You all have been so helpful to us, thank you! I still have trouble figuring where I belong here, and whether my kid is "smart enough," so I don't contribute much, but I have learned a lot by reading everything you all write.
We received DS's scores from the testing and were shot down again for the acceleration. FSIQ of 132. He had a 19 on Block Design and a 17 on Similarities, a 16 on the others in the VC and PR areas except a curious 11 on Picture Concepts. He really fell apart in Working Memory and Processing Speed with WM 116 and PS 106. His VC worked out to a 136 and PR of 133. I had asked them to use the GAI of 142 because there was such a discrepancy but the school psych acted like she had never heard such a thing. She insisted that the reason his processing skills were so low was he just wasn't developmentally ready for advanced tasks and therefore shouldn't be accelerated.
His Woodcock Johnson Achivement scores (she said) reflected this as well. He was in the 99th percentile for most items (and 99.9th on untimed writing samples) except writing fluency 80th and math fluency 89th (the timed written tests.)
I explained that he has fine motor issues, horrible handwriting and can barely tie his shoes at 10 1/2. But this was just more fuel for their not-developmentally-ready fire.
To be honest I'm not totally for the acceleration at this point myself, but only because he has been having a lot of success with making friends and being a leader in this gifted class, which is new for him. But the work is not challenging in the least and my requests for them to ramp it up have fallen on deaf ears.
I guess I'm just stuck at this point.
Seems a shame that abilities would be ignored because of weaknesses in other areas. They suggested I have him take piano lessons instead of accelerating him. I'm just bewildered.
Last edited by thebees; 10/22/07 06:17 AM. Reason: typo
