It's been a while since I have posted, but I had some time today and I became reflective. I want to share my experience with advocacy for my DD14 as it might help some parents of younger kids. I had my daughter tested and was connected DYS when my DD14 was in 4th grade. We haven't taken advantage of the opportunities like we could, but one thing I did do was talk to counselors at key points and received good advice for both direction and advocacy. Starting in 4th grade I had her tested, not just her end of year test at school but had the WISC-IV done and she took the Explore test. It was hard to argue with those results. She was finishing each subject in 10 minutes. So, we sent her to school with extra workbooks and books and I kept records of everything she did that was extraordinary. 8th grade logic books etc. She went to a small school that combined 5th and 6th grade, we wanted her to stay as a 5th grader on paper, but do the 6th grade curriculum as "honors" since it was the same classroom. They would not do that, but finally caved on the grade skip. They told me they would consider it if she took the tests for 6th grade Math and Language through the summer. She did all the Math tests in 3 weeks with a 98 average mostly over Spring Break. I went into the office dropped a folder with every test and final and said "Now do you understand." We took a bit longer on the Language. The benefits of grade skip lasted the first quarter and then we were back to boredom. During this time, we brought home DD12(now) at the time to test homeschooling. It was working well and we knew that homeschooling was the only option for DD14. We rolled back the grade skip so that she would not have to start high school a year early but could still advance in her learning, primarily because while Gifted in English, she is definitely asynchronous and writing is very stressful for her. We jumped all of her subjects ahead as a homeschooler to varying degrees. By the 2nd Semester of 7th grade, she was ready to take College Algebra at a local university as an online class. We found out a school would allow her to take the course as a Dual Enrollment student as long as she passed the mark on the placement test. (I had advanced grade Stanford AT ) 1st Semester 8th grade, she took College Trigonometry. This time it was on campus. For science, she took Physical Science in 7th Grade, and I started her in Chemistry for the first semester. We made a change in the 2nd Semester of 8th Grade. Thanks to a DYS contact, we found a public school online Gifted Geometry class giving a scholarship, that covered the whole years work in a semester. So, she took that class and enrolled in Chemistry and lab at the University. Now came the preparation for high school, but I was armed with records. I had University credit hours and public school credit hours. She is enrolled in a top honors/gifted high school located on a University campus, so she can easily take Dual classes. (That's a whole other story). She is at this school because the counselors were willing to work with me to figure out how to make sure she can get credit and her diploma. They were the ones who said let's figure out how we can do it and not tell me it can't be done, basically to ensure we met state graduation requirements. I would say the most critical things in the process were
1. Documentation from FAMILIAR acceptable sources: Advanced Grade National Tests, WISC scores, university transcript etc
2. Educate yourself on the laws, institution policies, etc. You have to know more than they do. Know the nitty gritty details and the research on gifted kids.
3. Dont waste time on the nahsayers, especially at the beginning. Build your army of supporters, especially those in the systems who you can reference.
4. Perservere. It is worth it.
