Hey all. I have not been monitoring the board as much lately, mostly due to being super busy at work and life in general.
I wanted to give a brief update for all of you playing at home... Quick recap: before the winter break we had another GIEP meeting to address the mismatch between the curriculum that DS was getting and his abilities. DS is definitely gifted (no DYS IQ scores, but math achievement scores are off the charts). We presented updated achievement tests at that meeting now that he was old enough to test. They agreed to do a real CBA (curriculum based assessment) testing out of level for math. One of our biggest frustrations was that the supplemental material was haphazard and didn't align at all with what he was doing during the day.
Yesterday we had the follow up meeting. It took a
long time to get this meeting scheduled. We expected that either we'd get the results of the CBA and have to argue why it wasn't appropriate for him to be doing second grade math or we'd have to point out that what they measured didn't match our independent results.
He was just shy of 90% proficient in third grade math and 63% proficient in fourth grade math. Given that they are measuring against the actual curriculum, this is pretty much what I expected from the boy. A lot of what he's learned has been very, very informal. So for example, he'd miss things like quarts/gallons conversions because all of the Murderous Maths book are metric
The meeting was very surprising. Not only did they present us with these results, but they had a real implementation plan. The meeting was focused on the logistics of implementing a plan where DS would be getting curriculum appropriate for him
daily. Part of what took so long for the meeting is that they were planning out the individualized lesson plan. The homeroom teacher was very excited and was asking if she could start immediately (to which the admin pointed out "you can't start anything
officially until the NORA is signed"). The director of pupil services came right out and said that she didn't want DS doing any second grade math because she didn't want DS to get bored, disengage and lose interest in math. Those were her words. We have our admins basically doing the advocating. (The original proposed lesson plan still had some second grade math mixed in...)
DS is going to get only the units that he didn't score proficient in, and he'll go at "his pace." I wouldn't be surprised if he's start fourth grade math by the end of Feb.
It took a long, long time (almost two years) to get to this point. I'm (maybe just a little cautiously) optimistic that we've finally gotten to where we need to be.
JB
