Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Cross road - need advice

My son was diagnosed with Asperger's and is now 10. He just recently did a WISC IV and the GAI is 154 (not using the extended norms). His scores are: VC:149, PR:143, WM: 154, PS:115.

He is now in a gifted class. However, because he frequently disrupts the class: rocking, making funny noises, sleeping during class, the school has suggested I remove him from the class and send him to a special needs school. The new school handles children who are autistic, and none gifted.

Does it make sense? While he is capable of doing Grade 9 maths consistently correct, he does not always get his grade 5 maths right. Why is this so? The teachers do not believe he is highly gifted or need acceleration. Is he highly gifted? Should we focus on 'righting' his behavior at the expense of his intellect development?

Hi 2ppaamm, I have a similar son, but he is only 7. We are very lucky that he is now in a school for the gifted. Before attending his current school, the teachers only saw his autism and not his gifted-ness. Your son's scores show that he is extremely gifted and he would be thrwarted and miserable in a school for kids with autism. (My son attended such a school when he was younger and while it was good for him at a young age, it would not be appropriate for a highly gifted elementary school age kid.)

It does sound like your son needs outside therapy to help his behavior in class. But you need teachers and/or a school that understands that his scores show he IS highly gifted, yet also has Asperger's and requires accommodations. Does he get any therapy now?

Nan

I would certianly take a look at the special needs school, but I wouldn't jump to move him out of the gifted class.

Is the gifted class full-time? What criteria does the school use to place a child in this particular program. There may well be a LOG (level of giftedness) issue causing him stress.

Is the person who did the testing availible to make any suggestions? Has the school provided 'friendship groups?'

What provisions are in place so your son can take a break appropriately when 'it' gets to be too much?

Are there any triggers that can be noticed and managed?

Do you think he's bored in school and that is triggering the unwanted behaviors?

I would certianly get that Davidson YSP application cranking if you haven't already. He is certianly highly gifted, profoundly gifted by my definition. And his processing speed is probably enough slower than the rest of him that it creates some tension, unless it is an artifact of the testing situation, or perfectionism.

Does your son have an IEP? or 504? what's in it?

What does your son say about when he disrupts class? Does he like school?

What is your son like at home? My son is high in WM, although not as high as your, and I've learned through experience that he can track an argument much better than I can!

I'm so glad that you are here!
Love and More Love,
Grinity

Hi NanRos and Grinity, thank you for the responses! Here are my answers to your questions.

1. No the school does not think he is highly gifted because his performance in school is not sterling. Sometimes, he will do extremely well, but on some days, he completely switches off and sleeps in class.

2. Yes, the gifted class is full-time. It is meant for those tested at 99 percentile.

3. Our private psychologist who tested him had worked with him for 9 months on his behavioral problems. We have put in some incentive program for him to behave in school. It was a smiley system, where he can earn smileys if he behaved. However, the school gave up two weeks into the program, saying it did not work. The school thought so because he was very angry that one smiley was taken away and retorted that he didn't care and that the smiley system won't work on him. However, I know that deep within him, he cared a lot about the smileys being removed. The school did not believe me. The psychologist who tested him did not believe he should go to the special school.

4. The school has not made any provision for him in case things get too much. I have asked that he be exempted from activities that will cause sensory overload, but the exemptions only comes when he had acted out. What provisions should I proactively ask for?

5. Noise is the main trigger when he was younger. Nevertheless, I notice no longer bothers him that much in recent months. However, I notice that he gets really angry when I repeat instructions to him. He will ask me to keep quiet and let him think. When he was doing the IQ test, he hit the ceiling for Arithmetic. In the last question, the psychologist wanted to repeat the question. He stopped her, and began singing and incorporated the answer in his 'song'.

6. He has his own ways of looking at things, and can find a solution to questions in an unusual way. He does not like people telling him how to think or solve anything their ways. He is not always right, but very often. He gets very irritated when teachers won't listen and impose their methods on him.

7. Could his processing speed be low because of his poor motor skills? He is clumsy and I am getting his vision checked. He appears to have binocular vision.

8. No, I did not manage to get an IEP for him thus far. That's why I got his IQ tested to see where he is.

9. My son loves school very much. He does not know that he disrupts the class when he asks too many questions, sleeps or rocks the chair. We notice that he behaves much better in a structured and quiet room, but only one teacher in the school is willing to offer that environment.

10. LOL! My son has no problem at all with his siblings and us. As I have five children, I have very little time for him (he is #4). He will read most of the day, and then prepare his own meals, he eats six meals a day. He plays with his younger brother, the piano, and sleeps. He does a bit of computer (an hour or so). When he argues in this house, he loses most of the time, the older teenagers will not let him have the last say. So he has learnt not to track an argument! Maybe because of that, he has brought his argumentative skills to the classroom?!

11. No, he has no therapy right now, because his asperger's is newly diagnosed. He compensated well when he was young. I am still not sure which therapy classes to enroll him in.

12. Maybe he is bored in class, because he is already doing Grade 9 work while the class he is in is at Grade 4.

Thank you very much for the encouragement!!! I did not think he was highly or profoundly gifted. Now I know to look in different directions!

Argh! First of all, the teachers gave up on the smileys because they were doing it wrong: you can't take away smileys, you can only give them (you CAN not give them in the first place, but you can't take them away).

Here is what my son has for sensory accommodations: a squishy seat pad and squishy foot pedals to help prevent rocking and kicking. A hand fidget to help when quiet listening is required. He used to have headphones. He has a place in his classroom that he is allowed to go to at any time he needs a break. His teachers provide movement breaks for him in between lessons. He gets advanced notice for fire drills and substitute teachers, optional attendance at assemblies, and we hand picked a quiet, low key teacher. He does poorly with inflexible teachers...they butt heads with him and nothing gets accomplished.

It has taken us 5 years to get here. He has had an IEP since he was 3, but teachers have not always followed it. If I were you, I would apply to DYS to have them advocate for you. I think it will be hard to find an advocate comfortable working with an exceptionally gifted kid with Asperger's, but you need someone to help you. We are lucky in that we have been doing this for 5 years, so we have a whole team to call on for help depending on what is needed.

The different therapies we have used that you might find helpful are: ABA or CBT to help teach appropriate behaviors so that they become second nature, OT to help with sensory issues, and speech therapy to help with social skills and social/language pragmatics.

I bet you are right that your son is bored, but teachers do NOT like to hear that! My son also thinks of solutions in a unique manner and gets irritated when people tell him that he has to do something a certain way. My son also gets frustrated when questions are repeated...he has to process the question and it takes longer sometimes to form the answer.

Anyway, I didn't answer you in a very organized manner, sorry! Just wanted you to know you are not alone, and I think you will find lots of help and good advice here. Keep pushing for your son's academic needs to be met, and make them accommodate for everything else...not vice versa!! Nan

What Nan said!
My son got a lot of accomidations without an IEP, although he did eventually get a 504. He doesn't have spectrum issues, but needed a hand fidget toy to destroy, hard candies, one teacher gave him 5 'question' cards and he had to hand her one for every question he asked. He got them all back the next day. It worked a charm!
Friendship group was very helpful. The teacher would keep an eye on him and send him to carry something heavy to the Principles office when he got 'antsy.'
When DS was older, he would use 'bathroom trips' and 'nurses office' trips to help break up the day. He was also famous for sharpening his pencil many times during the day.
Your son may well need a gradeskip,with extra accomidation in Math. but I would get the psychologist to be the one to bring it up. Is it possible for the psychologist to visit the school, observe and make suggestions?
It's so sad that they took away his smiley face. ((pout))
I'll bet that if you hand pick the teacher who's class he skips into, he might have a great rest of the year.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Piping in to say:
- Getting a good iq test performed with solidly above 145 scores is a big step in the right direction.
- the Misdisagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children book might give you some ideas if you haven't read it yet. http://www.amazon.com/Misdiagnosis-..._1?ie=UTF8&qid=1289269542&sr=8-1
- Smiley stickers would not work for my child either. Getting intellectually appropriate work does dramatically improve her classroom behavior.
- Is there an OT at the school who could help with the fidget equipment?
- Would the psychologist be willing to meet with the school?

Hi Chrys, thank you for the recommendation. I have already ordered the book. For the last two days, I've been wondering if he was midiagnosed. He has good eye contact, he used to have no friends, but since he started the gifted program he has made a few good friends. His sense of humor is never appreciated by his friends (even now), and he can read facial expressions. Sure, he has sensory issues especially auditory, and he can hear the mosquitoes fluttering around and tell you how many there are. He cannot stand loud noises and noises at certain frequencies, especially people singing at an imperfect pitch, could it be because he has a perfect/sensitive pitch?

I am going to read the book when it arrives.

Is there a possibility of highly gifted or PG kids being misdiagnosed as Asperger's? Could he be rocking because he is bored because he never does that at home. He does no flapping. He also does not like to follow routines, but he'll get upset if a new routine affects his dietary/sleeping patterns. He is clumsy, though. He reads widely and has love for many topics, and talks in depth about many topics, and not particularly any specific topic. He can, however, go too in-depth about a new topic he just learnt and loses his audience completely, and he wouldn't know others are no longer interested. But now that I've taught him to read people's bored cue, he seems to have learnt when to stop.

The psychologist has gone to the school to listen to the teacher's complaints and that's when the smiley system came into place. I'm going to look to the OT for fidget equipment and see what are available.

DS also makes frequent trips to the toilet, but the teachers are very concerned with his safety and wants his trips lessened. He used to hide in the toilet when he did something wrong. He was afraid the teachers would 'attack' him for being bad. Grinity, how did you get the privilege of handpicking our teachers? Did you have to produce some papers?

Wow NanRos, 5 years. It doesn't matter how long, as long as there is hope...

Thank you so much for the help. At least I'm seeing some possible steps to take, and definitely some possible answers.

ha ha...I hope saying 5 years wasn't discouraging, I didn't mean it that way. I meant that it is a process to find what works best for your child.

I also had the question as to whether a PG kid could be misdiagnosed with Aspergers, but eventually gave up on worrying about it because the accommodations he gets for his autism help him so much. I don't know how easy it would be to get accommodations for being fidgety because he is lightyears ahead of the teacher....

We handpicked our teacher also by stating that the psychologist (who is well-respected at the school) determined the best fit. We have learned how to name-drop!

Nan

Sadly, the handpicking never actually happened for us. We randomly got a terrific one for 3rd grade, and she reassured me that there was someone 'similar' for 4th grade - but in the end we didn't get the teacher, and ended up leaving that school at the end of 4th grade. I did ask the principle what was the qualities that the 3rd grade teacher had that would be 'ok' to request on the paper that gets sent around at the end of the year.

Princ said that Mrs. 3rd has a 'tremendous fund of knowledge' and that would be ok to request, as in "We have noticed fewer behavior problems when placed with a teacher with a tremendous fund of knowledge." It still didn't work.

But a few years later when we returned to that district for 8th grade, I said: "We have noticed that there is a more positive social adjustment when he is placed with several children who excell academically, such as 'Sam X'" And that got him a wonderful placement in a school that claims to have totally heterogeneous classes. ((shrug))

Good luck!
Grinity

I think that it is possible for PGness to be mistaken for AS, and I think that the reverse is true too, some kids with AS are hard to diagnose because they use their PGness to cover it up. I would go so far as to tell you that I believe in my heart of hearts that ADHD + PG and AS + PG might be their own catagories that have very little to do with 'garden variety' AS or ADHD. At some point it becomes so hard to tell what is what that it just doesn't even matter: Unless they are trying to ship your kid off to a school to work on the AS without accomidating the gifteness. That could lead to serious trouble if the AS is a misdiagnosis. Think back to your description of your family life - is your son showing some flexibility in navigating the social waters at home, or does he just avoid the teens and call all the shots for the younger sib?

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Amend_MisdiagnosisOfAspergersDisorder.shtml

I wouldn't begin to try and figure out your particular situation, but a phone call to Dr. Ed Amend might be a good idea. But I can say that AS doesn't turn 'on and off' - although it can be less noticible at home where everyone sort of accepts each other's quirks. In a way that is the sort of classroom experience you are looking for, a more accepting place.

For example, if the teacher doesn't like that number of trips to the bathroom, what other places could the teacher invent for the child to make trips too?

My DH's somewhat mythologized version of DS's gradeskip goes like this: DS was so bored that he was very distracting to the children who sat next to him. The teacher kept moving him from child to child as the children and their parents complained that sitting next to DS was too distracting. Finally there were no more kids for DS to sit next to in her classroom, so the teacher moved him up a grade.

This BTW isn't literally true, but it captures the spirit of the thing nicely!

Love and More lOve,
Grinity

At our school, we aren't allowed to pick teachers, but we're allowed to provide additional information for the school to use in making the assignment. "My kid does best with X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are characteristics of only one teacher, is an effective way of getting the assignment you want.

In our case, we said "We want DD to have a teacher who wants a grade-skipped kid," and got a teacher who was a perfect match for her. (And is generally considered to be the "best" teacher in the grade.)

Actually, 5 years is not long at all! We've had complains from the school about DS's behavior for 3 years now. It means just 2 more years. When the school suggested the special needs school, I think they believe there's nothing else they can do for me.

Yes, just two more years, or even five. I can handle that...

And that's what they are suggesting right now, to ship him off to a special school where there's no provision for his giftedness. I think the situation will only worsen as he'll either go to sleep, or find something really creative, like a riot. He's done it before when he was really bored. Stand on the chair to lead a protest.
Ha ha! I like this way of describing things! Perhaps we've got enough complains from the parents to consider moving DS up as well. He's gone through enough corporal punishment for this year because of the numerous complains from parents.

I'm going to try this out next week at the meeting with the school.

Yup - that isn't AS - that's PG! DS, at 8, organized a sit down strike on the playground of a summer program that he felt cheated of learning by. It's so embarassing to me. Yet now that DS has learned to 'be cool' and not expect anything of school, how I wish for those earlier times! Maybe the current placement will raise my son's expectations of what school will be.

I used to tell the school - if idle hands are the devil's playground, than an idle mind must be a whole 6 Flags amusement park! No, that didn't actually work, we had to switch to a private school to get the gradeskip, and but he did get to keep it when we switched back to public. And we did reverse it this year when we figured out that high school grades are all about 'following directions' and DS really needed an extra year of maturity to even be able to figure out what the directions were.

It's all about flexibility. There is no magic answer sheet for our kids. It's just try and see, try something else and see, try not to overcorrect when something is actually working pretty well.

love and more love,
Grinity

Another question: Is it possible that my son is just mildly gifted child but managed to be tested PG? Can there be a mistake or is there a flynn effect and that children are getting higher and higher scores on the WISC IV? If tested PG, what kind of percentile are we looking at? 99.999... or something else? One in a ____ (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million?). PG probably means very bright, so how often does a gifted education teacher meet with a PG student? One a year, or one every decade or a few a year?

An expert, which I'm not, will be along shortly, but I reckon:

- Really mildly gifted: Not likely. WISCIV test scores are not as stable as people sometimes think, but at the very least, your DS has on one occasion demonstrated the ability to answer extremely well. Suppose he were retested and tested 20 points lower (it does happen). What would that tell you? It wouldn't tell you he'd guessed the first time round - it would tell you that for some reason his performance was uneven. You'd still have these issues.

- Mistake: not likely, given that he has similarly high scores in several indices. If you have the raw scores I'm sure someone will check the calculation for you!

- Flynn effect: the Flynn effect is real, but the WISCIV is a current test, so you don't need to worry about the Flynn effect here. (In fact the Flynn effect may not apply to the upper tail of the curve in the same way that it applies to the middle, anyway; I remember it being suggested that it didn't, but I don't know what the state of knowledge is.)

- The WISCIV is based on a standard deviation of 15, so your DS is more than 3.5 DSs above the mean. Based on a normal curve that means at least that he's above the 99.9th percentile; but in fact, he's higher than that and the IQ distribution is fat-tailed (there are many more children with very high IQ scores than would be predicted from the normal curve - but it's still very rare, don't get me wrong!) so I don't know exactly. Anyway, "1 in 1000" is a conservative estimate I guess. You certainly can't assume that a teacher, even a gifted teacher, has ever known a child at that level well. (Let alone one at that level who also has AS!)

If you haven't already found Hoagies you may find it useful, e.g.
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm

Thanks for the information. Here are the breakdown. I'm curious if DS could be mistaken PG. I sat through the test, there was no lucky guess. He either knew the answers and answered them correctly, did not want to attempt, or did not know the answers.

Similarities 18 (did not want to attempt 2 simpler questions before the last question, but answered the last question correctly - did he hit the ceiling?)
Vocabulary 16
Information 18 (cannot answer last question)

Block Design 16
Matrix Reasoning 17
Picture Completion 16
GAI = 154

Digital Span 19 (answered all questions in the test correctly - hit the ceiling?)
Arithmetic 19 (answered all questions in the test correctly -hit the ceiling)

Coding 11
Symbol Search 14
FSIQ = Not interpretable

The psychologist had to do three additional subtests on a separate day because on the first test day, DS had a problem with his vision and did not want to attempt most of the questions when we did the first 10 tests. I did not know he had a problem until the psychologist pointed that out to me.

It is a hard call for me. The gifted teachers say they cannot handle his AS, because they have never met anyone like him in their 25 years of gifted education (50 students per intake). I'm just wondering how the autism/special needs teachers can handle him, if he is PG. If I send him to the special needs school, will they be telling me they cannot handle his PG because they would not have met anyone like him in their practice? Even if PG is one in 1000, it will be highly unlikely an autism class teacher would have met a child like him. That's why I wonder if the diagnosis of PG or AS could be a mistake.

This does not necessarily mean the diagnosis is a mistake, only that your child is a rare bird. (Like mine, gifted/AS.)

Think about the length of any one teacher's career. If they have a class of 30 each year, they might see 900 kids in 30 years of teaching. It's a significant slice of humanity, so they start to feel they've seen it all. AS kids are often bright, but the AS/gifted combo of the type my kid has is perhaps 1 in 10,000 kids. I can't be surprised that he seems odd to them, and that they don't know what to do.

You are right that the special needs school is unlikely to have seen one like yours. The regular school too. A gifted school likewise. The odds are against it.

I think you should approach this not theoretically, but practically. Go talk to the special needs school about your child. See what they could do. Watch what they do. See what kind of kids are there, what kind of peers he'd have. Some schools like that are terrific about accelerating (if everybody's needs are unique, stands to reason that they'd be equipped to think outside the box); some just don't.

There is an argument to be made for doing everything you can to remediate the AS now, before he's a teen; once he's recalcitrant it gets much, much harder. In your shoes I would choose private behavior therapy (ABA, CBT) and really work on problem behaviors as intensively as can be managed. Giftedness, in our experience, doesn't go away, but problem behaviors stay until they're resolved. You could choose to remediate the problem behaviors now, negotiating the best academic content you can for the moment but prioritizing good social functioning, and get him back into the gifted program again once he's operating in a more socially acceptable way.

The other option, of course, is to request training for the gifted teachers and support in the gifted classroom so they would know how to deal with him. You can make a Least Restrictive Environment argument; kids are supposed to be kept in the regular classroom if at all possible, even if it means adding staff or therapeutic support. However, if the gifted teachers don't want to help-- if they already want him gone-- this will be tough to do, because turning attitudes around is hard.

DeeDee

Hi Dottie, thanks for the help!

I have not yet received the full report because our psychologist was hospitalized, right after the test and could not finish the report. Before she went to the hospital, she sent me an email and that's what I enclosed in the previous post. I have no clue what the raw scores are, that's why I gave some information about the test as I observed, e.g. got all the questions right.

Throughout the first day of testing, he was non-complaint and could not see well. In the second test, he still could not see well due to an allergy, but he was more compliant and agreed to answer questions.

For Comprehension, DS refused to answer the questions up till a certain point, so the test discontinued. He was giving nonsensical answers with puns and stuff and joking about them. The psychologist went on to do Information the next day. Should we have finished it rather than replace it with Information? She did.

I had ask for her to consider using Picture Completion to replace Block Design due to his poor motor skills. She replaced Picture concepts with Picture Completion instead. In any case, the Picture Concepts score was 15.

As for Arithmetic, I requested for the test as I read that it is a good measure of g. After the first day, his test did suggest that he is highly gifted. I'm not sure if this matters since FSIQ is not interpretable given his low PS. Letter-number sequence was 18.

I think his low PSI is due to poor motor skills and poor eyesight that day, but it didn't matter. He would not sit through another test, as he hates the center. He said he doesn't want to go to a place where a psychologist works with 'ill' patients. He said he does not want to be a patient no matter how I explained to him. He has already made up his mind.

I can go to the psychologist's office and ask her secretary for the raw scores tomorrow morning, if it helps.

I'm interested to explore these private behavior therapy. Where can I get more information about these? I Googled but nothing much came up. I will be visiting the Special School to find out how they can cater to DS. I'm also thinking of homeschooling and sending him for these therapies in the afternoons, instead of sending him to a Special School full-time. Can it work like that?

It does not matter if he gets back on the gifted program once I pull him out. It is an elementary school, and there're just two years left. He is not really engaged in the program, so the only reason I want to hold on to the place is because he has a few very good friends and he treasures those friendships. I asked the school if they would allow him to go back for just a few classes a week to keep the link, but they do not look keen.

One high school did offer him a place to do Grade 9 in the school, but he is not interested at all. He said he'd be the only one who has not broken his voice. So I didn't pursue.

Ha ha! Dottie, you are spot on. I'm testing in Asia. Does that make a difference?

Can you also advise me whether using extended norms would be a better reflection of his cognitive ability? Thanks!

Glad that it make sense to you! Do you know what percentile he would be in? The psychologist indicated '>99.9' which does not say much to me.

It certainly can work like that. There is a good list of providers and a nice discussion forum for AS on this website:

http://www.aspergersyndrome.org/Home.aspx

I hope you find a good situation!

DeeDee

Tip of the hat to Dottie!

what 1:1000 says to me is that unless you are living in one of the few school districts that is well above average, that there is a very good chance that you local psychologist, local teacher, local neighbors have ZERO experience with 'kids like him.' So take what they say with a grain of salt. Or perhaps more salt than that.

Beyond that, there really isn't much more to say. It doesn't say what your child will be like as a grown up, or what his actual current educational readiness level is. But there are a few professionals around the US who have seen bucketfulls of kids 'like him' and are in a much better position to give helpful advice.

BTW - a school doesn't have to have any experience to actual meet a kid's individual needs. They just have to have the mindset that each child is an individual, and that they might have to throw away all the preconcieved notions, that they are willing to find out what his educational readiness levels are across the board, and provide for it.

The interpersonal stuff is harder to accomidate, but not that hard. Your current school doesn't seem willing to do even the smallest things, such as provide a 10$ squeezy apple for your son to mutilate during high-stress moments.

Open mindedness and flexibility are so important. Sadly, it is often true that the more expertise someone has the less open and flexible they act. It's human nature to 'not see' what we believe to 'not exist.'

We talk about LOG (levels of giftedness) here with such easy and confidence. An yet, LOG is still not part of the world-view of most of the folks working in the field of Giftedness.

Shrugs and More Shrugs,
Grinity