When I looked up a measure for autism I found that many of the symptoms do overlap with gifted characteristics. I'm feeling like I missed something here. Does Aspergers = Gifted and Gifted = Aspergers? If not aren't the measures biased toward identifying gifted children as autistic because of the overlap in symptoms?
Are the schools just identifying anyone who is different as autistic? Do schools identify children as autistic just to get access to the money?
What symptoms were you seeing? Are they gone, or is the new school simply more skilled at providing your DS with workarounds?
Not all people with Asperger's are gifted. Most are of average intelligence. Asperger's is just autism without a significant delay in language development. Since your child had a language delay, he probably wouldn't qualify as having Asperger's-- but obviously I can't say whether he'd be on the spectrum or not. The teacher appears to not know very much about this issue.
Schools very rarely would identify a child as having a disability to "get the money." The money that is supposed to flow to schools to fund the education of people with disabilities is partly fictitious (the federal government has never fully funded IDEA). It's not a get rich quick scheme; districts typically lose money by identifying children for special education. I'd say that the teacher was really seeing something that concerned her, even if she didn't have the technical knowledge to identify what that something was.
My DS8 had the opposite problem in kindergarten: nobody at the school wanted to identify him. "Oh, he's just a little odd" or "bright but quirky" was what we got, while he struggled with social and behavior issues (and was bored out of his mind academically). The boredom didn't cause the behavior problem, though, the Asperger's did. I'd say this is the more common scenario for a gifted/Asperger's kid-- "he's so bright, he couldn't possibly have autism." And yet it's perfectly possible to be gifted and have autism.
From my personal perspective, I don't buy the talk about gifted children having "overexcitabilities." Asperger's consists of mainly social deficits that impair a person's ability to succeed. But these deficits are treatable, as long as we don't ignore them or write them off as quirks of giftedness.
It's great that the new school has improved matters. I would say this: if there are still things that make your DS's behavior atypical in ways that bother people around him, I'd recommend working on those things, possibly with professional help. A formal evaluation by someone experienced with both autism and giftedness would not be a bad choice to make.
DeeDee
