Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Help getting started with profoundly gifted

Welcome to the board - as mon mentioned, you'll find a wealth of advice here. I'm also curious what the school had to say if you shared the scores?

Re visual processing issues, we have a dd who had severe double vision and tracking issues when she was young, and it impacted two of the subtests on the WISC - but I can't remember which ones! When her scores on those two subtests came out very very low relative to her other subtest scores, our neuropsych gave her a follow-up visual test, I think it was the Beery VMI. Our dd went through a year of vision therapy which helped tremendously, but that was two years ago and lately we've started thinking we're seeing signs of her vision issues re-emerging, although she won't admit it.

Re school - it's really tough finding a good fit for kids who are so out there on the far end of the bell curve. My advice is to not panic - there may be more options out there. One you might not have thought of is private school - we have two of our kiddos in private school and I've also served on the board of a third school - all three schools offer financial aid to families who have a need. In our ds' case, homeschooling would probably be the best fit solution for his academics, but ds wouldn't like it - he prefers to be with other kids, even if the class he's in is beyond boring to him. He's also a kid who doesn't want to be grade-accelerated across the board, that's just his personality, plus he's got a good dose of 2e mixed in. So one thing I've found helps us is for me to not get caught up in what I think he should be achieving based on ability and instead just focus on where he is naturally inclined to be. We've definitely had our share of challenges with school though! DS' elementary school also fought putting him into our district's GT program but we kept advocating and advocating until finally he was given a chance, and once he wa in the program he soared. Yet even that wasn't enough - it was more aimed at MG kids who are high-achieving in a traditional sense. What we found worked for us (and it's still a work in progress, and it's complicated for our ds due to his being 2e)... is that schools that looked good in theory didn't necessarily meet the expectation in practice, and other schools which we might not have thought would work were actually better fits - ultimately it largely comes down to the willingness of staff at any given school to respect what parents and students want/need and also to be able to be flexible and think outside the box. And of course that ideal school doesn't really exist, so we have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the non-ideal work!

So I'll stop rambling now, but welcome! If you have a chance, you might consider posting your ds' subtest scores and also let us know more about his visual processing issues.

Best wishes,

polarbear