Hello all,
I've been reading widely on these forums since getting testing results for my DS7 in September. The cumulative wisdom has been most helpful. I'm hoping to tap that wisdom for assistance with a looming school decision.
Briefly, DS7 (just turned 7) is in grade 2 at a highly regarded private school. He's always been ahead of the developmental curves and our first two years were excellent. Then we hit grade 1, or grade 1 hit us. After two weeks he asked me to talk to his teacher about how he could finish his work faster, which I did. She suggested ADHD without the H (I know, practicing w/o a licence!). To the pediatrician who said that's ridiculous, the only clinical issue is hypersensitivity. After two semesters of misery and much to/fro btwn the teacher and pediatrician, our child was describing himself as 'thinking too slowly' and saying he hated school. To the psychologist, who confirmed no 2E (although he has a few autism characteristics) and did testing.
Test results: WISC-IV verbal comp 99.7 percentile; perceptual reasoning 94; working memory 97 & processing speed 47. GAI 97. WJ-III 130. All with the caveat from the tester that when he wasn't interested, he produced below ability. I gather that in some jurisdictions the 97 qualifies as gifted.
Back to the school where, instead of happiness that he isn't ADHD, w/ or w/o letters, and appears to have a useful brain, they fret that he requires much one-on-one support to start and complete his work and isn't very interested in his classmates (his classmates aren't following Voyager's move into interstellar space or studying the hydrodynamics of tsunamis, but hey, that couldn't be a factor). The psychologist has intervened, but the school is making minimal efforts to accommodate his slow writing speed (they've put him in a remedial writing class) and none to enrich. My pleas that if he isn't challenged his disengagement will only get worse fall on deaf ears. DS7, while happier than grade 1, appears to be participating even less and really only goes to school because he has to.
The looming decision: the school has a specialized program for LD students that's one-on-one. They'd like to put him there next year. He's not conventionally LD (the gap btwn PS & everything else could be called a written output disorder) and it only arises because he doesn't do his work w/o a teacher at his side prodding him. Part of me thinks my sensitive perfectionist who does so much better in very small groups would be happier there, but most of me thinks he would benefit more from learning how to learn even when the work is desperately boring. That part of me is also slightly cranky that the school is throwing in the towel without making any apparent efforts over 1 year and 3 months to engage my child.
So...any thoughts/suggestions/advice on how to navigate this decision in a way that's best for my child would be gratefully received.
Thanks.
