Eibbed,
I wouldn't be completely discouraged by the Principal's response - my experience has been that a written response from the school is *always* going to be conservative and guarded because the school does not want to put anything in writing that they would be held legally accountable for. I don't know about your school district, but in our school district there is a large worry about legal action from parents.
I read the response and felt it was encouraging because he *did* respond to each of your points and he didn't completely shut you down re acceleration etc. Soooo... you will have your meeting and your chance to reply - that's all good! Gathering the evidence to support your advocacy is good too. When we were advocating for our 2e ds, I tried my best to think through every argument the school staff could throw out against what we were asking for and have my own counter-argument well prepared before the meeting
I also think that the three most helpful things we had in early elementary school to use in advocating for our ds and differentiation/acceleration were his IQ test results, background knowledge of what the school district used to determine "giftedness", and understanding statistics. We had one IQ test given through the school district and another private test. The school district psych at his elementary school tried to argue that the school district's IQ test was highly unreliable at a young age... but she couldn't really argue having two IQ tests with almost identical results. So the school tried to argue in turn that those high results were meaningless and that there were lots of those high-IQ kids running through the halls - that's where understanding and being able to explain some very minimal statistics re IQ test scores helped tremendously. Granted - the school staff should have understood that already (and I'm sure they did) - but - by us demonstrating what *we* knew and understood it helped prevent the school staff from summarily dismissing us as they wanted to.
Hang in there! And let us know how your meeting goes -
polarbear
