I've posted before. My 6yr old DS is at least Exceptionally Gifted (tested with ceiling issues at 4) and this school year (Kindergarten) has been nothing short of dramatic and traumatic.
It sounds like you need to tell the school. We told our ds' school right away when he was first diagnosed - but we had to - his LDs were causing him severe anxiety at school and his behaviors were not only being noticed at school, the school staff was making incorrect assumptions about what was driving them.
Re who to tell outside of school - we have left this partially up to our ds. For instance, he's a Boy Scout, and there is writing required for some Boy Scout projects. DS is dysgraphic. He does not want anyone else to know. We've let him choose whether or not to tell at Boy Scouts and he didn't for a few years... and it impacted him. I felt like that was a safe place (in terms of long-term impact) for ds to test the waters and see what the impact of *not* telling was. Eventually he realized it was better for him to let the people he was working with know.
I agree with everything ABQmom wrote - this isn't the kind of thing you walk up to strangers on the street or announce to everyone you meet in line at the checkout stand at the grocery store, but it's nothing to be ashamed of and it's important that people you work closely with and especially teachers at school know. I've also found it's important that I show, as a parent, that it's not something to hide - otherwise my ds might think it's something to be ashamed or worried about.
Lastly, we've actually found other children with the same challenges as my ds *by* letting people know. There is another child in his school who has almost exactly the same set of challenges. The school was not going to tell me that - but thanks to my loose-lips at a morning coffee chat with a group of parents I barely knew, I found out. Just knowing that there is one other kid at his small school who has the same LD relieved my ds' sense of feeling different tremendously.
Another thing about school - if you choose to not share information that you have from private evals now.... and then two or more years down the road really feel like you need to, it might be difficult to suddenly pull it out and try to explain why it's important to consider now but wasn't worth sharing when the eval took place.
And... one other perspective. I used to lead an after-school club at my ds' previous school - the kids ranged from 3rd-6th grade. We had several children participating who appeared to not want to be their at all (and this was a club that was prepping for a competition). It was beyond frustrating to deal with the kids who didn't seem to want to be there; there were some behavior problems that were dragging down the entire group. I had *no idea* that one of those children had ADHD, and that was the time of day that his meds wore off. I didn't know because the school wouldn't or couldn't legally share that info, and his parents didn't tell us - until we were about to ask him to leave the club due to his noncompliance, his mom told us we couldn't do that because he had ADHD... long story short, once the mom opened up to us, we were more understanding *plus* his parents found a way to work with their ds and things worked out a-ok, and he eventually became a very valued team member. After that I couldn't help but wonder if there were other things going on with the other kids who were so challenging to work with, and if we'd had info from the parents would we have been able to find a way to make things work better for them too.
Gotta run, hope that made sense!
Best wishes,
polarbear
