cdfox - thank you for the book tip! I'll look it up!
We are fortunate that while IL doesn't provide any mandatory gifted support and the gifted program in our school district is next to nothing, at least I can get services through the school district that DS needs as long as I keep his IEP going. For now we put it on hold but it's valid for 12 months and we are hoping that DS will be able to go back in later this year for at least some therapies without getting so majorly stressed out. I spoke with our special ed director about homeschooling and while she is against it she did say he would still qualify for some services like speech.
For what it's worth, most of the therapists he's had in the last year support the idea of him being homeschooled.
I am still unsure about how it works with us requesting testing further down the road. When I gently touched the subject, the special ed lady's reply was something along the lines of "oh, I don't think testing would be necessary. We can clearly see what services he needs" ... yeah. Right! That's why we ended up pulling him out because clearly they could NOT see what he needed. So we might have to do testing eventually at our own cost. Not that we would so desperately need it but I wouldn't want to wait too long to identify any other 2E issues aside from the ones we are already dealing with.
