I need help deciding whether or not to push things with my school district here in NJ. We are in a small rural community that has an elementary school of 500 students max. It seems that despite the fact the my DD is several SDs away from the norm, she is on the wrong side of that norm; the RHS. Consequently, she appears to have no legal right to an appropriate education in the public school sector - she has no diagnosed conditions.
As some of you will be only too painfully aware, particularly with girls, standing out is not good. It invites all kinds of 'girl bullying' - telling lies and generally making the outlier miserable. This in turn, from my limited forays into the available information online, appears to trigger over excitabilities and sensitivities.
School administrators will then come along and tell you that your child has social developmental issues so insist that the child should not be accelerated. 'A child should be allowed to be a child' they pompously declare and insist that social development is more important than academic development. They then go on to tell you that you can always do more academic work outside of school hours - oblivious to the contradiction. Your child, the one who has to be allowed to be a child, instead of being allowed to go out and play like a normal child after school should instead crack open the books?????? School administrators appear to think that academic outliers on the RHS of the norm must have been forced and borderline abused.
I have been through all of the above and have just had our request for acceleration denied - and conveniently, schools are now out here so no discussion or appeal can be heard until AFTER the new school year has begun. I am quite disheartened but do have time to organize my case. We have done the IOWA acceleration evaluation (3rd edition) and our child appears to be an excellent candidate. We had done this because we believe that the school may resist because they did not want an avalanche from other parents insisting on the same thing. The school was not even aware of the Iowa scale and so we introduced it to a) measure this ourselves to ensure the we were basing our request on solidly objective criteria and b) to give the school an objective yardstick by which to consider future requests. As of now, they have not even looked at the Iowa scale - such is their apparent resistance to acceleration that they will not even consider an objective and researched tool.
This leads me to the real question for you guys - am I guilty of confirmation bias myself?
I have only seen articles that basically tell you that your child will crash and burn (or turn into a dysfunctional husk of what they could have been) if they do not get accelerated. Could someone point me to any accelerations that had negative consequences?
Sorry for the long rant but I am sure that I am on a road that many here have travelled - I would appreciate all advice and any links that you can provide.
