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moomin, I am so sorry your dd is continuing to struggle - I know how tough it is to feel caught without a good solution in any direction, which it must feel like right now. I will second everything in DeeDee's post - I also doubt this is simply as easy as "she's gifted". If it was me, I'd also leave her in school - I may be way offbase here and I'm looking at this from the very limited perspective of what you've posted here, but from what you've written in this and previous posts, she seems to be having an unusually tough time socially. It's easy on the one hand to dismiss it by saying it only happens at school - but look at what school *is* at this age - that's the outside world. If you take her out of school to avoid the challenge, you also avoid the opportunity to help her learn how to cope with the challenge. And if you can help your dd work through these challenges now, in the early years of elementary school, she'll be much more able to take advantage of opportunities that open up in middle school and beyond - because that is where the opportunities for gifted students in most school districts really open up and there's a lot more to be excited about and want to take advantage of.

It's not easy being the parent of a 2e child in the early elementary years. When our kids are really young and at home with us their intellectual gifts are usually what we see, and the other pieces of the 2e may or may not appear, and if we see them we often see them as quirks and nothing more. Then our kids get out into the "real world" (aka school) and they are challenged in ways they don't experience at home - whether it's academics or social or environmental or whatever - and their world starts falling apart. Understanding what's up is usually much more difficult than looking up a set of symptoms and yep, there's your diagnosis - it can take years of observing, testing, talking to teachers etc. As dismal as that all may sound - it's also a time, though, where you can see tremendous progress once you have an idea of how to help your child - because it's much easier to start working through issues with our children when they are young than it's going to be to take her out of the situation completely, hope it resolves on it's own, come back in 3-4 years hoping to re-enter school (or whatever) and finding out that the challenge is still there, and now suddenly your dd is 4-6 years older and much less compliant re working with and communicating with you.

Sorry I got a bit long-winded and am not sure that made sense! Please know I am hoping you'll be able to find some truly help soon. And fwiw, I'd move forward with the IEP even though you may be worried about how the school will use it.

Best wishes,

polarbear

eta - one other thought for you - perhaps your dd isn't on the autism spectrum - that doesn't mean she wouldn't potentially benefit from some of the behavioral approaches used for children who are on the ASD spectrum. My ds is not on the spectrum, but has Developmental Coordination Disorder - two very different diagnoses, yet they share some very common challenges too, and many of the very helpful ideas that I've tried with ds have come from reading of the experiences of parenting ASD kids. His speech therapist has also used strategies with him that she uses with ASD kids she works with. So while a diagnosis might not be there (yet, or maybe ever), there still may be some very worthwhile ideas to try simply by isolating specific behaviors that you want to work on to help your dd and then look for ways others have approached the problem.