I cannot take credit for this because I found the information on this board and several here were enormously supportive but I will post it here to make it easier for new people to find this sort of thing in a single thread. I apologize for the length of this post in advance.
Here is our journey (so far):-
1. DD really enjoyed pre-school and was extremely outgoing but sometimes intense, especially in handling disappointment - we put it down to a phase she was going through.
2. We moved to a rural area (new district) and DD went into kindergarten there. Over that year we began to see a change in our DD - instead of improving, her sensitivities increased and she was no longer getting invited to other BD parties after a while.
3. The next year, grade 1, was worse. Our DD's mind started to pull away from the pack to an alarming degree. While everyone else in her class was learning that the Moon wasn't really made of cheese, DD was building a presentation via Pressy on why Pluto isn't a planet anymore (she got really fascinated by this) and after she presented to her class she was rewarded for efforts with 'girl bullying' for having the temerity to have a brain.
4. Grade 2 began badly as DD was already shutting down and her teacher decided that she wasn't really that bright after all. Unlike the prior year, there would be no 'pullouts'. At first, we were relieved because the pullout had got her bullied but over time we realized that holding her back was not going to work.
5. I pored the library, bookstores and the web looking for clues and discovered that sometimes social isolation and over excitabilities (OEs) were associated with 'giftedness'. Both DW and I are considered 'bright' but until recently I have lived in denial thinking that 'bright' is normal - because to me it is. I really thought until recently that everyone is bright.
6. Like a lot of dads my first reaction was to write off the 'giftedness' of being a social misfit as just American psycho babble. But I could see that my DD needed help and I was prepared to try anything, plus, having seen the 'apple', touched the 'apple' and smelled the 'apple' I just had to taste it. I searched around and found a reputable tester at the UMDNJ gifted child clinic. I called to find out more.
7. Oh hollow mockery of Fate! Not only was testing going to be expensive, there was also an 18 month waiting list. Too long - DD appeared to be fading on a daily basis. Given that a parent's entire biological raison d'être is to do their best for their child we tightened our belts and found the money.
8. Importantly and luckily, I work from home most days and have very flexible working conditions so I opted for the 'short notice cancellation option' (my quotes). We had an appointment within 6 weeks. DD was confirmed as being pretty bright. Our worries were over!
9. Wrong! They were just beginning - LOL. Once I had 'bitten into the apple', I discovered that, particularly with girls, giftedness can be 'self-suppressed' in order to fit in or the child can get really messed up by not being in a sufficiently stimulating intellectual environment. This caused a lot of sleeplessness and a feeling of being 'lost in the wilderness' because this country has become something of a gifted desert.
10. We discovered this forum and the Hoagies pages. What a relief - there were others in similar boats! We approached the school with our DDs test results - approaching it as a problem that we needed to work as a team on - their results were good and bad. Good because they provided LA pullout into 4th grade and because her second grade teacher did a complete 180 becoming a full on advocate for our DD. Bad because DD's OEs had caused her to be labelled as socially immature. The school's guidance counsellor flat out refused to consider acceleration citing the much hackneyed 'whole child' objection.
11. We applied filled out DDs DYS application (we needed to confirm that we weren't kidding ourselves about our DD being that bright) and she was accepted. This gave us more confidence as we now had two objective sources of confirmation the initial tester and the DYS program.
12. We also learned about the IOWA Acceleration Scale. It's appeal to me was that it breaks the decision down into an objective assessment using multiple factors -relative birthday, IQ, Achievement, extracurriculars, comparative physical stature etc helping to alleviate concerns over single factors (e.g OEs). I made up some worksheets and punched in the numbers. I found that even with the school objecting in every possible way that DD was an excellent candidate. I also learned through reading that OEs are actually exacerbated by being completely out of intellectual sync with her classmates which further stiffened my resolve to go back to the school.
13. Still worried about the effects of an acceleration on my DD I scoured the library, the bookstores and the web for negative cases and did not find any that factors that applied to our DD.
14. We presented our findings to the superintendent in a private meeting with him where we reviewed the test results, the results of the IOWA worksheets and some literature that we had found on the web including select excerpts from our state's report on giftedness, A Nation Deceived and others. We made our presentation purely data driven. It turned out that the superintendent was very pro-gifted (we were very lucky here) and with the data to support it he was convinced and agreed to take the skip to the school board for approval.
15. One of the school's (we heard this via a roundabout route) concerns was that if they accelerated our DD that they would start an avalanche of requests for everyone's 'special snowflake'. We presented the IOWA scale as a means of being able to objectively measure future requests to alleviate accusations of favoritism and MORE IMPORTANTLY so that future kids would have a chance for acceleration using an objective measure. Having seen it, he was a such a fan of the IOWA scale that he agreed to bring up not just our DDs grade skip at the next board meeting (it had to be approved by the board) but also the IOWA scale as means a yardstick with which to determine appropriate differentiation for future kids.
16. DD skipped into grade 4 this year. So far the difference is 'night and day'. She is giddy about school now and is just SO MUCH HAPPIER. God willing, long may it last...
