Some of you know our story - it's rather familiar and similar to many others' on here. I have a PG child who was attending public school full time and then after a million hours of polite advocacy and twisting myself into knots to get accommodations for my son, we ended up partial homeschooling my son. We had lots of negative and ridiculous interactions with administration and staff. Par for the course, unfortunately, for our lot (those with HG kids). Fortunately, because of my professional background, because of my Mama bear status who will not allow my son to be mistreated, and because of the support of THIS COMMUNITY, I could take a lot of heat and was able to deal quite well with the confrontations at school (at least in the heat of the moment, on my feet).
Anyway, another parent from out school contacted me. She has a gifted child as determined by her observations and by outside testing. She is new to the public schools and new to the country. She reached out to me because she heard from others that we had quite a struggle and was wondering if I could help. Turns out that we have had almost exactly the same experience, except the staff took advantage of her newly arrived status (I mean newly arrived to the country and newly arrived to world of gifted advocacy) and was verbally abusive, intimidating and all sorts of horrible things. Then after her million hours of meetings and advocacy they told this mom, "well your child is not a Davidson Young Scholar, so he doesn't need any accommodations". Uh, where do I even begin with the insanity of this statement?
Anyway, this family does not have the resources that our family, very fortunately, does. The family is asking me - out of desperation, as they have no where else to go and they can't homeschool - to help. I am so furious that they have taken advantage of this family (they played dumb about giftedness even though the school had received documents and assistance from our tester when advocating for our child - they pretended like they had never heard of gifted before). Before I wade in and figure out how, or if, I can be of help to them, I need to deal with my blind anger at this situation. Give me something constructive to do here, folks.
Plus, is there somewhere to report this blatant lying and treatment of this family?
