Welcome!
All of his test scores are in the 99th percentile.
Your DS8 may qualify to become a Davidson Young Scholar (
DYS).
They didn't send me the test scores. They just told me that over the phone. The lady I spoke with also wouldn't say what his IQ score was; just that it was "well above the threshold."
You are entitled to know the tests and scores. You may wish to make a request in writing (via e-mail) to the school to obtain this information from his student records.
the first IEP meeting is in two weeks. I want to be prepared to ask all the right questions and get him everything he needs.
Is this meeting for a gifted education plan, or an IEP/504 for disability/remediation/accommodation? This article from Understood.org,
10 Defusing Phrases to Use at IEP meetings, may be of interest.
Unfortunately the one-hour a week you describe is not unusual for "gifted programming". Many posters on the forums describe that the "gifted education" offered their children falls far short of curriculum and pacing at their child's level (or zone of proximal development (ZPD)), and gifted children are frequently not clustered with intellectual/academic peers.
Regardless of the size, many US public schools and districts are focused on equal outcomes for all students. Unfortunately gifted programs therefore may not be designed to help advanced students excel or remain advanced beyond their same-age peers. Rather, gifted students, high achievers, and early finishers may often been kept occupied with busywork until classmates catch up or complete their work.
Parents often become advocates for their children. You may have read this elsewhere on the forums, as advocacy and crowd-sourced tips for meeting prep are discussed in several old threads. The word bored may work against advocacy. This
thread has several posts which discuss reasons to not use the word "bored" when advocating. Here is a crowd-sourced list of
tips on preparing for a meeting. This can help you get started, and others will likely fill in with more information. Single subject acceleration (SSA) and/or one or more full-grade accelerations may be helpful to consider at some point in your child's educational journey. The Iowa Acceleration Scale (
IAS) can be a helpful tool for data gathering and discussion.
how do you handle reading when everything is going to be beyond the maturity level of the child?
The forum offers many crowd-sourced
recommended resources, including book lists for gifted kids of different ages.
