To answer your question about my dd's writing...I had no idea she was so impaired until the end of 3rd grade when her notebooks came home and I realized that she hardly wrote in them and nothing was corrected or graded either. I had asked the teachers how she was doing in writing, because I suspected there may be issues and was told she was fine. Almost no work comes home til the end of the year, and I was appalled by what I saw. Also, a long-term sub came in at the end of third grade and started sending me emails about how off-task my daughter was, whereas the regular classroom teacher just shrugged off concerns and acted like it wasn't that bad. I strongly believe that the teachers are actually told to quit referring students, or only do it unless they have to, so basically there was no communication about how impaired she was. By the time I figured it out, we had already made the decision to send her to the self-contained program at a different school in the district for highly gifted kids (basically kids who are in the 98th percentile or above for math, reading, and cognitive ability). I talked to one of the teachers before we enrolled and informed them that my daughter had some writing issues and was told that it would be fine, that they "have a lot of kids like that." So we enrolled her and went in and volunteered once or twice a month and watched her. She really wasn't doing any work, she was completely spaced out. At the same time I had put in the request to have her focus and writing assessed. When they evaluated her they only looked at one work sample and it was two sentences, exactly what I feared. But they just kind of blew it off and the teachers were told that she was not going to qualify and they would need to do the interventions (the fake interventions). The teachers started acting like everything was great and were actually inflating her grades so that I would quit asking what they were doing for her. That was when I realized it was never going to work out and we took her out and transferred to a different district (we have open enrollment in our state). The new school wrote an IEP and put her in the "Other Health Disability" category because she had an ADHD diagnosis. She probably also could have qualified as "Specific learning disability--written expression" but the school didn't seem to like that idea because her achievement testing for writing was in the average range, except for the TOWL which was done by an outside evaluator, where she couldn't even write the minimum amount of words needed for the open ended story. The school had given her the WIAT and she scored in the average range because she was able to use cognitive ability to compensate on most of it. Her problem is extended writing ability, not putting together single sentences, or spelling. But the schools compute a composite, they don't look at a single deficit (even though not being able to write more than two or three sentences is a pretty major deficit!) But only a small part of the written expression tests look at that ability. A student could bomb that section but if their scores in other areas are average or above, their whole score is likely to be average. Anyway, the problem with her writing was determined by the outside neuropsych to stem for an executive functioning deficit. She could not plan, organize or initiate the extended writing, and to make it worse would become agitated, so just sat there and did nothing.
The new district did end up identifying her as gifted and accelerated her for math as well. She is now in middle school and gifted kids are clustered together, with everyone in the core classes being at around the same level. So it's really no different than the special program that we had pulled her from in terms of what she is receiving (it's better actually, because even besides the IEP, the gifted program is much more organized! She even has a "gifted case manager" who talks to her every week). Fourth grade was a complete nightmare, but in the end it turned out to a good thing because we got her out of the toxic district we live in and into a better one.
