MOST IMPORTANTLY: How do you argue that your grade-skipped, academically-achieving child needs to have specialized reading training added to his IEP? Successfully, without making anyone regret they let your child skip a grade in the first place?
I'm not in the US, so I'll leave the legalities to others with appropriate expertise, and talk more generalities from our experience. It's a very rare school that will provide remediation to a kid at (let alone above) grade level. In fairness, few have the understanding of LDs, let alone 2E, let alone PG/2E, to recognize that the need is real. And they have so many kids whose need is so visibly more urgent... That said, your school sounds unusually thoughtful, so here's my best shot.
Bottom line: It's all about automaticity. If you don't have automaticity in the low-level functions, you don't have enough brain power free to properly tackle the higher-level ones once they come along.
When they are young, 2E kids have strengths that allow them to create workarounds to do tasks in their area of LD despite missing the basic skill required. Memorizing sight words instead of reading. Drawing words as pictures rather than writing them. When tasks such as reading and writing are new and hard for all kids, the 2E struggle fits right in. All the kids are using all their working memory, all their brain power, when they read or write. They are all thinking, "The "p".... is that the one with the circle on the front, or the back? And does the stick go up, or down? And how do I work my hand so that my circle actually looks round, and my stick is straight, and this letter doesn't end up on top of the next one? And oh yeah, then I have to use my two fingers to block out a space before I start the next word..."
But over time, these basic tasks get automated in the other kids - but not so much in the 2E child. The other kids stop having to do all that laborious thinking about how exactly to do these things, and so free up memory and brain power to think about
what they are reading, to think about
what they are writing. If you look at some of the Yale work, the dyslexia MRIs are fascinating. They show a large number of small regions scattered all over the brain, activated to try and cobble together the resources needed to read. In contrast, in a typical reader, it's one area activated, devoted to and efficient at the task, and all else is free for higher-level functions like comprehension, analysis, inference, etc. A crucial discovery was that when you provide proper dyslexia remediation, the bulk of the reading task actually
shifts to that part of the brain which deals with it most efficiently, so you are literally freeing up all those other parts of the brain to do the tasks they ought to be doing instead.
In other words, with a child like yours, it's not about whether they
can do the task, but
at what cost are they doing it? How inefficient is it? How painful will it get down the road? What are all the higher-level tasks he is going to struggle with as the reading, writing and especially comprehension become far more complex and demanding, but he doesn't have the brain resources available to deal with them because too much energy is still devoted to the basics?
2E kids tend to hit a wall. At some point, the reading and writing work will require a level of complexity and abstraction they can't deal with, because too much working memory and brain power is devoted to basic processing tasks and mechanics. Depending on their mix of strengths and weaknesses, sometimes it happens in primary, sometimes not until university. For a long time - especially if the work tends to the concrete and the rote - they can fake it with their work-arounds. For a long time after, they tend to be struggling, finding it harder and harder to keep up, seeing it get easier for everyone else but them, and that's where the anxiety ramps up. No one can see how hard they are working, that they are barely treading water, trying to keep up. Unfortunately, the mental health issues tends to grow pretty large long before school achievement drops low enough to trigger concern. Way too often, it's not until the child feels in so far over their head they've started to drown. And rescuing and recovering the child at this stage is really, really hard.
And that's why you want to remediate the problem long before you see below-grade achievement. By the time it's this obvious, we often have a very, very broken child on our hands.
