Grinity,
You give me some hope. I just met with our principal today and was told that the school does not feel my son is gifted & he's not entitled to differentiated instruction. My son was tested & identified as gifted by a neuro-psychologist when he was four. Yet the school is relying on a single subjective checklist completed by his kindergarten teacher. In NJ they don't have to accept an outside provider's test results & our district does not test till 2nd grade. (And that's only for placement in a lousy one day a week pull-out program). I had my son's IQ retested at age 6 and it went up 11 points so it's not a fluke or my imagination.
Now my son in 1st grade & bored. He's been saying he's bored. He says he feels stupid when the teacher makes him do stuff he already knows - like coloring, cutting and pasting vowel sounds onto a worksheet (when he reads fluently). To her credit his teacher is finally giving him some harder work and he's loving it. The harder work boosted his self-esteem, etc... Of course the school did not want to acknowledge this. According to the principal a gifted bored student does all of their assignments quickly and then just sits in class looking bored. And of course, my child is apparently unorganized, lacking social skills, unfocused, etc... At home he's fine. He's organized, does his homework without issue, can focus for hours on something of interest & can focus on less preferred things with the right motivation. In any case, they are dancing around the suggestion that he has ADHD or as his teacher put it "there's something wrong with him and it's not that he's gifted". Nice.
Anyway, I did see the neuro-psychologist who tested my son just the other day and he said that a gifted child cannot be diagnosed with ADHD until they are placed in the proper learning environment & that symptoms must be present across settings. He went a step further to say that stimulant medication is not a good idea. He mentioned recent research that found at one time kids who were not medicated would outgrow their ADHD symptoms & with medication they were symptomatic into adulthood. On the bright side, the doctor is going to contact the school to see what he can accomplish for my son. I'm not overly optimistic and legally I have no recourse. So I'm now considering home-schooling as I will not medicate my son so he can sit in circle time and count to 100! I only hope we can make it till June without doing any damage to my son's self-esteem.
Thanks for letting me vent.
