Oh! During 4th grade we requested, and got inclass enrichment, which helped, and an experimental permission to go with the 5th graders to musical instrument lessons and a once monthly 5th grade Math club. This did help tremendously, and one could observe DS 'brighten' after the math club. But overall, he was still pretty miserable. We were asking for subject acceleration in math, 1 year. Seems pretty tame right now.
They assesed him, and their Math consultant only saw the underachievement. Her assesment was: 'He is NOT a deep thinker in math.'
((As if you need to be a deep thinker to try to get out of a room that spends 6 weeks doing language arts exploration of the concept 'Perimeter.' - Gurrr))
So over the summer between 4th and 5th we shopped for private schools. At first I looked for schools that would accept him AND give him the skip, to minimze the social friction. Great idea, but, even with the IQ test reports in front of them, what I got was - "Moving from the public school to the much more demanding environment of the private school is enough of a transition for anyone, particularly your child." Again, his underachievement was showing - one placed asked him: 'Would you like to give us a writing sample?'
He politely said that he'd rather not.
By the time I applied to the last school in August, I didn't say anything about his IQ or his needing a gradeskip. I had convinsed myself that just transfering to private would be a step in the right direction. DS had taken a writting class over the summer (SIG day camp) and was feeling much more confident by then.
Of course, the head of the lower school (K-5th) came back for his 'interview' looking like a strange combination of queasy and excited. She said that he got more correct items on their vocabulary test than any child ever, and that his writing sample was so beautiful that it took her breath away, that she had never seen anything like in all her 20+ years of interviewing children for that division of the school. ( I had insisted that she demand he keyboard the writing sample.)
So I signed on the dotted line and he became a student at the private school. A month later he was getting in trouble for reading books in his desk, and they were po'd at him for not doing the 'additional math for those who finish early' that was widely availible. So DH and I requested a gradeskip, and he got one - it was finalized by mid October.
As a team, we all worked hard to get him up to speed with the very heavy 'product demands' of Middle School. He got a great education for 2 years, but things never really gelled socially, and there was a bullying issue so we switched back to the excellent public middle school, keeping the gradeskip.
and that was our 'way around.'
Love and More Love,
Grintiy
