The gifted teachers say they cannot handle his AS, because they have never met anyone like him in their 25 years of gifted education (50 students per intake). I'm just wondering how the autism/special needs teachers can handle him, if he is PG. If I send him to the special needs school, will they be telling me they cannot handle his PG because they would not have met anyone like him in their practice? Even if PG is one in 1000, it will be highly unlikely an autism class teacher would have met a child like him. That's why I wonder if the diagnosis of PG or AS could be a mistake.
This does not necessarily mean the diagnosis is a mistake, only that your child is a rare bird. (Like mine, gifted/AS.)
Think about the length of any one teacher's career. If they have a class of 30 each year, they might see 900 kids in 30 years of teaching. It's a significant slice of humanity, so they start to feel they've seen it all. AS kids are often bright, but the AS/gifted combo of the type my kid has is perhaps 1 in 10,000 kids. I can't be surprised that he seems odd to them, and that they don't know what to do.
You are right that the special needs school is unlikely to have seen one like yours. The regular school too. A gifted school likewise. The odds are against it.
I think you should approach this not theoretically, but practically. Go talk to the special needs school about your child. See what they could do. Watch what they do. See what kind of kids are there, what kind of peers he'd have. Some schools like that are terrific about accelerating (if everybody's needs are unique, stands to reason that they'd be equipped to think outside the box); some just don't.
There is an argument to be made for doing everything you can to remediate the AS now, before he's a teen; once he's recalcitrant it gets much, much harder. In your shoes I would choose private behavior therapy (ABA, CBT) and really work on problem behaviors as intensively as can be managed. Giftedness, in our experience, doesn't go away, but problem behaviors stay until they're resolved. You could choose to remediate the problem behaviors now, negotiating the best academic content you can for the moment but prioritizing good social functioning, and get him back into the gifted program again once he's operating in a more socially acceptable way.
The other option, of course, is to request training for the gifted teachers and support in the gifted classroom so they would know how to deal with him. You can make a Least Restrictive Environment argument; kids are supposed to be kept in the regular classroom if at all possible, even if it means adding staff or therapeutic support. However, if the gifted teachers don't want to help-- if they already want him gone-- this will be tough to do, because turning attitudes around is hard.
DeeDee
