They did a psych eval on him end of March and diagnosed him with Asperger's/ADHD. They recommended I get him tested for giftedness so that's why I did. The psychologist who tested him for this disagrees with the AS/ADHD diagnosis by the way. Says that the problems they see in school are common with children of his ability. He has an IEP in place at school that started in May. It's not working. Perhaps because the diagnosis was wrong?
Could be because the diagnosis was wrong; could be because the IEP wasn't designed to meet his needs, or (likely) his needs outstrip what the school can fix.
Our DS8 (AS/gifted) has needed intensive outside therapy; he is now flourishing in public school, but it took a lot of time and effort to get that working properly. He had pretty severe handwriting issues, trouble following directions and participating appropriately, lots of behavior problems that resulted from the AS, all of which we remediated at home with additional supports mandated in his IEP at school (and our private therapy team provided lots of support and helped write the IEP, so the whole program made sense).
It became clear to the school along the way that DS needed subject acceleration and gifted placement; those were part of our solution, and he does behave better there (more interesting material, smaller group, highly invested teacher)-- BUT this was not the whole solution for us, nor was it the biggest part of the solution. If your child does have AS, remediate that first and intensively, because that is what makes your and the child's life much easier and allows others to see the giftedness more clearly.
They want to put him in special ed half the day in another school for kids with behavioral issues. I asked them if he was challenged academically if some of these issues would go away and they said no. They suggest I medicate him. They also told me now that he's been identified as gifted that they don't have anything for him.
You definitely want to keep a kid with AS/ADHD out of the "emotionally disturbed" type of special ed classroom. But a special ed placement specifically designed for AS can be a good thing at this age, where an AS child is having a hard time grasping the social norms of school; especially if the regular ed classroom isn't offering anything academically, you can choose to spend these early years on social lessons. (We are not sorry we focused intensively on social skills in early elementary: a kid this bright will keep learning academics no matter what, but fixing the social and behavioral issues was a great investment for the long run.)
I would recommend that you go look at the placement they are suggesting, talk to the teachers and the people running that program, and see how instruction is differentiated in that classroom. If there's a high ratio of teachers to students, and it's a calm environment, it might be a good place to build skills for a while, and he may even get more appropriate academic content because content can be more individualized in a small group setting. Don't be freaked out by the special ed label before deciding whether that placement could possibly work; you may miss an opportunity.
That said, special education is not a place, it's a service-- if you can identify services he needs that can be offered in the regular ed environment, that can happen, too, and in fact the school is required by law to place him in the "least restrictive environment."
So, DS is seeing a psychologist once a week $$$ to work on his high anxiety, anger towards the school, frustration tolerance etc.
Is it talk therapy, behavior therapy, what kind? We found that traditional talk therapy will simply not work for AS; behavior therapy, on the other hand, was really substantially helpful. (We did ABA, and found it extremely effective.) Is the psych your son is seeing a specialist in AS/ADHD, or a generalist? We typically go for the most targeted expertise we can get; DS's year doing talk therapy with a general psych was not well spent.
Now, we are in a position where we have to look for a new school that can accommodate his needs. We're even in touch with an educational consultant who told us to not reveal his IQ to the schools we're interested in because they wouldn't want to deal with a PG child. Sigh. She gave me a list of schools to call that "might" be a good fit for him. All private.
In our experience, private schools may or may not want to deal with high IQ, but will very likely not want a child with behavior issues, unless they are a school that is specifically geared toward those issues.
We spent a lot of time looking to pull our child from public school or move to a different district (escape to anywhere)-- we considered homeschooling, which was not recommended by our private therapists for solid reasons. But we eventually found that our best bet was to stay put, hire an advocate, get the best private therapy we could find, bring our private therapy team and the advocate to school meetings, and work like crazy until we made the public school hospitable to DS's needs. I can't say that we had a lot of fun getting there, but third grade was a dream; he is successful and we're thrilled. Obviously, only you can decide whether it's worth protracted negotiation to keep him in school-- but that's our experience.
HTH,
DeeDee
