So I was sure my son wasn't going to qualify for gifted services at school and they surprised me by qualifying him using "Plan B" (which is a way to qualify minorities and low SES with a bit more flexibility).
He had high teacher rating scales, and high achievement results but his IQ using the RAIS (or whatever the initials are) was 138 verbal and 102 performance. It brought his full scale down. You are not supposed to use partial scores on the RAIS but they said eligible so I didn't argue.
We decided that he is in all honors classes and has a supplemental class at home. That we weren't going to change his schedule this year (well sort of). So he is eligible and then at the end of the year we will write an EP and develop a gifted schedule for the next year and at that time place him officially in the program.
What I found out is that this school has so many different levels of classes that they don't even tell you about. There are regular, advanced, honors and gifted (I was under the impression that the gifted kids were just in the honors classes mixed in with EPs and the teacher further differentiated for them or incorporated some of the best practices with the honors kids too). Many times the Gifted certified teacher teaches both the gifted section and some honors section. So he had a math teacher who was gifted certified for his honors section already.
So separate from this meeting...they were switching the math teacher from his schedule (she was teaching one class of 6th graders) and giving her another 8th grade class (we have class size limits and the numbers changed and they had to do that) so his first period was changing anyway. So the gifted math teacher happened to be at his eligibility meeting and she is receiving him into her honors class and is excited to get him.
I personally think he is getting just the right amount of challenge this year (his big focus is on learning how to keep track of all his stuff, keep a big binder, advocate and ask for help from teachers as needed, and other general functioning skills) and stepping it up/shifting to (some of) the gifted classes next year will be just right.
So he isn't DSY gifted but that is okay I am so glad to have the information that we have and to have the access the gifted services he needs to meet his academic needs (even if we held off until next year).
