These boards have so many inspiring stories, and parents struggling here that I identify with, that I'd like to ask a question that feels presumptuous. I could never ask my normal group of friends this, so please take for granted that I am just trying to find the right path for DS.
We need a new school for 10th grade, and so if he could get a GED after 9th grade and go to a good local college instead of 10th grade, should he? There is a second tier (but very good) private university and I learned it might be an option. Some thoughts/facts/opinions:
He has been exhaustively tested. 7th grade SAT: V:680 M:630 W:590. IQ uneven at 115. ERB's very very high, with some dropouts way low. He is on both sides of the bell curve.
He is 2E, with ADHD, executive function and dysgraphia. For lack of a better term, hyperlexic. He's one of the fastest natural readers anyone testing has seen, with amazing comprehension. Struggles to write, and a keyboard accommodation has been a world of difference. Didn't (and won't) use extra time allocation for standardized tests.
He is in 8th grade doing a two year program (8th/9th) in a special boarding school for kids with learning differences. It is the first semester of school that, as parents, has not been excruciating for us to get feedback from teachers. The school is coordinated in a way I hardly believed possible. It costs an arm and a leg, but I think he is on track to connect his incredible and original thoughts and be able to express them in writing, and is working through the other issues. He is not intellectually challenged there like he would be in a utopia, but the deep focus on his weak areas is certainly what he needs.
Looking for his school for 10th grade, I think a boarding school without other supports for him would eat him alive in a sea of uber-achievers. There is a great gifted public high school at home, but it requires a massive, grinding amount of homework and most kids report about the workload that the homework controls their lives and they are ambivalent about the experience.
Adults seem to love DS and find it hard to believe he has any issues at all, but his age peers struggle to appreciate him. I've been told by some people that he is the smartest human being they have ever met, although he is not the most precocious -- that is to say there was a child in his nursery school way beyond his abilities, and when I asked he self reports as 50th percentile at CTY/TIP, which he has done residential for the last 3 years at CTY and last year also at TIP. I read about kids on these boards who are obviously more capable, as well.
That said, his teachers from TIP and CTY last summer both, in parent conferences on the phone, had interesting things to say. They were first tip toeing around his intellectual wandering and worried about offending us. When we immediately copped to him being challenging to keep on track, each teacher breathed a sigh of relief. One said he was as capable as any kid they ever had seen in the program (but not more capable), and the other said he was one of two children in 20 years that she believed would do something great.
Other people say this kind of thing, that they see him as doing "great" things. It creates a weird burden of feeling like a failing parent.
His real strength is synthesis of ideas and reinterpretation. A simple example is a point he made about the song Imagine by John Lennon. DS said with a wink, "doesn't it describe a world where people would be sad and have no purpose? There is nothing to live or die for, no religion, no struggle?" I've heard the song a thousand times and never thought anything of the kind, but when I asked him why he thought that, he said he was referencing notions of survival in the developing world vs higher suicide rates in prosperous countries, and ideas about what keeps people going in life.
I got this comment once, and later again almost verbatim from another person: "He'll either run Goldman Sachs or become the unibomber." It rang very true, but also hurt my wife's feelings, understandably.
So, as we have been trying to figure out what to do for 10th grade, this university possibility came up. It seems he would be much better served by having 18 hours of class a week with 30 hours of homework, rather than 40 hours of classes a week with 30 hours of homework. He could get the intellectual stimulation of older kids (the radical advancement piece), and still see the few kids his age that he does connect with. He would be living at home as a 15 year old starting college but we could provide other supports like homework coaches.
Whatever he does, he is on his own path and as parents we can just try to improve and accommodate his weaknesses. Most parents have been very supportive with our decision to go with this boarding school, but some folks, including from his old school, say we have stigmatized him to colleges by putting him in "special school."
I have to just ignore the negative comments. Year by year he needs what he needs, and awesome credentials from a name brand university are far from the goal. So we've come to the 10th grade university question almost by process of elimination. I don't think he could make it at Davidson Academy because of the weak areas (even if he could get in). I'd love for him to be with geeky kids at a gifted high school, but not if the homework will cause repeated failures and he won't have time for a social life anyway.
I know this is a long post, and we have time to figure this out, but this group is an oasis of knowledge and I'm hoping our "journey" will continue to improve.
Thanks for any comments here, and to everyone creating this community.
