Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Penning the IEP application - advice welcomed

DD7 just had a WISC-IV to confirm what we suspected: 2-e. GAI of 154 and what appears to be dysgraphia. She also has ADHD hyperactive type and sensory processing disorder.

She's reading at a 1st grade level and her math is slightly higher.

I called the district's special education main office for some background before writing the IEP request with our DD's school. We are in a big district. We want access to a "non-public" school for ADHD/LD students that will accommodate gifted students.

Over the phone, the special education district representative said they will accommodate the gap between cognitive ability and performance. The WISC-IV showed a gap of 50 points. (I can't remember how many standard deviations that was, but it raised our testing psychologist's eyebrows. He felt certain DD could get an IEP.)

Any wording advice would be greatly appreciated. I've heard so many people say "you have to use a lawyer" that I really need to know if this has been true for most here.

Seablue, I believe that usually an out of district placement is only available (at district's expense) when the district has tried and failed to meet the child's needs, or when it's already crystal-clear that it can't do so. Every district will be different, but the norm is that they will want to serve your DD with the resources they have if at all possible.

Backing up several steps: this was a private eval, right? Has the district ever evaluated? If not, they HAVE to (by law) conduct an educational eval. All your letter has to do is to request that the district evaluate her, and list all the areas of concern. If you want to tell them you have this outside eval and diagnoses to share, it will speed things up considerably, but you are still looking at a process. The school is not entitled to diagnose anyone-- but they do have to make determinations of educational needs (as distinct from medical or other kinds).

Hope you find a situation that works for you.

Take a look at the Wrightslaw website if you haven't. They have some excellent books as well. We have used various special education advocates as well as a lawyer in our search for services. It was extremely expensive and more importantly very very stressful. We ultimately got what we needed but we had to move to do it.

I realize my situation is not your situation and ymmv. But I would just say that you have to realize and be prepared for the fight ahead. The district will often spend 10x in legal fees what the services you want would have cost. Their concern is not you but people like me. People so desperate to get appropriate services that they will move in to any district that would provide them. So they fight very hard not to pay out money for any services, regardless of what the child needs. There are other reasons , too, but that is the main one.

Check out the Wrightslaw website and try to (quietly) network with other parents. What services are they getting and how did they get them? Always remember that unless you plan to move you will be dealing with these people for a long time. Try hard to stay cordial. It is amazingly difficult.

Good luck

Great advice in the book From Emotions to Advocacy, Wrightslaw website, and also from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, see previous post.

Ok, thank you.

DeeDee, yes, this IEP will be to request district testing now that we have private testing. We have had a 504 in place this year, so maybe that will help our cause for new placement.

Southlake, you scare me. The two pieces of good news are 1. we already have the name of a successful lawyer who is both known by the district and by the non-public school we want to move DD to. 2. We just moved to the area and rent - so we can move anywhere we need to.

Indigo, I'll check those out!

Seablue, my best advice right now is to slow down. You are about 50 steps ahead of where the school district is.

The process is likely to be slower than you think. They have a 60-day window to get their eval done, and then there is normally a meeting of the whole team to discuss the eval and qualify the child for an IEP based on educational needs, and then another, separate meeting to determine what services correspond to those needs and how those services should be delivered and in what environment.

In short, if you get the request letter in tomorrow, I'll still be dazzled if the IEP is written during this school year.

Sorry to be a downer. I just want you to know that you have time to take a breath. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

DeeDee, I'm hoping to get things in place before Nov/Dec. If I submit the request for testing tomorrow or Monday, they have 15 days to respond, and 60 days to evaluate. That puts us to about the end of the school year.

DD could potentially gain a spot to the gifted elementary school (not holding my breath) next year if district testing is done and a spot opens up for Sept, which does happen.

So my urgency is in getting the process started before the end of this school year, in order to have an IEP in place the first half of next school year.

But thank you - you're right, I need to slow down. I just caught a glimpse of hope for a solution to this school chaos and I'm full steam ahead, as if I can will it to happen. My request is as much a cry for a reality check as it is for practical advice, so thank you.

They might (big might) do all the pieces that they have to do by law (hearing and vision screenings, etc) and possibly accept the outside testing. The fact that you already have a 504 means that the child already has a known disability. I used to work for a district that on occasion if the outside tester had a good reputation and the report was up to our standards ----well that was money saved by not doing that eval and just approve that report and add a short addendum that they had reviewed it and any additional thoughts or recommendations. ...they would make note of it and when the three year re-evaluation came up would make sure they didn't want to give the child the "works" at that time.

But one can only hope.

That's a good thing to shoot for. I just find it useful to keep my expectations adjusted.


That is my MO by temperament as well, just moderated over time...

Remember that depending on your state, it may be 15+60 school days, not calendar days.

Good luck!

Have you asked about the possibility of having the private results accepted instead of having to wait on additional in-house testing from the district? We had our youngest tested privately because he wasn't "far enough behind" at school to qualify for testing. Once the private results came back, I made an appointment with our school's diagnostician, shared the results with her and asked if we could use the results to being the process for getting him into special ed. She took the report to the district; they reviewed it and accepted the findings. It saved us several months and the risk of different results complicating things.

As far as the actual IEP went, it was a collaborative process between the diagnostician, the special ed chair, a special ed teacher, his current teacher, and myself. I found that the school actually wanted a very liberal IEP in elementary school so that they would have the freedom to try what they wanted to see what worked.

At this point they are asking me to try an alternative option, but getting them to accept a private option they'd have to pay for? I think that would require a lawsuit.

You may find that the school isn't willing to pay for an out-of-district option until it is proven an in-school IEP is a failure.

Yes...it is school days here.

ABQ, we're glad you're back.

Our experience is that even if school will accept the outside testing, they will want to do some of their own observations and evaluations. Letting them have the outside testing definitely speeds things up, though.

We typically also bring our outside professionals to school meetings, especially the meeting at which eligibility is determined, to clarify what the issues are.

seablue, I agree with DeeDee's wise advice above and indigo's recommendation to look at From Emotions to Advocacy. I'd also caution you not to leap to lawyers until you've tried advocating on your own - bringing a lawyer into the mix leads to divisiveness in a way that can work against your case.

I'd also take an additional step back and be certain that you have clear goals in requesting the IEP - ie, that you have a good understanding of how/why your child requires individualized instruction. What have you seen yourself as a need, and what does the new set of testing support? (I realize you may already have thought this through, but it wasn't listed in your post, so that's why I mentioned it).

I'd also be sure that you're not appearing to be going for the IEP simply to get your child into an alternative school, paid for by the district. This is highly unlikely to happen with the initial IEP - "out of district" placement is something that, from my understanding, only happens *after* a good faith effort has been made on the part of the school district to educate the child, and that effort did not work out. The people I've known who've had OOD work have had to spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and $ on the journey that leads to the placement, and even if you are offered an OOD, there is no guarantee it will be to the school you are hoping for. I would also anticipate that you'd have to show that your child is extremely exceptional, because if your school district is remotely similar to ours in any way, there will be other students id'd as gifted who also have ADHD and SPD. In fact, here, in early elementary, they are often the children identified first by the schools as gifted, because they have challenges in the classroom and are referred by the school staff for testing.

The timelines are business days in our school district too, fwiw. There is no way that a request for an eval that goes in now, in our district, would be followed up on until the next school year. This may sound horrid, but there are some realities out there beyond the deadlines and the needs of each individual student - the necessary team members that will be included are typically busy people with full schedules, and this time of year there are meetings planned and in progress putting together IEP updates for the following year for the students who already have IEPs in place.

We were able to successfully advocate for an IEP for our 2e student without calling on a lawyer or filing for due process. It did take time, however. Our timeline went like this:

1) We (and teacher) requested an IEP eligibility meeting.
2) School district required 6 weeks RTI (Response to Intervention) - this is routine, and stated in the district's policy handbook.
3) At the end of RTI, when it could be shown that RTI didn't work, the official request was made for an IEP eligibility meeting - this set off the first time clock for the district (it's 45 days here). The meeting wasn't scheduled until the last week possible, because it was so difficult to call together each of the required team members at the same time (due to their busy work schedules, and to be fair, we had our own requests re meeting times because of work conflicts for us as parents).
4) The meeting that we had at the end of the 45 days was the meeting to determine if the school felt ds was eligible for *testing* for an IEP, not a meeting to determine if he was eligible for an IEP. We did determine that testing was needed, and that set off a 60-day (possibly 45 day) period in which the district had to evaluate (test) ds. Again, the testing was put off by the district until the end of the 60-day window, and when the testing did happen, the school district psychologist felt he needed to do some additional testing. We agreed - because it was a reasonable decision and would help to better understand our ds. To be picky here - the psych could have predicted this from our original private test report... but... because he is working on school district time and budget, and because he is looking at educational need, not making a diagnosis, he had to first show that need for additional testing by going through his first steps of testing. Anyway, in order to fit the additional testing in, we had to agree to an extension of the 60-day time window. Had we pushed through and insisted on keeping the deadline, I am not sure we would have gotten an IEP (without the additional testing) and I suspect we would have been seen as not working with the district, which would not have looked good had we eventually landed in due process or legal challenges.
5) When the last set of testing was completed, and it was time to schedule the meeting, we ran into scheduling issues pulling the full team together which resulted in another request for an extension. There was really nothing we could do about this because we needed the full team present at the eligibility determination meeting.
6) We had the eligibility meeting, and we successfully persuaded the school to give ds an IEP. NOTE - the school did not offer it up at all - we had to advocate for it at this meeting. What happened was sorta like the school offered up testing results and gave numerous potential reasons for why those results might be (could be this, could be that etc), and it was up to us as parents to keep reiterating how the test results were related to ds' diagnosed disability *and* how they resulted in a need for individualized instruction. Basically, we had to prove ds needed the IEP, and the district couldn't disprove any of our reasons so they agreed to the IEP.
7) That was *only* an eligibility meeting - another meeting had to be scheduled to write up the actual IEP.
Total time between our original request (mid-August, start of school year) to having an IEP in place (last week of the school year). While that seems horribly slow, I also have friends who work in school district services (OT, SLP etc) and I know from what their work experience has been that the school district is simply overwhelmed with the number of requests for services and with the ability to accommodate the large number of children who have special needs.

I am also a full-steam ahead personality who wants to plow through quickly and get things done. It helped me tremendously to take my focus off of the IEP process and put it on my child - looking at the situation as where does he need to be and what does he need (inside and outside of school) to get there, rather than making the focus of my effort all about getting the IEP. We did get the IEP - but it wasn't the magic cure-all for anything.

Sorry if some of that sounds negative - it's not meant to be, just out there for food for thought.

Good luck as you move forward!

polarbear

My DD has the same gap on the WISC but her achievement testing is Ok, except for writing fluency is maybe 1 grade level below. Two different private psychs have told me a 504 is reasonable but the school district is unlikely to approve anything more than that. You can look online at the different special ed categories and see exactly what criteria a child has to meet in order to qualify. Usually it is 2 standard deviations below the mean for reading/math/writing, etc. I need to look at the "Other Health Impairments" category again and see what the qualifying criteria are, because ADHD is usually under that category. It is not as rigid as the learning disability category. Honestly, though, the servies that the school offers are so minimal that it may not be worth the hassle. My DS has developmental coordination disorder and gets 60 min. of OT per month. Not enough to make any difference. I doubt you would get an out of district placement unless the needs are so severe that the district cannot accommodate them. The most important thing to go after are accommodations but that can be done with the 504 you already have.

Here's a helpful article on evaluating/qualifying 2e kids for special ed. I had forwarded this to the special ed director in our district and I think it helped. Although I think it would still be difficult to get DD an IEP, and if we did she might be pulled out a few times per month for writing. I just don't think it's worth the hassle. But maybe in your case it is.
sgo.sagepub.com/content/3/3/2158244013505855