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The school has scheduled my son's IEP for Wednesday. Two things will be discussed.

The first is that they are not qualifying him for gifted. The second was to exit him from special ed for his learning disability.

After an hour on the phone with the diagnostician, we came to the agreement that my son will not be exited from special ed but will be given a new IEP with a specific learning disability (dysgraphia) that will be in place for 3 years before he will need re-evaluation again. We will specify that he will no longer be pulled out of regular ed class but will be provided support on an as-needed basis by the special ed teacher who will collaborate with his regular ed teacher to see what areas my son is struggling with in the classroom.

He is being exited from O.T., because the skills he needs for academics have met acceptable grade level standards (handwriting). We will continue to work privately on the shoe tying, bike riding, pants buttoning skills.

Most of the hour was spent arguing about the gifted placement. She said that he increased 20 points on some portions of the IQ battery she gave him compared to his initial private testing 3 years ago. And she said that after testing him, she is very aware that he is a brilliant kid who is most likely gifted but because he IQ test came in at 119 and that it needs to be 130 for gifted, she can't qualify him.

She recommended that I give it three years and request that he be re-evaluated at the end of mid-school. She also said that with the IEP in place, he will be given the accommodations he needs to handle mid-school such as being given more creative projects rather than worksheets, etc.

I am still very torn about accepting this plan, because I worry about misbehaviors starting to crop up when he becomes bored in mid-school. Up until now, just making it through the workload has been enough to wear him out, because he's been compensating for the dysgraphia. But as he's mastered some of those compensations and made remedial gains in areas where he was struggling, I've seen his performance really take off this year. (And if I hear one more mom tell me, "Oh, we all want our kids to be gifted, but sometimes we just have to accept them as they are..." I'm going to scream. I've had a gifted kid, and I've had a normal-IQ kid. I know that it's no dreamy bowl of cherries, but I also know the character traits and learning styles, and I understand if I don't advocate to get my kid what he needs to succeed, nobody else will.

And so, while I know none of you know me from Adam, I'd love your insight.

If you didn't read the initial thread, you can see his test scores Gifted Issues Discussion Forum

Hi ABQmom,

A few thoughts, don't know if they're helpful or not:

I am struck by their exiting him from OT when he can't button his pants-- he's 10, right? By my lights that's a 5-year-old milestone. If you go to wrightslaw.com and look up "functional" in their search box you will see that the law requires schools to address not only academic, but also life-skills deficits. I wouldn't let them drop this, unless you are planning to really push this with private OT and you want him out of school OT for reasons of your own. They owe him the service, IMHO. Not being able to tie your shoes and do other functional tasks can be stigmatizing in middle school.

For the IQ testing, I think you need to know the district's and state's rules for identifying gifted kids in great detail to fight this one. Would they accept the Raven, or other alternative IQ testing, as identification for gifted placement? Is there reason to think if you had him tested privately he'd do differently? Where we live, the state sets the standard for IQ and achievement scores that identify a child as gifted and the district a slightly higher one for children who are "served"; there is no getting around those numbers. But your state and district may have different rules.

IQ test scores do tend to increase and become more coherent when you address LDs, so the 20 point increase looks very much in the right direction. I agree that it would be very frustrating to have to wait another few years until his dexterity catches up with his capacity otherwise. It does sound as though it will catch up.

We have found it useful to hire an educational advocate to help us wade through rules when we hit our own limit; sometimes we find the advocate can negotiate things for you with the school or the district that you can't on your own.

Good luck,
DeeDee

Thank you so much for your post, Dee Dee. I've mentioned to the school numerous times about his shoes and buttons, and the answer is always that the school will only focus on those skills needed to perform academically. It is good to be armed with the law that says the school needs to address the others as well.

The state allows wiggle room for IQ standards if there is a diagnosed disability. That is why I am struggling between battling now or just asking for a re-eval in 3 years.

Thanks again -

ABQmom, if you want to get them to follow the law you may need either a crash course in reading the law (I did this one year, it wasn't fun but very edifying)-- or an educational advocate. Or both.

If you choose to read: the book From Emotions to Advocacy is good, and the same people run the website wrightslaw.com. The site is poorly laid out and has lots of ads for their stuff, but full of good information. I also recommend looking up the actual IDEA statute and the updates to it, and reading the relevant parts of them. Wrightslaw often provides guidance about what bits to focus on: if you search "functional" on their site, they will give you pointers to the precise places in the law where this is spelled out. (Maybe this direct link will work: http://www.wrightslaw.com/howey/iep.functional.perf.htm ). Note that you don't have to buy the text of IDEA from them, you can google it and the text is online.

Advocates: we have at various times had both a free one from the state Legal Rights Service (which helps people with disabilities access things they are entitled to)-- and a paid one. They were both very good, but we got more mileage from the one we paid, only because the state had limits on what their person could do for us in our particular situation. We have sent the paid one to negotiate things on our behalf that they would never have given us if we had asked ourselves. It made a difference and sure took some pressure off me.

On the IQ wiggle room: is it spelled out how much room, and for what disabilities, or is the identification at the school's discretion? You will need to be super-strategic about this, on two fronts at once. I sympathize.

HTH,
DeeDee

I came across this today via Aimee Yermish's blog and was wondering if you considered including your son at his IEP meeting? You have my sympathies too.
http://www.ncld.org/at-school/your-...why-my-son-attended-his-own-iep-meetings
P.S. I read the rest of Aimee's blog entry on this subject and wanted to give you the link:
http://davincilearning.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/meetings-the-final-frontier/

inky, thanks!

It may not be worth fighting for training in how to button his pants and tie his shoes. My guess is that they're going to say that these are easily accommodated with velcro, slip-ons, and elastic -- you and I might think that those are crucial life skills that a school should teach, but I am not sure the school is really legally on the hook for those. They're not going to be deal-breakers for a kid to be able to live independently in adulthood. Spend the money you'd have spent on advocates and lawyers (who would probably spend years and then lose that fight) on private OT, or get stuff from www.theraproducts.com (the owners, two OTs, are really nice people and can probably help you figure out how to intervene at home) and roll your own.

What I think might be more worth looking at is how much wiggle room there may be in the GT qualifications, and what additional information might help them understand the nature of the 2E. If they'd be open to information from an outside evaluation, that may be expensive, and it's crucial that you have it done by someone who knows 2E issues well -- I have an article on my site talking about the general problem here: http://www.davincilearning.org/sketchbook/multiple_exceptionality.html -- but if you can swing it, it might be more helpful than waiting three years of middle school with no GT services, until the kid is about to enter high school where classes are tracked (yay!) but he didn't have access to the curriculum that the other honors-class-bound kids did for the past three years.

I'll take a look at the scores you posted and see if I have any other ideas...

Hm... no, no words of wisdom. They probably only did the WISC VC and PR because either (1) they think the GAI is a better measure of what they're looking for (2) they knew that dysgraphia would trash PS and that low WM is quite common in the dyslexic population (since from your descriptions, it sounds like he has needs in both areas). The dysgraphia frankly probably wouldn't even have affected Block Design unless it were severe (and they could check with BDN (no time bonus) to get a better read on that). Picture Concepts and Matrix Reasoning are not likely to be hit by dysgraphia or dyslexia (they are completely visual and oral, and the visuals are designed to be easy to see, even for kids with imperfect visual processing), might get hit with a low working memory but a gifted kid with strong fluid reasoning, even with LDs, would generally do better on those two subtests.

Yes, if those are 94th percentiles (I was hoping they were T scores or NCEs), they aren't all that much different from the rest of the scores -- z+1 (one standard deviation above the mean), not the z+2 they are asking for.

The tricky thing is that it may be that he's a 2E kid, or it may be that he's a smart-but-not-gifted-and-also-LD kid. We have to be fair to all of the possible hypotheses. This testing is not sufficient to really elucidate the problems in processing and academics and such such that it's clear which hypothesis has more support. School-based evaluations generally can't do this, and even most evaluators have no training on the topic -- that's why people come to seriously-geeky people like the Eides or myself for evaluations.

Wow.

Thank you for so much feedback and so much to consider.

Aimee - you hit the nail on the head with this "This testing is not sufficient to really elucidate the problems in processing and academics and such such that it's clear which hypothesis has more support."

I agree that it is reasonable to entertain all the options, because in the end what I want is the best course of action for my son - not a label. After one gifted kid, there is no ego involved in the label. I greatly appreciate your insight about the strategies about the testing.

I've searched the NM area and can't find someone who is an expert in 2e testing. We do have one school in the district where a teacher works specifically with 2e kids, but I can't find a private diagnostician who is experienced in this area. That doesn't mean they're not out there - just that I haven't be able to identify someone.

Inky - I've long be up front with my kids and included them with decisions that affected them, and whenever possible I made them a part of the decision. So thank you for this link - it was a very good read.

I hadn't considered bringing my son to the IEP, but I've already talked to him about all of the results and about the decisions we are going to make at the meeting so that I could get his feedback about what he wanted. He said that he is comfortable with the work in class, is getting better every day with his reading and writing, and so he is happy with the decision to not be pulled out for special ed for those subjects anymore. He said that if OT might help him learn to remember how to tie (we practice it every stinkin' day, but he can never remember the sequencing of which loop goes where), he'd like to continue. Otherwise, he is ready to move on and practice his areas of need at home. He pointed out that two years ago, we wasted money on swimming lessons because he couldn't understand how to do the strokes and then this summer the lessons went much better - he turned into an excellent swimming who can lap the pool several times from someone who couldn't even dog paddle. So his thinking is that the part of his brain that is needed for riding a bike or tying his shoes may kick in with a little more time the way swimming did. I like his logic, whether he's right or not.

Dee Dee - it seems to be rather arbitrary, because the diagnostician told me prior to testing that she would assign the gifted diagnosis if his IQ was anywhere in the 120's. It was 119, although his last IQ test was 123. Now she is saying it just wasn't high enough - that if it was higher in the 120's she would, since his other scores now showed no signs of a learning disability.

It is the logic of that explanation that's been giving me fits, because I do feel it is all so arbitrary and that I am left without really knowing the best way to advocate for my kid.