Hello! I don't believe I have posted here before. Thank you for reading!
DS11 is in 5th grade and the school has been testing for gifted services for middle school. He has an IEP with ADHD and a language disorder. He has had OT and other help with his fine motor ability. His CogAT test percentiles for Quantitative is 99, and verbal is also in the high nineties. The school has a few other tests it gives the kids and DS made the Math TAG program. For everything else, his score was just under the automatic minimum, and needed a review. (DS did not make the cut based on a single writing sample they had him do for this purpose.) Part of the scoring includes the non-verbal portion of the CogAT, which DS was not able to complete, and scored in the seventies. As a composite with his Quantitative scores, it brought his total point number to right under the 'shoo-in' number. He has various vision challenges, including Convergence Insufficiency that make it difficult to do the figural work on the non-verbal portion. DS does have difficulty with written expression, more as an EF issue, but also in nuanced inferencing. He has ben steadily growing in this aspect - other components of a LA curriculum are a strength, including grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. DS is very curious, is a voracious reader, and enjoys history and science. This Reading program also is the only way to access Science and Social Studies at an enriched level. All of elementary school, DS has been complaining of being bored in class, and has been much more engaged when presented with challenging material. My question is- given these circumstances, would you appeal the decision and fight the school? What are your thoughts on this? I'd appreciate your opinions- my instinct is that he needs the challenge, and we can help him with the written expression. Thanks for reading through this.

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Yes, from the description in your post it seems appropriate to appeal the decision. Depending upon how familiar you are with the school's appeal process, and how familiar you are with approaches to advocacy, there may be a bit of a learning curve involved.

Welcome to the forums Anar!

I have a 2e child who is now in high school, and who has challenges with expressive language (primarily impacts written expression), and fine motor (DCD/dysgraphia). My advice is that the *number 1* best thing you can do for your ds right now is to get him evaluated if you suspect he's 2e, so that you can understand the root cause of what's going on, how it impacts him now, how it might impact him in the future, and so you can come up with an appropriate game-plan for accommodations/remediation that will make sense for your ds and will work.

Re the gifted program, yes, I would advocate to get him included. We absolutely saw with my 2e ds that he had a challenge that wasn't going to magically disappear, the challenge needed remediation, but the remediation worked better when he was placed in the appropriate academic setting that met his intellectual abilities. Holding him back in non-accelerated and non-gifted classrooms did not help at all, and just added frustration to a child who already had a lot of frustration from his LD.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Indigo- I was spending this morning effectively finding out how much of an uphill endeavor this is going to be. We are new to this school and district. However with my child's IEP which he's had for years, I am not new to advocacy in general. Did you have something specific in mind when you referred to 'approaches to advocacy'? According to the school, there is no appeals process- of course this makes the process longer, in addition to the general learning curve. Thank you for responding!

I would definitely appeal since your DS was pretty close to the cut, he has disabilities that likely impacted his scores, and there may be a huge difference(both academic depth/expectations and student behavior) between GT and regular classes at the middle school.

Polarbear- thank you for responding! You have articulated so well in the second paragraph of your response, what I have been belaboring with the school coordinator this morning- to no avail. They are trying to separate out the disability and the giftedness, to where the lack of a robust gifted profile, based on the writing sample, is not thought of as being a result of his specific challenges. I was given a detailed explanation of why middle school being do difficult because of increased organization and independence requirements, would put an added layer of stress on DS, to where we wouldn't want to burden him with the rigor of the accelerated program! A number of his attention and other difficulties are markedly reduced when he is presented with challenging material.

He has an ADHD diagnosis and Mixed Expressive Language Disorder, along with a small bouquet of other diagnoses. His executive function tested at below the 10th percentile, and he has difficulty with the pragmatics of language. As others have found, the school(s) see that he is performing significantly above grade level on test scores, so he wouldn't qualify for instruction (basically, they can't go through the RTI process with his scores). While we have held on to the IEP, it really doesn't have much content. The school has not been able to see the child as a whole, with the 2e piece. Does any of this suggest a possible avenue for evaluation?

How did you work with the expressive language challenges within the gifted program? Did it impede consideration for the accelerated setting? I guess I'm trying to figure out what to do next in trying to advocate for him. In a program that includes ELA acceleration, their counter is that his written expression has to be similar to other participants without accommodations (though they are not saying that explicitly). I do have a meeting set up with the SPED teacher/ coordinator so hopefully I will have another avenue to explore.

Thanks again!

As you've advocated previously, you may already be familiar with these...

For advocacy with 2e (IEP and/or 504): the WrightsLaw website, the book From Emotions to Advocacy, and corresponding fetaweb.com website are indispensable resources.

Have you seen the gifted advocacy Guidebook on the Davidson Database?

More advocacy tips in these old posts:
- In this recent thread, several posts discuss reasons to not use the word "bored" when advocating.
- While in general there is good and bad in everything, a focus on negativity and disappointment may be seen as smacking the oobleck with a spoon and creating an unyielding solid... it works against advocacy.
- Focus on the positive, on the ideas set forth in the law and in school policies, and how the school can implement these to help meet your child's needs for intellectual peers and an appropriate level of academic challenge and pacing... Tips on preparing for a meeting.

I sent you a PM, Anar (the flashing white envelope on the menu bar).

I agree with the others that you should definitely try to get him into the gifted program, if for no other reason than this:

That is really a hallmark of a gifted kid who needs more.

Thank you Indigo and Elizabeth! Thanks for the oobleck bit- now permanently seared in my head! Had a meeting last Friday, and still working on some of the details.

I would point out to the school staff that a child who has challenges with organization is going to have those challenges no matter what program he is in, gifted or not. Having an organizational challenge is not a good reason to keep a student out of a gifted program.

In the grand scheme of school challenges, organizational challenges are actually not that difficult to accommodate. And it's quite possible that you might find that in middle school, many teachers have purposely built-in organizational helps for their full classes simply because it's a huge step up in organzation demands from elementary school for *all* students.


We didn't remediate through the school. Although our ds was able to qualify for an IEP, the goals and strategies provided for help with written expression were weak and also weren't followed through on. It was a lot easier (here) to get appropriate goals and help with organization challenges. Once we realized ds wasn't going to be getting any meaningful help from school that would allow him to catch up with written expression, we made the decision (for our family) to put him into private speech therapy - and that made all the difference in the world for him! It wasn't overnight, it took several years and it is still a work in progress.


It was only an issue in the area where it was clearly going to be an issue, and where we knew it was going to be an issue we had accommodations and strategies in place to deal with it. How is that for a confusing answer? It would also have been an issue had he not been in an accelerated classroom. So, from ds' viewpoint, and from our viewpoint as a family, it was important that he be placed where he was intellectually capable, not placed based on the limitations of his written expression challenges. The impact - for us, family and ds, he has to put in more time on homework primarily. His LA grades probably aren't as high as they would be in a regular class. We also have to deal with teachers and counselors who really don't understand 2e very well, because yes, 2e kids are discouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from being accelerated or placed in higher level classes in our district. On the flip side, ds is very happy with his classes - for him, the important thing is to be in a class where the intellectual discussion is at or nearer-than-far-away-from his level.

Hope that helps a bit -

polarbear