Hello Everyone. New here. So glad I've found this place. My DS-6 will be 7 soon and entering the 2nd gr in the fall. He is currently in a charter school that is NOT working out. They did a psych eval on him end of March and diagnosed him with Asperger's/ADHD. They recommended I get him tested for giftedness so that's why I did. The psychologist who tested him for this disagrees with the AS/ADHD diagnosis by the way. Says that the problems they see in school are common with children of his ability. He has an IEP in place at school that started in May. It's not working. Perhaps because the diagnosis was wrong? Anyhow, long story short we will not be going back to the school in the fall. They want to put him in special ed half the day in another school for kids with behavioral issues. I asked them if he was challenged academically if some of these issues would go away and they said no. They suggest I medicate him. They also told me now that he's been identified as gifted that they don't have anything for him.

So, DS is seeing a psychologist once a week $$$ to work on his high anxiety, anger towards the school, frustration tolerance etc. Now, we are in a position where we have to look for a new school that can accommodate his needs. We're even in touch with an educational consultant who told us to not reveal his IQ to the schools we're interested in because they wouldn't want to deal with a PG child. Sigh. She gave me a list of schools to call that "might" be a good fit for him. All private. $$$ But, since enrollment for the Fall has passed my options are very very limited.

Anyone deal with this? How do I begin to help my DS? I knew he was bright but I didn't expect this. I feel like he's never learned how to learn. He's never been challenged. So, now he has bad habits. He doesn't care for school and I don't blame him. He's had 2 years at 2 different schools with the same problems. The public schools are not equipped to handle a gifted child. His self-esteem took a dip this year as well. He keeps saying he's the worst student ever and that his teacher hates him etc. Poor guy.

Where do I begin? How do you know what type of school is a right fit? How do I help him unlock his potential. How do I help his spirit soar? What do I do if we can't get into any private schools? Home school? That scares me.

Someone who's been there before should answer soon, bit until then here's the recommended reading on an appropriate free education :
http://www.ldonline.org/article/Understanding_the_Differences_Between_IDEA_and_Section_504
And the bottom of this chart suggests simple accomidations to request for when your child has innapropriate behavior problems :
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10446.aspx
Somebody should offer more advice soon.
I just wanted u to know somebody heard you.

Don't let homeschooling scare you. Even if the AS/ADHD diagnoses are correct as well as the gifted ID, don't let it scare you. We have been homeschooling successfully for years with all of these in the mix, plus dysgraphia and other issues. It is so much easier than dealing with schools that don't get it that it isn't even funny. There are incredible resources out there, many of them FREE, and many others relatively cheap, that you can use to help your child learn at a pace and depth that won't being boring and frustrating. Most places have homeschooling groups, museum courses, and clubs that you can use to help your child find interest-based peers, which is likely to be a much better bet than trying to find real peers in an age-based classroom. I would be happy to send you links to resources, if you need them.

That said, an active, curious HG+ child bored to tears and frustrated and in a class with no intellectual peers can look an awful lot like ADHD and Asperger's to people who don't know any better, and an HG or PG kid with these disorders will exhibit much more extreme symptoms than he or she would in a more appropriate environment. In our experience, the first step is to get rid of the boring and frustrating environment and the lack of intellectual peers and see if the problem behaviors and the social difficulties go away. We are fairly certain we have accurate diagnoses with my DS, but even still, when he is in an engaging environment with intellectual peers, like the kids from the Duke TIP program, or the kids from our local summer Shakespeare group, he blends into the crowd to a much greater extent than he does when he is bored and frustrated. A boring, frustrating environment is bad for gifted kids, it is bad for ADHD kids, and it is bad for Asperger's kids. I can't really imagine that it would be good for very many kids at all.

I really hope that you find a solution that works for your family.

I agree. (My DD also homeschools.)

We are currently working with a neurophyschologist who specializes in AS in kids with IQ's over 135. I would highly recommend someone who "gets" these kids, it can make a world of difference. Gifted children with AS present differently than average children with AS, and you really need someone very knowledgable in that areas to help differentiate the two.

Regardless of a diagnosis it sounds like you are doing what is most important, treating the symptoms. What does the current psychologist recommend?

A few more questions that might help brainstorming, are you in a state with gifted laws? What is the status of the IEP? You said it isn't working, can you elaborate? (My DD has an IEP and has received services from our PS through this year.)

[drooling]

Any chance this person is in the southeastern US?

[/drooling]

Thank you all! I appreciate everyones input. I live in CA. I'm just now learning about all this giftedness. So much information to digest.

I'd love those links on homeschooling but his current psychologist is very against it. Hmm...

His IEP seems very cookie cutter. OT once a month, lots of positive reinforcement from teacher (doesn't happen from what DS says), sensory breaks throughout the day, if he is getting upset he can go to the resource room to calm down and he has a one on one aide who just started 2 weeks ago. They do not have a GATE program and they will not accelerate. Like I mentioned they want to put him in special ed at a different school. There are HG magnets here but their admission is based on a lottery.

I admit DS can be difficult but I really believe that he can change given the right tools and being in a more conducive environment. I tell ya though put him in a room of older kids and adults and he's a completely different person!

I'll have to do my research on homeschooling. I just feel bad for DS if we go down that route. He is very social. Loves being around a lot of people. Loves that they have PE at school. I suppose there are ways to supplement all those if I need to. I guess I wish this wasn't so challenging.

Again, thank you everyone for your support!

There's a blue underlined link on the sidebar of this page that says davidson database. That has a lot of articles by professionals. Hoagies.org also has lots of articles by professionals (psychologists, teachers, etc). And of course you've found this forum, great for talking to real people here at the congregation of frustration. There's another forum if you sign up for davidson young scholars. That requires an application process and qualifying test scores.

Here on this forum I have seen people talking other people through the advocacy process every step of the way. It's apparently an ongoing journey. Even if you don't homeschool many parents do an informal supplementation called afterschooling. There's a lot of great stuff going around now. A lot of it is online self- correcting edutainment.

Oh yeah, if you do the DYS application and are accepted I think there's a secure chartroom for the PG kid's to be there with each other.
When the kid's are older there's what they call "talent searches" which sounds a lot like overnight summer camp the colleges host for the gifted kid's (starting as young teenagers). There's the good news. There's a lot of fun stuff and programs to do.

I don't have a one time single answer that will make it all fit nicely. You do have an active, supportive, creative, enthusiastic forum here to help you vent, brainstorm, and celebrate.

I have to wrap my brain around what the educational consultant told you.

She is here in Michigan. We drive and hour and half each way, very willingly. With homeschool we are able to go down to see her during the school day. During the summer months she has patients that come in from all over the world. We are very lucky she accepted my DD as a patient.

She has been a wonderful light for me in what had become a very dark tunnel.

That I don't understand at all, how do you advocate without telling the school? It does not sound like this is a child that would/could "fly under the radar".

Yes, I find this odd too. I can't really see how you could negotiate proper accomodations without the giftedness being taken into account? How can they meet his needs if you aren't telling them what his needs are?



I'm homeschooling too. Rhat's a disclaimer! Mant professionals actually don't understand homeschooling (or giftedness for that matter). There is plenty of evidence that it can and does work.

There are no easy answers here, but keep reading and researching and follow you parental instincts. You are the expert on your child.

Could be because the diagnosis was wrong; could be because the IEP wasn't designed to meet his needs, or (likely) his needs outstrip what the school can fix.

Our DS8 (AS/gifted) has needed intensive outside therapy; he is now flourishing in public school, but it took a lot of time and effort to get that working properly. He had pretty severe handwriting issues, trouble following directions and participating appropriately, lots of behavior problems that resulted from the AS, all of which we remediated at home with additional supports mandated in his IEP at school (and our private therapy team provided lots of support and helped write the IEP, so the whole program made sense).

It became clear to the school along the way that DS needed subject acceleration and gifted placement; those were part of our solution, and he does behave better there (more interesting material, smaller group, highly invested teacher)-- BUT this was not the whole solution for us, nor was it the biggest part of the solution. If your child does have AS, remediate that first and intensively, because that is what makes your and the child's life much easier and allows others to see the giftedness more clearly.


You definitely want to keep a kid with AS/ADHD out of the "emotionally disturbed" type of special ed classroom. But a special ed placement specifically designed for AS can be a good thing at this age, where an AS child is having a hard time grasping the social norms of school; especially if the regular ed classroom isn't offering anything academically, you can choose to spend these early years on social lessons. (We are not sorry we focused intensively on social skills in early elementary: a kid this bright will keep learning academics no matter what, but fixing the social and behavioral issues was a great investment for the long run.)

I would recommend that you go look at the placement they are suggesting, talk to the teachers and the people running that program, and see how instruction is differentiated in that classroom. If there's a high ratio of teachers to students, and it's a calm environment, it might be a good place to build skills for a while, and he may even get more appropriate academic content because content can be more individualized in a small group setting. Don't be freaked out by the special ed label before deciding whether that placement could possibly work; you may miss an opportunity.

That said, special education is not a place, it's a service-- if you can identify services he needs that can be offered in the regular ed environment, that can happen, too, and in fact the school is required by law to place him in the "least restrictive environment."


Is it talk therapy, behavior therapy, what kind? We found that traditional talk therapy will simply not work for AS; behavior therapy, on the other hand, was really substantially helpful. (We did ABA, and found it extremely effective.) Is the psych your son is seeing a specialist in AS/ADHD, or a generalist? We typically go for the most targeted expertise we can get; DS's year doing talk therapy with a general psych was not well spent.


In our experience, private schools may or may not want to deal with high IQ, but will very likely not want a child with behavior issues, unless they are a school that is specifically geared toward those issues.

We spent a lot of time looking to pull our child from public school or move to a different district (escape to anywhere)-- we considered homeschooling, which was not recommended by our private therapists for solid reasons. But we eventually found that our best bet was to stay put, hire an advocate, get the best private therapy we could find, bring our private therapy team and the advocate to school meetings, and work like crazy until we made the public school hospitable to DS's needs. I can't say that we had a lot of fun getting there, but third grade was a dream; he is successful and we're thrilled. Obviously, only you can decide whether it's worth protracted negotiation to keep him in school-- but that's our experience.

HTH,
DeeDee

My very lengthy post just poofed but I would suggest reading Giftedness and Asperger's Syndrome: A New Agenda for Education http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/eric/fact/asperger.pdf (sorry, I cannot get to full reply screen for some reason). Table 2 is very telling about these children. Yes, homeschooling is becoming more popular and recognized for this population than when it was published in 2002, but it is a very good article none the less.

The quote I like best and try to keep in mind for these kids (especially now when my DD is 11) from Losing Our Minds, "It is very hard for highly intelligent-but immature and inexperienced-young people to be patient with others who are on a completely different intellectual plane. Appropriate group interaction is very difficult for highly advanced children under the age of 14-the age at which their experience and maturity begins to get closer to their reasoning."

I will try and come back later and post about our PS experience, or you can search my user name. In our experience advocacy and accomodations will really vary by state, by school district, by principal, and by teacher. Many educators do not understand the nature of gifted with AS in order to provide appropriate interventions, it is a whole different monster than just gifted or just AS.

At the time of my DD's diagnosis I was told that the psychologists were pretty comfortable with it but that there were only 5 psychologists in the country that could differentiate GT and GT/AS in kids with IQ's over 145. I'm not sure what the number is now. This is why I said, treat the symptoms, treat the child, regardless of the diagnosis.

I think that a list of those psychologists would be a great resource...

Thank you again. There are a lot of things to consider here. I'm pouring over all the links and researching everyone's suggestions. Whew! My head is spinning.

I did ask the school 2 weeks ago for the schools they were suggesting for him as they do not have special ed at his current school. They haven't gotten back to me.

Today he had a humiliating experience at school. When he arrived in class the teacher asked him what we were doing there??!!! Huh? Apparently, he was suppose to be suspended today for fighting with another kid but nobody told us. No slip, no phone call, no nothing. So, my DS started crying and amidst the meltdown dropped his homework. The teacher started picking up the homework then perhaps had a change of heart and threw the papers back down on the floor! DH said that this all could have been prevented with a simple note. Then she said very abruptly that she has 23 other kids and asked us what do we want her to do.

So, my DS walks home, head held low, feeling terrible about himself. Meanwhile, we are rushing to my DD Physical therapy appointment (she was 3 months premature).... Sorry, this turned more into a vent. Ahhh... I just want one day of quiet and calm. Is that too much? Lol

Thanks again. I'm really taking everything said here seriously. I'm trying to organize all this information and present it neatly to DH so we can discuss.

Oh my gosh I am flabbergasted! That is horrific. Your poor boy.


Um, Her Job? I realise there are two sides to ever story, but she sounds unable to cope with her duties at best and unbalanced at worst from this version of the story?

I would be letting her know that a) if she wants to suspend your child she needs to actually notify an adult in writing or with a phone call (not a voicemail) and b) half picking up his papers and then throwing them back down is wildly inappropriate behavior for an adult! Then I would be letting the principle know the same, most likely in writing as a formal complaint.

Note: I am assuming that schools in the US can't just suspend a child without making sure an adult is aware of the situation? There must surely be a policy about this? What if the child had just been dropped at the gate and there was no parent to send them home with?