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Welcome, blueberry!

Appeals processes depend on the local educational authority in your area, as each one has different policies for identifying eligible students. Without knowing your specific LEA, only fairly general thoughts can be offered. (And please don't feel pressure to post any personal information you don't feel comfortable posting.)

But some general thoughts:

LEAs often use criteria such as cognitive screeners/measures (e.g., CogAT), achievement measures (e.g., iReady), grades (probably irrelevant at this grade level) and teacher nominations (often heavily weighted). In your DC's case, the cognitive measures are well above typical GT levels, but the achievement measures will depend on where they have decided to set the cutoff this year--which may not be a fixed number, as sometimes this has to do with the number of children/number of slots in program.

On the CogAT, 132 is +2 SD (98th %ile). It may be that the LEA has decided that students need to meet/exceed the 98th %ile on all measures to qualify, in which case the reading score would be the one measure that does not. Districts make different decisions on these cut scores. They are allowed to do so, as long as the criteria are applied equitably.

You certainly would be within your rights to inquire about the appeal process, and to request additional transparency regarding the selection process. If they use a holistic process (such as one including teacher comments or nominations), this might be met with less openness, mainly to protect the teacher from parent reprisals (which do happen, unfortunately).

Coddling removes the important benefit of students developing "internal locus of control" (or self-efficacy) from the college experience;
students who do not exercise their own ingenuity to solve dilemmas, avoid potentially detrimental situations, and advance their advocacy skills may instead learn a sense of dependence on the system which supported them.

The result may be a college system which is turning out adults who are not resilient, independent, capable, organized, self-reliant producers, contributors, schedulers, planners, leaders, negotiators, and problem solvers who value their self-discipline and ability to prioritize and budget their time, money, and talent, and seek or create opportunities to better themselves, increase their knowledge base through lifelong learning, and help others... but may instead remain stuck in an immature mindest of requiring and being dependent upon constant and continual assistance at others' expense of time, money, and talent.

Hello
I just received my child’s test scores. She just turned 6 and is in Kindergarten. She did the cogat in April. Verbal (139), quantitative (142), nonverbal (154), composite (153). They said the typical scores for identified kids was 132.

She did her iready in the winter and got reading 95 percentile, maths 98 percentile.

Got the letter that she was not in need of AL services. Why?? And can I appeal? How?

Thank you

Hi,
I'm a parent of two gifted kids, and have followed Davidson's resources for many years, as I'm also a school principal and a doctoral student. I'm currently looking for ways to connect to principals, assistant principals, and any school leader who has supervised teachers in the last three years- any state or US territory, any type of school, any grade levels, for an anonymous survey around student-centered, gifted, and general education practices.

If you know anyone? The link is here: https://surveyuccs.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5thBfGDD8oNnkTs

-Thanks.
S. Nikki Myers
University of Colorado Colorado Springs

This is wonderful news! I am so pleased to hear that he has had happy years in middle school, and has things to look forward to in high school. It sounds like he has really blossomed in multiple ways, and also found his people socially.

Since it’s been a few years, I thought I’d come back with an update:

My son just finished middle school. He was subject accelerated in math and science in 6th grade and has several high school credits on his transcript already. He was on the honor roll every year in middle school and finished 8th grade with above a 4.0 gpa. Even though writing is still a relative weakness for him, he has improved tremendously with intervention and accommodations. He’s had no behavior problems since he was in elementary, and he even started participating in clubs, sports and team activities. His current passions are DnD, swimming, violin/viola, video games, chess and riding his bike. He and his friends meet once a week to play DnD and other board games, and he’s planning on joining the high school chess club next year.

I just wanted to give an update to show how much everyone’s advice here helped. He has made tremendous progress since 3rd grade and I don’t know how to thank everyone who helped us when we were struggling with the school district.

Nice to hear from you again, perse! And also good to hear that your older one eventually did get what he needed in school.

As to #2: Her Lexile is indeed quite high for her age. It's also not crazy for a GT kiddo, hyperlexic or no. That's about where one of ours was at that age--reaching what Metametrics would consider college-ready around third or fourth grade. And that's starting from simple decodables just after the fourth birthday. The Lexile is about where the median entering-7th grader was in the MetaMetrics studies. the iReady score is about where the median entering-8th grader was in the relevant studies. So they match up reasonably well, all things considered. (iReady is more focused on decoding at this age, and Lexiles are about comprehension.)

And math being only a grade or two ahead is likely not only a function of the differential impact of instruction on math (vs reading, which is gated in a fluent decoder mainly by vocabulary and socio-cultural context), but also on the ceiling of the grade two tests. On top of that, there are differences between percentiles (ordinal performance versus age-peers) and grade-level expectations. Consider that the majority (69%) of USA fourth graders read below grade-level on the 2024 NAEP. Most programmatic standardized testing scores reported to parents are taken from tests designed to identify at-risk learners, so the spread below grade-level also is quite a bit more detailed than that above.

Regarding advocacy: If this is the same district, you have the advantage this time of your older child's experience. (I'm one of a sibling group of GT learners, and the younger sibs definitely benefited from parental advocacy for the older sibs.) (And btw, it actually speaks well of your district's commitment to at-risk learners that they are using Fundations as their tier 1 reading curriculum. It's relatively expensive, and labor-intensive training teachers, but it's also highly effective at catching and remediating readers at-risk of dyslexia early, when implemented correctly. This also suggests your district may have some resources to work with...) And on the advocacy front for Fundations, it does include unit assessments at the higher levels (grade 4 & 5), which might be one way to demonstrate to the district that she can move on from it.

And if it's a different district, then you can talk wistfully about what a struggle it was to get the past districts to support your son, and how happy you are to be working with this one instead, since they are so much more student-centered.

For our own children, we haven't had to deal with much of this, as we've homeschooled most of K-12. I have worked in schools for longer than I care to think about, though, and can say a few things, in no particular order:

1. Having a key school staff member as an ally is extremely helpful.
2. Come prepared with win-win solutions-- these respect teachers' time and expertise, and are also presented as strategies that will help them display their own strengths better.
3. If the conversation starts to slide toward how this may affect other students, respecfully but firmly re-focus the conversation on your child.
4. Consider and prioritize the functions and needs that are most impactful for your child, and be willing to compromise on lower-priority items as an act of good faith collaboration.

indigo has a rather comprehensive roundup of crowd-sourced advocacy tips from over the years. Search for "advocacy roundup" and I think it should come up. I know there are links connected to the "advocacy as a non-newtonian fluid" thread.

As it happens, the scoring program(s) that nearly everyone uses for the WISC-V (including in the UK) generates a GAI automatically along with the FSIQ. All of the subtests necessary for the GAI are included in the FSIQ, so no additional testing or even table-lookups are needed (since, unless the psych is in the tiny minority of professionals still hand-scoring, the publisher's software will have done all the work already). Formally, there are not VECI, EFI, EGAI or extended index scores for the UK norms, so those would have to be derived from US norms and interpreted with caution.

But I understand why she does not want to report an FSIQ, as her professional opinion is that it is not a good representation of your child's overall cognitive ability. (In those circumstances, I typically include it in the document somewhere for reference, asterisked, but deemphasize it in my analysis.)

With regard to the GAI, it may be that the spread across just those five subtests is also large enough that she does not judge it to be a good representation of overall cognition. You report that four of the five primary indices were in the Extremely High range. That is not incompatible with a large magnitude of intrasubtest scatter. As a back-of-the-napkin example, consider that a score in the EH range can result from two scaled scores of 16 in the same index. But what actually generates the index score is the sum of the two subtests. So instead of 16, 16, they could have been 13, 19, which is a pretty significant difference. Many evaluators would consider the resulting index score to be a poor representation of the domain, and choose not to report it.

Your child also has a marked relative weakness in processing speed, which may be motor-based, or may be cognitive-based. Or both. Consider that even the GAI includes two timed subtests, which means it can be subject to score-lowering effects in a child with significantly discrepant speed. Consequently, the only index-level score that may not be affected by his known area of weakness is the VCI, and possibly WMI, depending on how weak his fine-motor efficiency is.

Bottom line: there may well be an entirely legitimate professional reason that the evaluator, in her clinical judgement, does not choose to report a composite score (either the FSIQ or the GAI). Have you identiifed a key advocacy use for a formal composite number? If you have, you might try leading with that in your communications with the psych, possibly wrapped in, "I know this may not be the best indicator of his real ability, but it's what the (school, program, etc.) demands in order for him to access this opportunity". It may also be that some resources would respond to presenting the relevant primary index scores for focused advancement.

Was the testing done through the school? If so, there may be different rules ...

... but at least in the US, when you pay to have a private EP run testing, you typically receive at least:

- the scaled score and percentile rank for each subtest
- the composite score and percentile rank for the primary indices (VCI, VSI, FRI, WMI, PSI) and FSIQ

Spikiness and differences of 2-3 SD's (standard deviations) or more between relatively high and relatively low on the WISC-V is not uncommon with highly gifted, profoundly gifted, or twice-exceptional children (some may even say that score profile is in the majority among these populations) ... so I wonder how much experience with those kinds of populations, your EP has had?

In any case, if she has scaled scores for all of the subtests, she can calculate an FSIQ. Whether she is doing it electronically via Q-Global or looking up tables in the Technical Manual, there is nothing about the range of subtest scores that prevents an FSIQ from being calculated. She is correct that the wider the spread among the subtests the less reliable the FSIQ is considered to be. But she has already provided you with that expert overlay.

On a related note, be aware that schools have wide discretion on how they want to identify giftedness. If a school wants to stick to FSIQ and not use other indices such as GAI or EGAI, that is their call (not saying it's the right call, just saying it's their call and they don't have to change it.)

Here is a GREAT use of AI, in my opinion: Ray Ban Meta Glasses (for the blind)!
Useful for the blind and also for their care givers, the glasses respond to voice commands. They have a tiny camera in the frame and can report back to the wearer, answering their questions.

A demonstration during a TV ad includes: "Which is the blue shirt?" 
This website includes the TV ad I saw: 
https://lighthouseguild.org/news/fr...sses-for-every-blind-veteran-in-america/

https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/ray-ban-meta-ai-glasses