UPDATE

We met with DD"s psych today. She said that she had spoken to the SW from scary school #2. She let them know that any school where DD is placed will need to have an open door policy and be completely transparent about their program. Psych tried to explain how damaging her prior school experiences had been. After we filled her in on exactly how our intake interview went she was completely appalled and told us to remove them from consideration. She will now likely have to engage in some damage control with DD after just that brief experience.

We laid out the pros and cons of both the 2E school and the (somewhat) local spec ed school. I asked her about my thinking that the next year really needs to focus on rehabilitating the LD issues and working on getting DD independent in some form of writing. She agreed. While the 2E school is the obvious best choice academically all the problems related to uprooting DD make it less inviting.

So the decision looks like we will give the spec ed school a try. We are not - in our minds anyway - committing for the whole year. We will do everything we can to set up a situation where DD can be successful but if it becomes clear that it is not meeting her needs in any way we will immediately pull the plug and pursue the 2E school. Assuming they still have a spot for her we would then be able to do the separation with total confidence that we did everything possible to keep her home. I think that will make a difference.

So crossing our fingers that we will be moving on to a better situation. Crossing many more body parts hoping that a year from today DD is independent reading and writing and we have a handle of the math issues so that we can better evaluate what she needs moving forward. The insights of everyone here have been very helpful - thank you. Knowing that many of you only started leading with the giftedness in late 4th -5th grade has taken some of the pressure off. The idea of the pressure being placed on her ability to perform in order for the family to reunite added an exceptional extra perspective to the idea of separating.

Now hopefully onto healing and moving forward...