Well, after 3 days and many hours of testing (which still isn't complete, seems DS is getting too many questions right) I learned that they are actually doing IQ testing. I hadn't even realized they were doing the WISC until the second day of testing and was really surprised because at the last district I had to fight so hard for IQ testing and they didn't do more than the bare minimum anyway. This lady even did the optional subtests. I'm not sure I wanted another test done and if we had decided to retest I would have preferred to wait until 8, but I guess I can't complain too much. I do wish they had discussed it with me first, I thought we were just testing reading, writing, and comprehension, my areas of concern (turns out we are not going to be testing any of them).
I was able to talk to the psych about her impressions so far. She said she can't tell yet if his score will be in the gifted range, but she kept telling me he was going to the end on the various sections, which I would think would give some idea of whether he will meet the cutoff or not. And when I specifically asked if she thought he would qualify for the gifted program, she said that it's not just based on IQ and listed a bunch of stuff including leadership skills, social/emotional skills, creative output, and also academic levels (flashback to last horrible school experience). I mentioned that I had provided his MAP scores which put him in the 99th %ile and she asked me if that was by district norms and I said no, national norms (DS is private school, so there are no %iles on the report, I looked them up online). She said that this is a high performing district and he may not qualify academically with his scores.
She then let me know that there was no way they would find a disability of any sort and they aren't even going to test for any. She said he would have to be significantly behind on reading or writing to even consider assessment/disability and he is significantly ahead on everything. She also said that they can only test him on grade level material, so if fluency is fine on 1st grade text then there is no disability, even if fluency is poor on more cognitively appropriate text. So now I'm feeling pretty bad about putting DS through all of this testing and having him miss 2 days of school because it seems the the only thing that might come of this is possible qualification for the district gifted program in case we can't afford private next year. And even that seems iffy because if you apply a bunch of extra criteria, especially things like creative output, DS isn't looking so good (although his art teacher tells me he is extremely gifted in art... which is hard for me to believe!) Plus the tester doesn't even seem confident DS will come up as gifted on the WISC despite saying he has done amazingly well on the test and mentioning a few times he did all of the items available on certain subtests.
So, am I out of options? Should I save up and pursue private testing? Should I fight the district if they deny DS from gifted programming based on emotional immaturity or lack of creative output? If he were not allowed into the gifted program there is no way he could go to public school. After a year at the private gifted school DS has further widened the gap between himself and agemates and I can't see him being happy at all in a typical classroom. He actually already complains his current school moves too slow and the math is too easy. Plus some of his favorite classes are Mandarin, Projects, and Coding, none of which will be offered at that public school. I guess I have to really hope for a good result with our financial aid application
