I am hoping you can give me some insight, advice, ideas, etc. A little background. My daughter was always very bright as I like to put it. We started her in Kindergarten a year early at 4yrs. old because we could already see problems coming. Fast forward after four very rough years. The end of last school year we finally had an outside evaluation done. The results were Gifted Aspergers, ADHD tendancies, written expression problems of more than 30 point deviation, and all the common problems related to the Aspergers. We approached the school and were told that they would eventually do an eval but things would go on much the same for now. My daughter begged all summer to be homeschooled so we pulled her and her sisters the beginning of the school year. If in public school as things stood she would be 8yr. and in 4th, the school considers this a grade skip for most applications.
Fast forward, the evaluation is done, although I haven't seen the reports yet and the school is now pushing to put her back in class. I can understand this because of the social aspects of Aspergers. We have never debated that but we aren't going to dismiss her academic needs either. Research shows Aspergers children do better when challenged just like all gifted children. The teacher consultant has twice brought up the option of grade skipping to fifth for the second half of this year. I haven't heard yet what the speech therapist results were either but she has expressed concern that DD be around other kids; we are hoping for services, no matter what the school situation. What might we be looking at with a 9yr old going to the middle school for 6th grade? What have your experiences been? The principal has supposedly said that the group of girls in a particular fifth grade class might be more accepting of my daughter than the group she was in with in 3rd. They are talking 5th because her lowest area, written expression tests at the end of fourth grade by their new tests. I haven't seen those results yet either but know that her testing last year showed her written expression to be 3rd-4th grade and everything else was at least 5.8th to 8th grade. Her SB-IV was in the 140's except for some short term memory and visual-abstact copying.
What questions should I be asking at this meeting? I guess they have decided that she doesn't qualify for special ed.
I don't know about speech but the consultant is talking about a 504? I would think they need to wait for the speech results first but hey, that's just my thinking. Any comments, suggestion, recommendations, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I question if this is a long term solution.
