As painful as this sounds, at DD7's school every classroom has one or two kids that are in the room half-day with a dedicated para. These kids sometimes can do some of the work but DD complains that their artwork always comes out best because the para does it for them. Last year's special ed kid was nonverbal. Honestly, I would be disturbed by a high achieving/gifted magnet that did take these kids; the benefit of having them in the room at all seems to be purely to help them learn to mix socially in a mainstreamed society, and help the other kids react normally to severely disabled persons.
In the autism world, we have a maxim: "presume competence." That is, you can't always tell on first glance or even a casual acquaintance what a person can do or understand. I'd say it's extra true for children.
There exist, for example, gifted nonverbal autistics. Humans are uneven: lacking one particular skill or capacity does not mean there are no other skills or capacities, even really advanced ones, right there in the same person.
Without other information, I'd choose to believe that the school folks have decided that nonverbal child is getting something real out of their experience in that classroom (because otherwise they wouldn't "inconvenience" the teacher by placing the child there). I would certainly not presume incompetence.
This matters to me because presuming incompetence is often hurtful to people.
