Polarbear gave you great advice to first call your school, and what to say; the process may be easy. If you have not done this yet, do this NOW. As a follow-up or next step, you may wish to e-mail your school.
IMO, you want the scores (or at least to have requested the scores and received a reply which indicates the score retrieval is in the works) BEFORE a meeting.
A meeting is probably NOT the best format to request the scores, if other options exist.
Other advice:
- Remember that school districts can vary considerably. Some are more transparent, compliant with the law, empowering toward students and families, and easy to work with. Others are more insular, less compliant with the law, and more inclined to dis-empower students and parents (especially gifted children and their parents when schools may be incubators of policies for equal outcomes)... although they may be very pleasant to your face, they may deflect, veer off-track, fail to follow-through, not return phone calls or e-mails, miss deadlines, provide only non-responsive replies (replies which do not provide the requested information), engage in divide-and-conquer techniques (attempt to pit family members against each other by falsely reporting or taking out of context or perspective that one did not have the same goal as another... for example, if 5 solutions are under consideration and ranked, child and parents may all agree on the top two but may have rated the top two differently... while this is substantial agreement, a district may saw away at this for years as a disagreement among family members), etc, and generally not hold themselves accountable.
- I supplied you with source documents for information which you requested, so that you understand that you are entitled to the information which you are seeking. This is to boost your confidence: Although inexperienced, you do need not be naive or overly dependent on what the school says, with no other source of information to potentially counter with, if needed. However this is not meant to suggest that you ought to quickly escalate matters. Once escalated, it is difficult if not impossible to go back to making simple requests.
- Document, document, document. You may need or benefit from having accurate records, for any future educational advocacy.
- Arrange everything into an advocacy ring-binder for easy ongoing reference.
- Highlight the important parts in the printed articles. This would generally be the points mentioned/quoted/discussed in the posts on this forum. If you don't highlight these points, they may be missed when the article is read/skimmed.
- Did you read the links at
this post, including crowd-sourced meeting prep?
I hope this is the case. I am anticipating some resistance because on the website it says "Proficiency Based Testing results will only be reported as “Pass” or “Not Pass”.
One effective approach or strategy may be to ask, "Can you help me understand...?", as this is generally seen as non-confrontational. For example, depending upon the conversation occurring...
- "Can you help me understand where the actual scores exist?"
- "Can you help me understand whether the testing company has the scores?"
- "Can you help me understand how the district believes it is compliant in withholding the scores when the FERPA definition of "educational records" says...."
- etc...
Thanks for sharing. This may help the school have confidence in supporting your son's acceleration and may also help future children/families facing this decision.