Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Appealing School's Decision on Gifted Placement?

Does anyone have experience appealing their school's decision on whether their child qualifies for the gifted program? We're in Washington State, if that makes a difference. Here's our situation:

The full day gifted program in our district starts in 3rd grade, so all 2nd graders take the CoGAT & Stanford. My daughter happens to be AD/HD as well, and often has difficulty beginning projects and/or staying on task, yet she still managed to score in the 97th/98th percentile on most sections of the tests (nothing below 96th). However, she needed to score 98th/99th percentile to get into the full day program. We had her privately tested, and she was clearly in the high 99th percentile.

Now there was also a 3rd test that our district uses to measure creativity for their gifted programs and students need to get a stanine score of 8 or 9. My daughter got a 5. I was able to take a look at her test after it was scored, and it was definitely not AD/HD friendly. I can't seem to find any other districts that use it--it's called the "Structure of Intellect", and it's a very short test, just 3 5-minute sections. They had to solve some math puzzles, draw as many tiny pictures as they could and then write a paragraph about one of the pictures.

So I'm trying to get my arguments together. Her AD/HD affects her test taking, but in optimum conditions, she's clearly 99th percentile. The third test was very AD/HD unfriendly, and if I'd known what it entailed in advance, I would have pushed for accomodations. The pull-out enrichment program which she did qualify for would be a poor fit because she'd still be stuck with grade-level work the rest of the time.

I'm really trying not to antagonize the powers that be, but I'm so afraid that they may just toss all appeals in the trash can without seriously considering them. Do people ever appeal successfully? Does anyone have any tips?

The reason I'm posting is to comment on the creativity test - it seems unusual to test for that from the outset for a gt program.

Our county definitely assesses the kids as they are moving through the program on things like creativity but this is something they have on their plate to work with the kids on, not one of the factors in eligibility.
They don't really expect the kids to be exhibiting massive amounts of creativity from the get go - after a few years in regular school a lot of this has been shut down for kids anyway! This will vary from child to child, but the idea is, they gather the children with loads of intellectual potential and bring them out of their creative shells if need be.

Did you find out which 'form' of this test they used?

http://portal.wpspublish.com/portal/page?_pageid=53,69325&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

I don't know about Washington State, but I think they would let you re-test with accomodations. The IQ tests can generally be broken down into smaller chunks over the course of days instead of taken all at once.

The issue may be letting her re-test before a year is up, since psychologists worry about a child becoming accustomed to the test and scoring higher because of it.

Trillium!!!! THe Structure of Intellect test kept my son out of our gifted program as well!!! I found no other district using the test. You're correct. It was three 5-minute tests. DS, then in 2nd grade, did score very/high gifted in math on that subtest but average on their other 2 subtests of creativity so he was denied entrance.

My suggestion would be to be sure you know what you are fighting for. Some programs may not be a good fit for your DD and not worth the fight. I see yours is a full-day gifted program so it may very well be worth a good fight. Ours was a pull-out program while having some good projects, had a huge research project to be done and worth most of the grade. All of this is done on the student's own time and student still has to complete all classwork which is not differentiated. So in my view, it wasn't worth fighting even though I had WISCIV scores etc. I am now HSing so it was a mute point anyhow.

But I know a friend who did fight and get her son into the program and she didn't even have any outside scores.

Can the psych who administered the WISCIV write a letter saying that DD needs to be in this program and how it would benefit her?

The ADHD diagnosis should get her testing accommodations. The CogAT is *not* ADHD friendly, as getting a good score depends not only on knowing the right answers, but also on speed. It also has a low ceiling, so if she was tested at grade level, just a few silly mistakes will knock down the percentile rank considerably. If she doesn't already have testing accommodations with a 504 or IEP, I would work on getting those in place ASAP and then insist on a retest. It should be untimed and at least one level up, preferably two.