Comments on another thread have me thinking about the gifted IEP we're struggling over for my 9 year old daughter. The school district's approach at elementary level is to offer only classroom differentiation; last year's gifted IEP was never implemented by the classroom teacher (i.e. none of the fairly vague goals for differentiated Language Arts, including an independent research project, were ever initiated, and we never received the end-of-year summary of differentiation activities that we were promised). So we've been determined that this year we'll have a specific plan that we can monitor over the course of the year. But the school librarian, who's in charge of IEP development, is resistant to including anything specific and says that it's "not what IEPs are for". She's also turned down our request for a reading assessment to get baseline data (our psycho-ed assessment is two years old--at that point our daughter read at a Grade 11 level at age 7). I'm frustrated, and contemplating the lovely private school down the street with some longing. Should I just give up on trying to wring an individualized approach out of an underfunded system? Or do I persevere and insist on a SMART IEP?
