Your experience with advocating for your accelerated learner

[AChimes]

I would love to hear your experiences - how have you advocated to educators to convince them to challenge your accelerated child at school?  Were you successful or not, and what did you end up doing to resolve the situation?  What are your tips for successful advocacy?  Thank you in advance.  

 

 

[Jackie]

This is a homeschooling board. While some of us have experiences with our kids in traditional school environments, those who feel they have successfully advocated for accommodations in school settings are probably a little sparse here. You might want to try asking this on the Davidson forums, where there are a lot of parents with gifted kids in more traditional school settings.

My only experience that is even close is in the homeschool charter’s (optional) onsite classes. When the classes offered at my kid’s age level were a total flop for one time slot last year, we re-asked a teacher who had previously said no to acceleration to allow a two week trial. She did, it went well, and she recommended that my kid stay with the older kids for at least some classes this next year. Because the teachers are now familiar with DD, the other teacher we asked to allow her to bump up this next year also said yes. But this is a fairly informal system, in a very small school. Also worth noting that the classes are still academically well below where she is working, even with the bump. The bump simply serves to make the content not as torturous while she has fun socializing with other kids.

[gstharr]

My 13 y.o is very advanced., But, I have not requested any acceleration at school. I'm waiting until the 9th grade. But, if that is your goal, Davidson Gifted Forum is the better board for that discussion.  It is full of parents trying to place their 1st and 2nd graders into the 5th grade, because little Johnny knows his multiplication facts.    I find it curious though that there is no later discussion of what happened to those kids when they  became 10 y.o. high school students. 

[Cake and Pi]

My DS#2 is mildly/moderately accelerated and in public school.  He started PS at the beginning of 2nd grade after being homeschooled.  He was registered as a 1st grader when we went to enroll him because we held him back due to perceived maturity issues and him having a cusp birthday (b-day is a few days before our district's October cut-off).  Since by age he *could* technically have been a 2nd grader, the school agreed to enrolling him as such.  

The school was set up into different classrooms for each subject, so the students normally moved around from period to period.  His math teacher taught both 2nd and 3rd grade math and after giving him a pretest at the beginning of the year just on her own decided to teach him with the 3rd graders, but he was still bored in math and he essentially became a teacher's helper.

He has stealth dyslexia and ADHD, but we didn't know that at the time.  We knew *something* was up, and I felt strongly that he needed a 504 in order to thrive.  We asked the school if they would test him for learning disabilities, which turned into assessing for an IEP.  He didn't qualify for one, as I already knew he wouldn't, but it did bring to the school's attention how advanced he was in math.  Ultimately, we had to get outside testing in order to get the diagnoses needed to secure a 504 plan.

With his math teacher, the school psychologist, and I all saying that he needed further acceleration in math, the administration reluctantly agreed to move him into a combined 4th-5th grade classroom for math.  It took about three months of me advocating, emailing, contacting the district's GT department, and a couple of meetings with the principal.

For 3rd grade, we applied and he was accepted into one of our district's gifted magnet schools.  The program includes one whole grade content acceleration while keeping the same grade designation.  So last year at 7-8yo he did 4th grade curriculum as a GT 3rd grader, except for math, for which he traveled to a 5th grade classroom.  This school has the traditional one-room-per-grade set up, so moving to another classroom for math wasn't as easy to orchestrate as the year before.  However, there were two other boys in his class with the same math acceleration, and the school made it work.  He's also not the youngest in his class because other students have grade skipped.  This school was significantly easier to work with and advocate within than the old school.

That's what we've done so far.  All I can do now is hope that this GT elementary school continues to be an excellent fit and the GT middle school, when he gets there, is also easy to work with.