Reply to Emotional disability and highly gifted, age 6...what next?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Has anyone had an HG kid in the ED program at MCPS?

DD with ADHD-combined and anxiety is in K in MCPS and has had a rough year behaviorally. We’re working through some medication options with child psychiatrist but haven’t quite found the right mix – we thought we had, but then it stopped working as well.

Long story short, we decided in January to get private psychoeducational testing – besides confirming the ADHD and anxiety, it found hints of autism (but not enough for diagnosis) and a highly gifted IQ, which may explain her being potentially bored at school and thus getting into trouble, plus slow processing speeds. The school has tried a number of things to address the behaviors (pulling other girls' hair twice since October, pushing chairs, the occasional giant tantrum over sharing, outbursts in class, etc.), to little avail. She is basically fine at home. We saw similar stuff in preschool but not this bad.

The first week in May, we’re meeting with her IEP team to hash out what to do for 1st grade. Placement in an ED program is one possibility. Also not sure if they’d consider putting her in the Asperger’s program even though she’s not diagnosed as such. But there’s concerns she would be bored and not engaged academically. Plus she sometimes sees other kids misbehaving and decides to do so herself. We can’t afford private.

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OP, the curriculum used by the ED and Asperger's programs are identical to the one used in regular mainstream classrooms. Your child would have many of her classes in those mainstream classes anyway. Who is concerned she might be bored and not engaged academically? You or the school? We have a child with ADHD and anxiety who had a horrible time in K behaviorally and who has a sky high IQ. He would mostly get himself into trouble during the times when he had nothing to do. NO ONE ever brought up the idea of him being bored as the cause because that is just about the most lame excuse you could have. Yes, he was bored. Many, if not all, of his classmates were also bored. He had meltdowns. They did not or at least most of them did not. We focused all our therapies on emotional regulation and those meltdowns went away. I know it's comforting to think of your child as 2E and not just SN and that focusing on the highly gifted part must make you feel better as a mom but take it from someone who has been through this that you need to address her weaknesses right now if you want her to be in a regular school. The giftedness will not go away and you can enrich or after school or whatever you want to do for as long as she lives with you, but she has to get the pushing and pulling and giant tantrums under control now while she's still young. I do know there are some really profoundly gifted kids who really can't succeed in a normal classroom no matter what and you may have one of those kids but if you do you should really home school.[/quote]

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