ADHD AND GATE

My son is GT/ADD/LD (dyslexia and apraxia) and has been in a Gifted Center for 4 years, starting with the 3rd grade. He very much needed an enriched environment. I was assured by the public school that he would be able to get the special accommodations he needed. For the most part that was true until the 6th grade. He is finishing the 6th grade now. It’s been impossible to keep the Special Ed services on track with the IEP this year. His teacher believes that he can make his disabilities go away through the sheer force of his intellect. She keeps saying, “but he is so bright, why can’t he…?” I finally took a lot of it over because I couldn’t get the teacher’s belief or Special Ed’s support, and holding out for it meant that my son wasn’t getting the support he needed.

Speech in a public school has been poor. He did very well with a private speech therapist at a local hospital who specialized in pediatric speech. She focused on strengthening muscles and making him aware of the sensory input necessary for sounds he was having trouble with. She answered his questions about how and where various sounds were made and where his tongue should be, etc. They practiced conversational speech including body language, inflection and intonation. In contrast, the school’s therapist handed him a list of words with sounds he couldn’t say and made him repeat that same list of words over and over, as if he could say it differently/correctly if he just did it long enough. The school therapist didn’t show up half the time and had him in a group all working on different sounds. I told the school therapist that I wanted her to shift her focus to helping him make oral presentations and manage conversational speech. She agreed that was an appropriate focus, but has yet to start, I’ve been his speech support this year.

The Assisted Technology people were great through the 5th grade. In the 6th grade, his vocabulary and assignments outstripped the hardware and software for kids his age. Basically if it wasn’t an Alpha Smart it was out of their league and he was on his own. My son and I found a good reference for Word and used his assignments as a springboard to learn useful features and shortcuts.

Special Ed is geared to a slower paced learner, and it’s hard for them to understand that a fast paced learner can have the same issues. Gifted and Special Ed can work together, but I’ve had to be vigilant and heavily involved to make it work. It’s really hard for people, even educators, to understand that GT/ADD/LD exists and be able to work with it. I’m not sure I would’ve really understood it had it not been for my son. It is hard to explain how someone can be so brilliant to be able to casually converse on the physics of matter vs. anti-matter and yet need a card with the alphabet to know if N is before S. It is mind boggling, but it’s true.

I wouldn’t discourage you from trying the gifted environment for your son. We had 3 years where Special Ed support was of value, and I was always able to pick up the slack for what was missing. My son has been successful in spite of iffy and sporadic Special Ed support, but he would’ve been bored silly without the enriched environment and likely would’ve zoned out completely in regular ed. I think that would’ve been worse than inconsistent support.

Good luck to you and your son.

Be very thankful that your district is willing to accept that your child is GT/LD since most districts feel that these children do exist but are better served in the regular ed environment.

If you see shortcomings, do your best to fill in the blanks or address it with the school. Your child can only benefit from being “identified” as gifted since many children feel stigmatized later from being “identified” with an LD.

My first thought when my son was diagnosed GT/ADD/LD in the first grade was that his giftedness was a waste because of ADD and the LDs. His school prinicipal told me not to write off his giftededness when he became eligible for consideration for gifted placement at the end of the second grade, that the school could handle the GT/ADD/LD combination.

Even so, I’ve had to stay heavily involved every step of the way and be an active presence. Every year I have to educate his new GT teacher about his LDs and what’s in the IEP, only to have them look at me as if I’m crazy. They always think my son can manage without the accommodations in the IEP because they are such good teachers and he is so smart, and every year we lose the first two months until his teacher has no choice but to concede the accommodations are there for the reason stated. Ususally I have to do a refresher course several times during the year when the teacher “forgets” or doesn’t realize that the disability can have more than one affect, e.g. if a child has motor issues affecting writing, those same motor issues affect the ability to draw.