my special needs son is gifted and i had no idea
My son is 12 and he is autistic (level 2). He’s semi-verbal, and we’ve tried to use an AAC or ASL, but he doesn’t show much interest in it. Which is fine with me, he uses communication cards and seems pretty happy with that, and thats all that really matters to us. He’s in the special education classes at his school and the teacher seemed good if not somewhat overworked.
When we first put him in school, they did cognitive tests, and they went over some stuff with us and explained he had a low IQ, they went over the areas he struggled in the most, etc. He’s also in some therapies (speech and occupational) and they said the same thing. Cool, he’s a great kid, it’s good to know his limits and how we can help him.
He can read and write, me and my wife read to him a lot when he was younger and worked hard to teach him. Teacher says he’s reading at a 2nd grade level, all his previous teachers have said he’s similarly placed. We get him books for around that level, we don’t usually see him read them but whatever, not all kids like to read anyways, no big deal.
So he’s really likes to write in notebooks, we give him a lot, he’s filled up maybe 30? Me and my wife never go through them because he’s a preteen he deserves some privacy, even if he’s different I think that should still be given to him. And if he wants to show us something, he will, usually tearing out a page and handing it to us. Typically those are asking for things: food, something on the tv, et; something thats not on a communication card that he doesn’t feel capable of verbalizing.
Well, a few weeks ago, he gives us a note asking for “demons”. And me and my wife looked at each other pretty confused. Uh what?? So we tell him we don’t understand what he means. He gets a little distressed, but then he walks into his room and we follow, and he goes under his bed and grabs a book. It’s a library book, from the school, for a book called “Humiliated and Insulted” and so now me and my wife are VERY confused and honestly concerned. He opens the book and flips to the back and there’s a little ad for a book by the same author.
We are relieved like ok cool, he’s reading books and liking them, thats great. We wanted to check obviously if it was appropriate for a preteen (given the titles we were sort of concerned), so we looked them up. And we see it’s by the same author that wrote Crime and Punishment (which i had to read in junior year of high school), and that they seem to be really difficult books to read. And from what I remembered about Crime and Punishment, it was insanely confusing.
So we are thinking alright he probably isn’t really understanding it, but we want to cultivate this and get him things he wants, so of course we’ll get him the other book he wants. But then we are like wait where did he get this book? He says the library at school, and he points under his bed, where there are about 20 other library books. Which there are definitely limits on so we realize he stole them.
Not great. We tell him thats not allowed, and he needs to ask for them, etc. and it’s not usually like him to steal things so we are a little worried. But he tells us his teacher won’t let him check any books out. We flip through the other books and see he has annotated them. And we realize he understand them, that he’s not just idk flipping through the pages but he is underlining stuff about figurative language and tone and pacing. Which is definitely above a 2nd grade level. Me and my wife are totally shocked, we had no idea he was capable of this.
So we went into rhe school, had a meeting with his teacher. And she says that he isn’t allowed to check out books that ‘aren’t on his reading level’, and when we explain that we think he might be ahead of where they placed him, she says thats not possible. Not possible?? Really?
Things escalate, we have this whole meeting with people from the county. And it is explained to us that he’s low IQ, thats impossible for him to be doing these things, that it’s just wishful thinking. They pull up the transcript from his reading test. Transcript, because the fucking tests were done verbally. They had him read passages and they verbally asked questions that he was supposed to verbally respond to. Yeah no shit he didn’t do well he doesnt talk much. Me and my wife are very mad it was done this way when it’s clearly documented he has issues with verbal communication. How hard would it be to have a written test??
They tell us that it’s the county standard to do the tests like this and there’s nothing they can do. WTF? My wife asks if his IQ test was done the same way; they pull up rhe documentation and turns out most of it (besides a part where he moved around blocks) was verbal. They say verbal intelligence is a large component of IQ, and it’s fine he had to verbally say the answer option because “he can talk”.
Me and my wife barely keep it together because holy shit this whole time theres been some serious mismanagement. We’ve been told for years that his IQ is low, he’s cognitively impaired, that he won’t be past a kindergarten level. And we believed it, which is defiantly a big part our fault. It’s just that typically he has no interested in reading or doing anything like that around us, and we didn’t want to force him, he should be able to have some choice on what he does. But clearly we just totally missed some things, we feel awful.
We had a private IQ test done, and they were totally cool with nothing being done verbally, that they handle things like this all the time. His score was 121; his reading score was in the 99th percentile. I just feel so horrible, we failed him, he had this in him the whole time and we missed it. We were giving him 2nd grade books and he was bored out of his mind reading them, not uninterested like we thought. This whole situation has gone on long enough that school is out and the school is refusing to accept the new cognitive tests until his next IEP evaluation (next year).
I’ve been talking to his therapists but they didn’t know either. My wife and I are seriously considering switching his school (we can afford private school). We’ve been getting him all the books he asks for, trying to see what he likes. He likes a lot of russian literature and it’s just so crazy we had no idea. We’ve been taking him to barnes and noble, letting him get whatever books he wants. He doesn’t like to talk with us about it, or even be seen reading. We arent sure if that’s because maybe he thought he had to hide this or if he just wants to keep it personal. We just want what’s best for him, but obviously we fucked up badly.
Any advice? On any front, really. Is private school the move here? And how can we possibly make up for missing all this? And, hell, even some book recommendations.