Urgent: Smart kid in crisis: tests show high IQ, low WMI- what can be done to help?

<p>Hi everyone,
I thought I would give an update now that all the college decisions are in!
First of all, I want to thank the CC community again for all your help and support. It was a tough road and you all helped a lot.
Way back in sophomore year, before things got really bad for her, she visited Mount Holyoke College and fell in love with it. After her ADD was diagnosed and she was learning techniques and coping mechanisms, her ADD coach suggested she find one future goal to keep in mind when things got tough. For her, it was going to Mount Holyoke.
Despite her wrecked GPA, she applied to some very selective colleges. Given our financial situation and her adamant desire to ONLY attend a college that she felt was filled with REALLY passionate, engaged, intellectually curious peers, she didn’t really have any safeties on her list. We’ve been worried for 6 months that she might not get in anywhere. But results are in!</p>

<p>ACCEPTED
Mount Holyoke College (!!!)
Bard College
Hampshire College</p>

<p>WAITLISTED
Wellesley College (she was surprised and will definitely stay on the waitlist. She was super inspired by her visit there…)</p>

<p>REJECTED
Smith
Skidmore (she didn’t care about that one at all since it was below all the women’s colleges in her list)</p>

<p>She worked really hard to get to where she is. I am SO proud of her!
:)</p>

<p>Hi staceyneil – I’m a longtime lurker and wanted to let you know that I registered just so I could congratulate you and your daughter with my first post on CC! When I read your first post on this thread I felt like I must have written it in my sleep because my daughter and I have a very similar story/journey so I feel like I know to some extent the challenges that you and your daughter have experienced and what an incredible thing she has accomplished. Strangely enough I was just reading about how beneficial single sex colleges are for women so Mt. Holyoke is really a wonderful choice. Anyway – long story short – congratulations and very best of luck to you and your daughter – please let her know what an inspiration she is!</p>

<p>Thank you so much for your kind words!</p>

<p>That’s wonderful news @staceyneil. It’s great to hear about students that are able to turn this around. Please repost when your daughter makes her decision.</p>

<p>@staceyneil, congratulations! I hope your daughter loves MHC. Please continue to post. As an adult, her relationship is now with the school and help may be harder to give from home. Good luck to her in her new trajectory. For others, there is support in the law that a discrepancy of more than 1-1/2 SD between ability and performance or between subscore and total score is indicative of a LD. This would be 21 points. I don’t recall the IDEA USC reference, but sometimes knowing that it exists is at least a starting point to getting it turned into an IEP, right? So if full scale is 133-137 and verbal subscore is 116-120, there is a 21 point difference. Kind of like a ‘B’ student turing in ‘D’ papers- can be very frustrating and cause him/her to really beat up on themselves (especially if it is intermittent). It is hard for the school to recognize, since both scores are very much above the average, but it really can have an impact on the student and needs to be addressed (hopefully through and IEP).</p>

<p>@ItsJustSchool Thank you! She is loving college so far. I had heard that the discrepancy law existed but when I asked the IEP team at our school about they said it didn’t apply in our state. I didn’t investigate further… perhaps I should have.</p>

<p>Stacey, the law does not require the 1-1/2. Or does not require action at that, or any, threshold. Probably why I do not have it memorized anymore. I used it (successfully) more to argue/persuade the district that 2E is a legitimate concern for personal safety (i.e. mental health); that the dissonance could have serious ramifications and needs to be addressed, beyond simply having the kid graduate from school, which in the end for many of us ceases to be a primary goal, and to put a definition (admittedly, <em>my</em> definition) with a legitimate reference backup on “learning disability,” different from low functioning or low ability. My son is in his second year (Junior) at a top-ten-in-the-USA school, and I have many worries, so I really appreciate reading your story.</p>

<p>Congratulations on your daughter’s achievements. I had a similar situation with my son. He had a 50 pt difference between VCI and WMI. Was always losing things, couldn’t get homework submitted. Went on ADHD meds which helped a lot with the WMI. Grades in high school were mediocre due to late assignments and missing homeworks. He just didn’t care about the work- thought a lot of it was meaningless. Self studied AP Physics C exams (5’s) and AP Computer Science (4) and passed his other APs USH, Calc BC, Chem, Bio, Eng Lang with 5’s. Now at large state engineering program, taking sophomore courses as a freshman, doing well and getting his homework done. In college the homework is posted and submitted online- makes it hard to lose it in backpack!</p>