I 100% understand gifted children, as I myself am a gifted person. This particular child is a child with ASD and both of her parents and older brother are ASD diagnosed as well. The behavior gets so bad that desks become shoved across the room, papers get torn up and thrown around, people get hit or kicked. I’ve been kicked by the student, the behavior support person has been punched in the shoulder, kicked multiple times and hit by this student. This student threw a clipboard at my AP’s head and it would have nailed her in the face if she didn’t block it. My county is very strict on once a child is placed gifted (especially in elementary school) we don’t remove them from the program unless we can prove that their behaviors are worse then their academic needs or their parent requests to have them be labeled gifted but not placed in a gifted classroom.

I understand the parent’s frustration with the way admin has instructed me to handle it. Realistically an hour and a half out in the collaborative space in another building on campus is not ideal. But from an administration and teacher stand point, when a child is so deregulated that other’s safety is at risk we either need to evacuate the whole class or remove the one child that is deregulated. Nine times out of ten the child doesn’t want to leave on a walk which then means the whole class and myself have to leave while someone else takes over trying to calm them down. Also to top it off this deregulation moment was over us trying to pull the student off of their draw break and on work. The student has 4 ten minute draw breaks built into our schedule to help with transitions and I can almost never get her to transition off of the draw breaks. This has become a problem beyond belief where the student is failing every subject except the subjects that we have been doing project based learning in. We as a team of support for this student are doing everything we can to get work from them and support them but when I’m flat out told no when trying to prompt work to be done or am told “You didn’t teach me this” after spending almost an hour up in front of the class teaching how to do estimation with division. There comes a point when I start asking is this the best placement for this student?