So, here's an article about how a group of Aspie kids won a trivia contest

[conuly]

As an aspie who attended Stuy, I find the unstated assumption that the kids at Stuy (and those other elite schools) don't overlap at *all* with the, uh, "special needs crowd" to be, if not quite wildly hilarious, at least quietly amusing.

However, lest we go too far the *other* way - no, not all supergeniuses are autistic, and no, not everybody at Stuy is on the spectrum. (When I was there I'd say the percentage wasn't any higher than in the general population - but it wasn't lower than the general population either, of course.)

Comments

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

I went to the English equivalent of these schools (while I was there, it was ranked as the 30th best school in the country one year) and we did have a significantly lower proportion of special-needs kids compared to the non-selective comprehensives - but not none. My primary school was 25% statemented, or something like that ("statemented" = having a statement of special educational needs) and my secondary school had, I believe, 5 people statemented out of 1000. However, we had at least one student with almost stereotypical Asperger's, and probably several others who weren't quite so obvious - and god knows how many were on the spectrum somewhere. And not everyone with special needs managed to get a statement, particularly if the differences between the person and their peers were not so clear cut.

[conuly]

If "statemented" = "having an IEP", it might also be that as kids get older their parents are less determined to keep up with that, or they outgrow some of the things they needed to have done specially.

I had an IEP when I was young (mostly unrelated to the AS, it was for speech therapy... which may or may not be related, but that certainly wasn't the why of it), but sometime after my father died it simply... stopped. It wasn't very useful to me at that point anyway.