Empowered by Strengths: Our Child’s Transformation at ACCESS

10/22/2025 2:20 pm

We were told about ACCESS in KG as our child was very bright, but our teacher also suggested she saw signs of ADHD and mentioned ACCESS to us, but we loved our neighborhood school and teachers, and didn't want to take him away from his friends. While he grew socially and emotionally in 1st grade he was less challenged academically.  

Our child has ADHD as well, and one of the key ways we are told for gifted children with ADHD to succeed is strength based learning.  Our child became disinterested in math (which he really likes) by 2nd grade, often not finishing his work or getting poor scores on quizzes/tests, as he had long learned the subject matter, some of it as early as KG, but was not receiving any differentiated work, to our knowledge (another way of saying strength based learning, in a sense).  We approached his teacher, and were rebuffed in our efforts to obtain differentiated learning to match his rate and level. Our teacher did not seem to be interested in straying from the standard curriculum, and perhaps was even hostile to the idea of differentiated learning, even as our child began to disengage from school.

We struggled to determine whether his ADHD made it so he couldn't focus, or if what was being taught was just boring as he already knew it already. We saw increasing detachment/disengagement from school academically, which was unlike the child we had known previously. We thought a 504 might be a way to obtain the appropriate strength based education (i.e., some differentiated learning) that he was otherwise denied given limited efforts/resources towards differentiated learning/TAG services at our neighborhood school, both to help his ADHD given the worse outcomes for children who don't get appropriate therapy, but also to allow him to learn according to his true ability. 

When we got to ACCESS, all of that went away immediately.  In third grade, through the walk to math program, he was able to receive age appropriate teaching, and completed 5th grade math as a third grader, coming home routinely with completed work and high scores when he was given appropriate instruction he could engage with. His enjoyment/enthusiasm for school similarly immediately rebounded. 

Whatever societal disparities exist, our child is just a little boy that loves to learn, can do so at an unusually high level, and suffers when that opportunity is denied to him. We are very fortunate that we were able to literally win the lottery and get into ACCESS.  I wish there was more of a focus in allowing all children that PPS serves learn to the best of their ability, whether through expansion of ACCESS or a combination of the ACCESS program and bolstered TAG programming districtwide.