Sharon Duncan never knew her daughter Katie was different.
You didn’t have to talk with her for long to realize she was sharp as a tack. But she had to work hard to keep up in school. It was exhausting, Duncan says, but she never complained.
It wasn’t until the anxiety caught up in college that she thought something might be wrong.
Katie Duncan always knew her friends read faster but never knew why. It turns out when she sat down to read, her eyes moved five words forward, three words back. Five words forward, three words back. She literally chased the words all over the paper. That day when she was tested, she discovered for the first time that the words didn’t move for everyone.
She was 19.
Katie Duncan has stealth dyslexia—her learning disability is masked by her high intelligence. Her IQ combined with her dyslexia makes her what’s known as twice exceptional. She is gifted and has a learning disability, but they canceled each other out, and she seemed typical.
Twice exceptional kids often fall through the cracks of the public school system. Sharon Duncan says gifted kids make up two percent of the U.S. school population and 20 percent of high school dropouts. And even though the different IQs, disabilities and disorders make the twice exceptional community so unique, all the parents and kids have the same observation: The biggest failure is a lack of knowledge and understanding.
Twice exceptional, or 2E, only became part of educational vocabulary 13 years ago, but the concept is not new. Public schools today have programs for kids with learning disabilities and programs for gifted kids, but there are a select few that find themselves stuck in the middle. Some kids qualify for an accelerated program and title one reading all at the same time, but their parents and their schools can’t figure out where to put them. And then there are people like Katie Duncan, who learn how to fit in but struggle the whole way.
Sean Booth was one of the kids that didn’t quite fit in. His mother Marcie says she figured out early on that he was probably gifted.
“I would take him to the grocery store, he would read signs and labels and he loved math. He could do it backwards and forwards in his head by 4 or 5,” she says.
But it fell apart in second grade, when he was met with timed math tests. He would put his head down on his desk and give up. That’s when Booth took him to a private psychologist and found out he had ADHD.
Marcie Booth and her son, Ryan Booth
When she discovered her oldest son was twice exceptional, she couldn’t find the support she needed, so she made her own. Booth founded 2ENetwork originally as an email chain between a few local parents to share their experiences and support each other. But almost ten years later, there are thousands of members, with thirty countries represented in its membership.
“A lot of 2E families run into the same obstacles that I was running into,” Booth says. “That was really frustrating. And I also learned about other twice exceptional categories.”
Her younger son Ryan was 14 before he was diagnosed with Asperger’s and found to be twice exceptional. Unlike his older brother, math was his best subject.
And that isn’t uncommon. Twice exceptional people are joined by their experience of defying the mold, but each of them do it differently.
“If you’ve met one of these children you’ve met one and one only,” Sharon Duncan says.
Deep pockets and no diversity
Bridges Academy in Studio City is a one-of-a-kind college prep school designed to educate twice exceptional kids. Admissions and Outreach Liaison Kim Vargas says its families come from all over Los Angeles, from Chicago, even from Australia to enroll their kids there.
Bridges serves kids in grades 4 through 12.
“These children are who they are, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They should be celebrated,” she said. “We’re teaching our kids here to navigate the stream that they’re in and we respect that.”
There’s only one catch: Annual tuition is $40,000.
After a quick stroll through campus it’s clear that the student body is mostly wealthy, mostly white and mostly male. In fact, out of the 121 students enrolled there just a few years ago, 25 were girls, and six were kids of color.
But it’s not just Bridges. Adrienne Furst commutes with her 2E daughter Emma to the McKenna Learning Center in Malibu, a much smaller alternative to Bridges. She said 80 percent of the students there are boys, 100 percent are white, and she’s one of only two families that lives outside the beach town.
But even beyond the private education options, support groups like West LA Gifted and 2ENetwork that are free to join are based on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, traditionally where white and wealthy residents live.
And Furst doesn’t like the message it sends to her daughter.
“What this teaches her is 2E does not pervade other socioeconomic backgrounds,” says Furst. “It’s just that they’re the only ones that can afford identification.”
Emma's IQ falls into the 99.9th percentile.
The testing that identified Emma’s diagnosis was $7000 for the Furst family, and insurance only covered a small fraction. Emma has ADHD and ODD, and will graduate high school by the time she is 15. Furst drives three hours every day to get Emma to the McKenna Learning Center.
“In a span of six hours. What full time job am I supposed to get?” Furst says. “And then I get to pay for a therapist.”
The specialists at the clinic also said that Emma was not a good candidate for a pull out gifted program like some public schools provide, but instead needed a full-time gifted education.
“Where do I find that in a free and appropriate education world?” Furst asks.
Vargas says parents can request assessments of their children in public school, but the district is only required to test the child if he or she is performing two grade levels below where they are supposed to be.
“But often times there’s just too many kids to get through,” Vargas says. “And if a kid is gifted but has learning trouble and is in the middle of that bell curve they’re not going to draw attention to themselves.”
And if free assessments are only required for kids that are falling behind, when funding gets tight, gifted programs are sometimes the first to go. The elementary school where Emma is zoned cut their gifted program because of a lack of funding.
So instead, she is one of four girls at the McKenna Learning Center, which is not a unique statistic either. Bridges also has about one girl for every four boys in the student body. Vargas says the difference stems from different behaviors between the two genders. Gifted boys more likely act out from boredom and call attention to themselves, and girls will fit in and fly under the radar. So boys are more likely to get tested and diagnosed.
Furst says the challenges of gender norms extend beyond a lopsided student body.
“Why is it that a female child who climbs a bookcase to get the book at the top is super awkward and weird and probably psychologically problematic, but if a boy did it that’s OK?” she asks.
Public schools nationwide estimate that there are around 360,000 twice exceptional kids in public school. But when that group is predominantly white, wealthy and male, when public schools only need to test kids that are falling behind in school, and when independent diagnoses cost thousands of dollars, the real number may be hard to find.
"The real crime is not finding those children before they collapse internally or they shut down and turn off," says Sharon Duncan. "Because you're turning off a child that could be a game changer. It's scary to think about."