"I don't want to be me anymore." Justin Myles Chapman was born July 17, 1993, the son of Elizabeth Chapman, then 20, and James Maurer, then 24. Chapman was in North Carolina, hopeful of opening a gymnastics studio, when she met Maurer through a friend. He was working a manufacturing job at IBM. The two dated for a few months but "irreconcilable differences" -- Maurer's words -- kept them from taking the relationship further. He now lives at the YMCA in Raleigh, N.C., and works a midnight shift as a security guard. Chapman, pregnant, returned to New York. Her parents live in the Rochester suburb of Henrietta. Maurer faded from her life. She said she was determined to raise her son differently than she had been raised -- which she described as "totalitarian." Her parents were strict Catholics, she said, and she attended private Catholic schools. Chapman's father, George, works as an electrical engineer and computer programmer for Rochester Gas & Electric. Her mother, Jane, stays home. Chapman said she sought refuge by becoming a competitive gymnast. She said her parents thought she was "obsessed" with the sport. As a troubled teen, she was counseled by a clinical social worker in Rochester. In a letter to George and Jane Chapman in fall 1987, social worker Delores Sanderson noted that "the issues Elizabeth is dealing with are family issues, not personal pathology, and need to be treated in the context of the dynamics within the family." After high school, Chapman studied physical education at the State University of New York at Cortland for a semester, but she did not do well and dropped out. Chapman said in one interview with the News that she received a master's degree in elementary and secondary education through Regents College in New York. But the registrar's office at the college, now called Excelsior College, an online university, said she never was actively enrolled. When her son was born six weeks early, she was enrolled at Monroe Community College in Rochester. Chapman read all she could about child-rearing. She said she was determined to be a model for Justin. It wasn't many months before Elizabeth's stories about Justin began to baffle those who heard them. Walking at 7 months. Reading aloud at 2 years, 4 months. Chapman often brought the toddler to the Monroe campus, where he pretended to take notes on a magnetic drawing board. One day, his mother said, Justin, at age 2 1/2, filled out the bubbles on a 40-question test and turned it in to the instructor. The graded paper received a 76, she said. Instructor Dale Doty said he did not remember the episode. As a toddler, Justin ate with a fork and hated to be messy. "He was obsessed with reading. I read him my college textbooks. The only way to keep him quiet and calm him down was to make things really complicated," she said. Chapman decided to teach her son at home. She wanted to nurture his talents and follow his lead, letting him eat, sleep and study whenever he wanted; his upbringing would be the opposite of her own. Psychologist Thomas Arnold gave Justin, then age 3, a Wechsler Intelligence Scale test for preschool-aged children, his mother said. She said Justin's IQ was tested at 160, placing him in the "exceptionally gifted range." Arnold could not be located for comment. Not long after the Wechsler test, Chapman refused a request by the public school system in Penfield, N.Y., to test her son for placement. At age 4, she enrolled Justin in Stanford's Educational Program for Gifted Youth's interactive computer mathematics program. He received a B in honors intermediate algebra, an A in elementary writing and "satisfactory" ratings in accelerated 3-4 math, accelerated 5-6 math and honors pre-algebra, according to a program transcript. The work was performed via the Internet. At age 5 1/2, Justin began taking high school classes via the Internet. At age 6 in 1999, Justin burst into the media spotlight when he was enrolled in college courses at the University of Rochester. According to one transcript, he received a B in a four-credit-hour religion course called The Ancient World for a paper on Babylonian creations, myths and Homer's The Iliad. He audited a physics course. Justin's Web site states that he then enrolled full time. University officials declined comment and refused to confirm Justin's course schedule. In Justin's free time, Chapman said, he behaved like a regular child, engaging in pillow fights, playing soccer, swimming or reading Harry Potter books. Justin is credited with writing a syndicated column through Paradigm News called The Justin Report, in which he opined on topics ranging from family car trips to the merits of the nation's education system in 1895. One of his columns, about his crusade against age restrictions, was published in the Christian Science Monitor. Justin's Web site contains the entire run of columns, which were distributed weekly from July 3, 2000, to May 6, 2001. The tone of the writing is earnest and thoughtful. Paradigm News declined to talk about Justin or his columns. The media descended on Justin, but Chapman said it never was her intention to make her child a celebrity. She turned down 115 requests for media interviews and accepted 14, according to a record of media interviews kept by the University of Rochester. In May 2000, when Justin was almost 7, he took the SAT test at Penfield High School, where Chapman said he scored those remarkable numbers. It was his first crack at the college placement test. Officials with the College Board, which administers the SAT, were unable to independently verify the scores. "The scores are the property of the student," College Board spokeswoman Janice Gams said. A copy of Justin's score report, taken from a transparency he made for a presentation, does not include a test center code number or the name of the testing site. Mike Sullivan, an assistant principal at Penfield High, said he did not recall ever seeing Justin taking the SAT with juniors and seniors at his school and said he no longer is in possession of SAT records for that date. Regardless, Julian Stanley, director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Johns Hopkins University, was intrigued when, through the Gifted Development Center in Denver, he learned of the boy's high score. He said a copy of the SAT score he received looked legitimate, although it, too, lacked a testing site. "He's a very bright kid, assuming these scores are correct," Stanley said. In July 2000, Stanley invited Chapman to bring her son to Johns Hopkins for objective testing. The costs would be covered by Stanley's program. Chapman declined. She said later that she planned to take her son to Stanley's center the following summer, but Justin had begun to struggle. In August 2000, one month after he turned 7, Justin graduated from the Cambridge Academy, a distance learning high school based in Ocala, Fla., with a 3.75 grade-point average. According to his course transcript, he had completed the high school course work in 1 1/2 years. Academy Principal John Fox said most of his interactions were with Justin's mother, but he praised Justin's work. "As flexible as our program is, he was challenging us to keep up with him as far as sending in his work," Fox said. "Usually in ninth grade we require two credits of electives. He submitted proposals for 14 of them and he did them all." Fox also lauded Justin's efforts to end age discrimination in education. Indeed, Justin and his mother have taken his crusade across the country to conferences for educators and parents of gifted students. At a typical seminar, he stood on a box and read a presentation while exhibiting transparencies of bell curves and graphs. He quoted Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it was during these conferences that his inability to answer questions was noted. Chapman said Justin thinks of too many possible answers and can't answer simple questions such as, "What's your favorite color?" Other experts who have treated Justin say his auditory processing problem makes it difficult for him to respond. Michael Piechowski, a researcher in the field of gifted education and educational psychology, first heard Justin speak at the May 2000 Hollingworth Conference on the Highly Gifted in Newton, Mass. He is convinced that Justin knew his stuff. "His arguments were presented logically, and from the way he emphasized his points, it was clear that he understood what he was saying," Piechowski said in a recent letter supporting Chapman's quest to regain custody of her son.
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