Originally Posted by Old Dad
It's good for the forum readers to get advice and hear issues discussed at this level prior to experiencing them.
For some US public high schools and districts, the student experience may have a root which goes beyond individual teachers, as the teachers may not have much latitude to act independently; In districts which are policy incubators teacher compensation may be aligned to supporting district initiatives (including rewarding teachers for "influence" - those who become regional leaders in promulgating these initiatives to other districts, by speaking at conferences, writing articles, etc).

As an example of policy, a quick web search shows online documents from different schools and districts which may combine and/or conflate and/or replace Gifted with AVID:
1) https://tomasrivera.valverde.edu/Us...pal/GATE%20v.%20AVID%20v.%20Scholars.pdf
2) http://www.sausd.us/Domain/509
3) http://www.avid.org/dl/eve_natcon/natcon_2010_sankstone.pdf

While there may be overlap between any two groups of students, including Gifted and AVID (due to late-bloomers, students with EF function difficulties, study skills deficit, need for scaffolding, 2e, etc) ... a combined program may benefit AVID students at the expense of purely Gifted students who have no other label.

Especially if a grant-funded research study may be underway within the school/district; Possibly something designed to explore whether high-fliers maintain their altitude intended to show that high-fliers do not maintain their altitude.

Such conflation of Gifted programs and services with AVID programs and services may be a means to close achievement gaps and excellence gaps, by capping the growth of students at the top... while raising the school's overall scores by cultivating the skills of a broader tier of students.

A brief roundup of a few specific techniques which may be encountered:
- district hiring of additional school psychologists, school social workers, high school counselors, and/or legal council,
- independent audit of a district's Gifted program (which may give hope of improvement in meeting needs of purely gifted students... but to which the district responds by changing semantics such as "gifted" to "advanced" or to "talent development" in order to better serve a different (larger) slice of students while abandoning the purely gifted),
- GT coordinator who states his/her only duty toward gifted students is to record their outside activities,
- high school counselor who tells gifted student his/her time could be better spent helping a student who actually needs assistance,
- undermining gifted by supporting others in accomplishing the gifted student's original ideas, rather than supporting the gifted student who sought mentorship,
- grading practices which may tend to show equal outcomes,
- policies which lack transparency.

Parents may wish to be alert to these tells, which may indicate that purely gifted children have been supplanted in Gifted programs; This may create a negative, unsupportive, and/or toxic environment for their gifted child.