Hello,
My daughter will be entering 2nd grade in the fall. She is at a school that has gifted certified teachers, but no official gifted program (they did a (Gifted)IEP for her at the end of last year, but I feel it is so they could check the box... her only IEP goal set for 2 years was to 'enhance critical thinking' - it feels like a boilerplate goal.

She entered Kindergarten excited about learning and fired up about her school. In the first year she quickly lost her enthusiasm for learning. She plowed through the sight and spelling words within the first two months and was not really given anything else. She also met all of the math goals in that same time frame.
We felt that her teachers last year dismissed our assessment of her needing a greater challenge (I believe they were overwhelmed with their class) so we had her tested for gifted in the hopes that she would be challenged by a more rapid curriculum. We've been disappointed. We love her teacher's personality which helps her kind of like school a little, but the only acceleration she has been given is advanced spelling. I now feel that her pace of learning has slowed as a result of not being challenged.

When she was 5 (in Kindergarten) she would tell me that she is bored and doesn't learn anything new in school. At 6, she told me that she learned more from her preschool science teacher than she learns in 1st grade and now at 7 she says she 'doesn't learn anything new in school' and asks why she has to do so many worksheets drilling adding and subtracting when as she puts it 'My brain already knows how to do it'.
She is not extremely gifted (IQ is 133) so I feel the administration somewhat dismisses her.

This school was supposed to be THE school to get into and yet we have been sorely disappointed. There is a dedicated gifted school close to us that is supposed to be one of the top gifted programs in the country (families move here to send their kids to it)- but I worry with her not having an extremely high IQ, it might be overwhelming.

We have considered private school, but feel spending $30,000 (the local cost) is extremely high for elementary - we would be talking $300,000 for the remaining years of grade school.
I would love to hear suggestions from other parents who also felt the public school programs didn't cut the mustard and what you did that worked well.

Thank you!