Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Regions Schools in San Francisco for gifted kids

I wasn't specific about it, but this is why I asked if your child was on a waitlist. Our experience with choice programs in our city was that all the parents who were looking for a "something better than neighborhood" school applied for almost all of the optional programs, and many of the private programs too. Once the public optional school lottery was held and notifications were made, there was a period of a few weeks where kids on the waitlist move up quite a bit as parents decline lower choice schools if their child got into multiple schools. Then there was a second wave of declines that happened again during the first week of the school year, because there was a large group of parents who kept their child on multiple acceptance lists "just in case" (even though it was against school district policy - no one actually checked). I was really bummed after our ds' kindergarten lottery - he was #74 on the wait list for the school I really wanted to send him to (note that I can still remember that # 10 years later lol). I gave up and we sent him to the one school (out of several) that he lotteried into. Found out a few weeks later that one of his friends from preschool got into the other school - not because he got in on the first round of the lottery but because he was *#72* on the wait list until the week school started. I called the school up and found out my ds had moved up to #2 on the wait list, we left him on it, and an opening did come up for him in first grade. By that time, we'd totally changed our minds about where we wanted him anyway, but that's life

Best wishes,

polarbear

Lepa, can you tell us now what has happened with your son. I can say that there are a lot of people with similar stories who share your pain.

I can’t be too cross with the gifted schools because they’re all we have. But Nueva has a reputation for avoiding kids with too high an IQ. They are part of an oligopoly. Schools like to claim the word gifted.. they could help higher IQ kids who may be more introverted, but choose to just take the easy path with extroverted kids. Did I mention that extroversion correlates with lower IQ?

I heard of a SF kid who commutes to Helios in Sunnyvale. But Helios has a slight case of the Nueva disease too I am sorry to report.

Do think seriously about home schooling. I would do this rather than assume that moving to Palo Alto would be any panacea.

My understanding is slow processing is common in gifted, and doesn’t mean 2E. Its because they see more or are perfectionists. You might want to talk with the Gifted Development Center in San Mateo or that one in Denver. You might consider a few months of vision therapy.

Hope we hear back from you, and here is a new thread about, the entire Bay Area. http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/219385.html#Post219385

It sounds like the feedback Nueva gave you was genuine, and I have to respect that. Though I am still tempted to deconstruct it. For example that they sure don’t want any kids that are “hard to manage”. These kids may be the most gifted. They could handle them if they wanted to. If anyone has the expertise and understanding they do. But they just reject them. All the while cloaking themselves in the mantle of “serving the gifted”. Similarly, there seems some mis-alignment between their promotional material about self-directed learning, and then proceeding to grant admission to the ones who do as they’re told. They should know full well that gifted are often like this; its tantamount to another betrayal of the gifted. From members of our own gifted community who surely (one hopes) know the literature. Sorry if I'm being a little hard on Nueva, but hey research shows that we gifted have a righteous streak. Helios is not immune from some of the above either.

I feel for you, me, and many other who get started on the gifted road, feel like Nueva etc. is salvation... only to have them slam the door in your face. Its true there are only so many openings, but parts of it smack of hypocrisy. I have to feel that many in the gifted community are wounded... first by public schools... then by private schools... and by society all along. In BAGHS they don't want to talk about private schools, as if there's nothing to learn from them. I suppose it might clog up their mailing list, but really there are only a handful to discuss. I feel they are a bit reactive or have self-doubt, or that past rejection and/or costly tuition remains a sore spot.

Yelp has some interesting reviews (click through to the "not recommended reviews") of Nueva, it can really turn into a bad mushroom trip. Even if your kid gets in these schools maintain a process for "counseling out" a child who stops fitting in. The overarching problem is, out to where exactly. And the other side of this coin is that the current demand leads to power trips and distortions that accompany any (near-)monopoly. Think Comcast customer service... then imagine a balance of power where if you get too loud Comcast can cut your cord... thus the parent community becomes a bit of a farce... or sparsely populated as parents realize they should just keep their head down... nobody wants to risk giving the administration or the board any real feedback.

Its possible that your son may simply need glasses. Or something called “vision therapy” which seems pseudo-scientific but that some gifted kids seem to benefit from.

Do keep home schooling in mind. See http://www.sfbaghs.org/ (Apply when you get close to actually doing it. You can get observer status for a while but they are focused on parents actively homeschooling.)