Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Lottery to gain entrance

Huh? Don't understand what you mean. IEP's can run through the completion of public H.S.?

Yes "Gifted" (GATE) ed ends officially at the end of 8th grade in my district. In H.S. has honors & AP classes that are "supposed" to fill the void but they are more performance based.

In the school district I grew up in (long before IEPs), students lose the protection of having an IEP when they leave middle school. There are no magnet schools. There are two big urban high schools and a couple of smaller ones; AP course availability varies from school to school and year to year (depending on faculty/funding/facilities availability.) You have the choice of enrolling in any high school that has space, but you have to provide your own transportation. This flexibility allows the district to claim that they meet the state mandate for gifted education. It is a largely-urban district in a depressed and depopulated industrial region.

I haven't lived there in a long time, but an old friend that I grew up with got her HG daughter through that system to graduation just a couple of years ago, and I witnessed the process starting with her middle school years.

My multi-racial nephew grew up in that district (he's now in his mid-20s) and since I'd promised many years before to support his education as fully as possible, I was involved in it from the beginning. We could not get him evaluated for the state-mandated gifted program (pull-out.) So, no IEP. He finished fifth grade at the top of his class, still no evaluation--the school (teachers and principal) stonewalled the family the whole way. Finances back then prevented engaging private testing, and anyway there was a history of the district not accepting private test results. Achievement test scores were in the high 90s. I thought he might have ADD but his scores and grades were so good that the school did not evaluate for that, either. All the schools he attended were inner-city schools, underfunded.

His middle school years were painful, and high school was a disaster. He finished his final year of high school in a special program for at-risk kids, at a local public university. He stayed at that university (a HBCU) for college, finally getting his ADD and depression diagnosed and addressed. Now, after alternating years of school with years of working, he's pretty much caught up with himself and will graduate with a B.S. soon.

While it is true that a high-ranking school may or may not be a gifted school (or have a gifted program) the ranking criteria were not revealed upthread and neither was the OP's school described specifically as a magnet school or a public school. Bearing in mind that many may use euphemisms to avoid the word "gifted", that alternative programs mentioned (such as IB and early college) are offered by some public school districts as their gifted program (or part of their gifted program) and this is a "Gifted Issues Discussion Forum", all responses on the thread have seemed to be on-topic regarding the thread's subject of "Lottery to gain entrance" and appear to be authentic to various poster's experiences.

I, for one, stand by the idea that public school districts should offer an education which mirrors the public which they are intended to serve, including offering a sufficient number of seats for advanced learners making a lottery unnecessary.

Not to veer off-topic from the thread's subject of "Lottery to gain entrance", but as described several places on the wrightslaw website, schools must have a plan for "transitioning" students with an IEP, and this begins at age 14 (typical age for a high school freshman) to age 16. This "transitioning" may give casual observers the impression that the student has aged out of IEP services.