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    Joined: Nov 2012
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    DS 9 has been in his very small private school since he was 3 and generally been very happy. I got him tested for the gifted program in our county and he got in. We went to the open house last night and it seems like a good program. The focus is on literacy, reading and writing. Science and Social Science is more project based and in depth and math is really the same as the county's normal accelerated offering. There are two classes of 27 of highly able kids. The program lasts two years. The program targets about the 3-5% kids.

    I am actually fine with his private school's curriculum even though it is not challenging at all in math (but the country's program is not going to be challenging in math either). And my son has never ever complained about school. The problem is the school is tiny. The advantage is that he gets a lot of attention.

    The GT program is for two years and then we have to deal with middle school. The middle school magnet program is going through changes and being in the elementary programs is not necessarily a pipeline to middle school magnet. His little private goes to 8th grade and we can accept that barring unforeseen social problems.

    DS doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to leave his friends. At the Open House they told him he would be expected to read and write a lot and do a lot of harder work, and he wasn't keen on that. He was a little tempted by having more than 50 potential peers. But not enough incentive for him to want to try the new program.

    I am not sure what we should do and how much we should try to convince him.


    Last edited by Thomas Percy; 05/01/18 12:00 PM.
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    Given the number of transitions within the public option, the lack of improved curriculum, and the likely lower standard of customer responsiveness in the public system, you're deciding on the basis of cost and potential peers. Only you and your son can gauge the weight of these factors. I think you should make a balanced scorecard and weight these (and other) factors to inform your decision.

    It's probably unorthodox from the public school's point of view, but would the GT school let your son visit for a day to gauge fit?

    I will provide this comment from personal experience. Small, private schools are flexible and accountable in ways that public administrations with bloated bureaucracies are not. I have been dissatisfied with the lack of advanced curriculum provision by DS' small private school, but its flexibility has meant that I can impose my will where needed to achieve what DS needs in areas where the school's offering is lacking. Were I to enact similar advocacy in a public setting, I would be outright stonewalled or facing an administrative lead time of upwards of 20 months, and it would still achieve mediocre results.

    For us, I've prioritized customer-centricity and flexibility, because DS' needs change and accelerate with sufficient frequency that the public advocacy cycle can't keep up without demoralizing DS.


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    Originally Posted by Portia
    not better or differentiated curriculum, it's just more work...
    Yes, unfortunately that practice is becoming so widespread that there's a name for it: differentiated task demands... and it is generally experienced as punitive: a punishment for being smart, gifted, and/or high achieving. "Differentiated task demands" can cause homework to be so lengthy and burdensome as to take away from extracurricular activities, sports, hobbies, and pastimes which tend to make a well-rounded individual and create internally motivated life-long learners outside the classroom. An intended or unintended consequence of this negative educational experience is that the gifted and/or high-achieving kids may begin to intentionally underperform and underachieve in order to avoid the punitive homework demands placed on the gifted and/or high-achieving.

    I would tend to agree that if your child is happy and experiencing continued growth and development, I'm not a fan of change for the sake of change - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." That said, I think it's great to look into different programs/schools and know what your various options are at any given moment... as circumstances may change.

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    Thank you all for chiming in. We are leaning towards keeping him in our small private since he has been really happy there. I am finding that I am really attached to our community and maybe I am not ready for the change either.

    The gifted program is more of a humanities program and they do have different curriculum than general education, only math is the same. It captures about four to five percent kids in the system, but since our district has a highly educated parent population, so presumably the IQ score of these kids would be higher than 95 percentile nationally. The program has a good reputation, and some around us think we are crazy to even think about turning it down. This is the kind of things that are giving me pause. Thanks you all for providing a balancing opinion.

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    Dont recall whether it was on this site or another where someone had a neat little formula for decisions like this: is the kid happy, engaged and learning?

    Whether the kid is challenged I’d consider, on this board, the icing on the cake. Even in the gifted program my oldest is in, I couldn’t really think of any way of challenging him in his subjects of strength that made sense within the constraints of a classroom. But, there is still stuff that they are teaching that he is learning and most of that stuff they are doing quite well.

    Having been through so much angst on the issue, I’d decide based on social fit and friends these days.

    At the moment, your kid is happy and has friends he doesn’t want to leave. I’m assuming from your posts he is somewhat engaged and learning, too, and the gifted program may not offer more than that, and may offer less. You don’t know where other people who so strongly recommend the program are coming from, and what their experiences with their kids previous schools have been.

    And it’s just for two years, and then you’d have to start all over again for middle school. If you kept him where he is, you have all the options for middle school that you’d have had otherwise, plus simply leaving him where he is until high school, without any social interruptions.

    Sounds To me like it’s not worth it.

    Please update us on what you end up choosing!

    Last edited by Tigerle; 05/15/18 11:33 AM.

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