We opted to keep dd10 is a specific school last year despite the fact that she'd get more in some areas in another school b/c the first school had a highly intelligent GT teacher where the other one had a GT coordinator who struck me as of no more than average intelligence at best.
This is something I have wondered about a few times... Does it matter if the gifted ed teacher is not very gifted?
I think that giftedness comes in all shapes and sizes. I know that some of my friends are 'gifted-level' in their ability to empathise and care even though as far as I can tell or guess, they would be designated as 'bright' in an academic setting.
They get my kid, and understand his special educational needs and his alternate developmental path.
That said, I think it's as rare to find those 'heart-gifted' folks as it is to find 'IQ-gifted' folks, and my guess is that a 'mere-mortal' style gifted coordinator who didn't grow up with a whole bunch of advanced siblings and cousins and Aunts and Uncles will have a hard time faking seeing things from the perspective of an unusually gifted kid, unless she is in a school system where there are unusually gifted kids all over the place and she has learned well.
The big difference is that as adults, we specialize in our area of interest and do our jobs for years, giving us a change to learn in depth with whatever aptitude we started off with.
I often see people applying rules to situations in ways that make it clear that they are working off of a simplification of someone else's good and deep thought. For me it's much easier to make a decision if I'm working with principles of some kind, if I understand the thinking behind the rules and there reasons the rules were created. This is one of the areas of life that if I project and assume that everyone is 'like me' in this particular way, that I will make blunder after blunder.
The key is this: When I hear schools saying: "We don't do X" or "X isn't in the best interest of the student." I have to translate that in my mind into: "In my experience so far, I've never seen X happen. Please give me some tangible reasons that I can use with other people to help them understand why X needs to happen in this particular situation."
See?
Grinity
