If homeschooling, as someone else mentioned, isn't something that works for your family, would another school within the district be more accommodating? I never intended to have my kids move around as much as they have, but we've been in two districts, homeschooled, and tried a charter school in order to get dd13's needs closer to met.
Homeschooling is definitely an option, which we exercised last year. Louisiana's standards for admission to the G/T program are extraordinarily high for 5yos, in order to weed out the otherwise normal kids with pushy parents, and with no real services for her and deteriorating emotional state, we homeschooled her. She LOVED it, and it was great for her, too. It really restored and improved upon her love for learning, and it even brought her and her mom closer together.
The one downside to homeschooling is she's an extrovert, and she wants to be around lots of kids. There's an element of loneliness to homeschooling (she's an only child). She has some friends in the neighborhood, and she has all sorts of athletic activities after school, so we're meeting those needs as best we can outside the school environment already. While homeschooling, she was also involved in some local homeschool classes, but she was the youngest kid in the classes by far, and there really weren't social opportunities that went with them.
There's also a local charter school which might fit, though affordability is a BIG issue. They say they offer children work one level above grade level as a matter of course.
One interesting thing about the state of LA is they promise a right to a free, appropriate public education to gifted children, which goes beyond the requirements of IDEA and similar federal legislation. In concept, it's quite laudable. So now we're trying to leverage that right into what's truly appropriate for her. If it works out, that's the best possible scenario... she's around lots of kids, we can afford it, and she gets the appropriate education. Otherwise, the best we can do is two out of three, and we have to figure out which one to give up... and giving up the appropriate education is not an option.
Changing to another school within the district does not appear to be an option. They appear to be fairly strict about attending the school whose attendance boundaries include your home.
The thing with the IAS that I've found to be a bummer is that it is pretty subjective. If the school is strongly opposed, they can fill out all kinds of things like work habits, social skills, etc. to put the kid in a poor light.
Yeah, I have that same concern, especially when they're already finding little ways to criticize her maturity. As I mentioned before, they criticized her for needing help on work that's brand new to her and two grade levels above her. They also said she should be taking the lead on group activities in first grade, to which I responded that it's not an appropriate expectation... sure, maybe she feels motivated to lead, but maybe also she feels motivated to shut down and tune out, because the work is so beneath her, and this is a personality response which has nothing to do with whether she's ready for a more challenging environment or not.
It doesn't help that the more frustrated she becomes in school, the more she shuts down. We saw this in K, when it got so bad she told us she'd forgotten how to write T's (this from a kid with beautiful penmanship who was already writing full sentences for a full year by that time, and whose first name includes the letter). We're seeing this again, where selected papers are coming home extremely sloppy, which shows us she rushed through it to get it over with, because she hated doing the assignment. And last night she brought home a paper from her first grade class where she'd gotten a lot of it wrong, it was basic grammar stuff she had mastered last year during homeschooling, and it was obvious she'd just rushed through it without thinking much about it. Then she beat herself up for not getting 100% on it, which she had convinced herself she should always do, as the only gifted kid in her class. Not fun.
So, to sum up, the longer the school fails to meet her needs, the more she's going to show them behaviors that indicate she's not ready for more, which enables them to continue to fail her, and ignore us. ARRRRGGGHHH!!
