I live in the Bay Area of California. Given the high concentration of smart people around here, the choices for education of gifted kids are shockingly limited. As HowlerKarma said, there isn't really a culture of support for gifted students out here.
Correction to HK: There are
no HG+ public schools in the Bay Area. Redwood City (San Mateo County) has a school called
North Star Academy (grades 3-8). Its website says it admits "high achieving" students. I looked at the math review packets for students entering different grades. The mathematics seems more in-depth than what I'm used to seeing in public school curricula, and is advanced but not super-advanced. They seem to do algebra in 7th grade. They also seem to have a lot of interesting-looking enrichment activities. My kids don't go there, though, so I'm only going off the website. I do know that public schools in this state don't want kids to do algebra II in 8th grade because "there's no test for it" at the middle school level. This is what I was told by my son's principal.
AFAIK, that's the
only public school aimed at gifted kids in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties (and it's really aimed at "high achievers." Entry isn't based on IQ). I don't think that San Francisco, Alameda, or Contra Costa counties have any public schools for gifted kids.
There are a few private schools (Nueva and Harker stand out, but Harker is very expensive and very, very intensive). The others are pretty small. There's a private school for gifted students in Santa Cruz, but in an interview a couple of years ago, two of their teachers said that they met kids who had taught themselves to read at two or three but that everyone evens out by fourth grade. Very early reading was not seen as a sign of high IQ, but rather as simply a bland "milestone."
LA has a series of public K-12 schools for kids with IQs >= 145.
Picking a school is like a crap shoot. You just don't know what it will be like until you've lived it for a while, unless you know people whose gifted kids attend the school. The best you can do without knowing someone is to write up a list of questions, call the school, and press them until you get an answer. But it's hard because people will generally try to "sell" the school and your impression can differ a lot from reality.
