From our point of view, you are more of an expert on your gifted student, then your public school even. Depending on your state, your public school teachers have not been required to be educated themselves on the topic of giftedness. If you looked at older estimates of the average IQ of an elementary school teacher the statistics might put their IQ on average around the average of 100 points. For some reason that we cannot figure, even though decades of parents before us have tried to advocate for the gifted students, the public school systems really do make the parents advocate on each point, nothing is just easily facilitated. In the past we have written our own recommendation and then it did come back that we needed other 'third party, non-family' verification (how could someone outside the family household really verify?) so we got three confirmations from neighbors who were all different and certainly were able to be honest (each sent their letter straight to the necessary office) and we did not request a copy of what they wrote. I don't think it will be like this forever because the scientists are studying the brain so aggressively now.
