We were underwhelmed with the charter in Manchester. It's run by people who ran a tiny, failed local gifted school (Scholar's Academy). I attended formation meetings and there didn't seem to be much direction at that point, plus there seemed to be adherence to some questionable educational ideas on the part of some attendees of the meetings, at least.

The formers of the new charter seem to have done it to secure guaranteed slots for their own kids, but don't seem to have the best handle on gifted education in my view. NH law apparently provides that a school can't be restricted just to gifted children, or so they claimed. Children are segregated loosely by age, or were; when we visited, we saw some children seated in a semicircle being read to by the teacher, in a big, mostly empty room.

GIEPs don't exist in NH.

We got some acceleration from the local school, a grade skip and additional subject acceleration in math. Our son was given to a series of teachers who didn't have a strong math background and graded some work incorrectly. We repeatedly heard that children need to go "broader rather than deeper"; at a couple of points it was suggested that our son read about famous mathematicians instead of learning new math; and in general, despite efforts to be flexible, it became apparent that the local district just wasn't set up to cater to highly gifted kids, due to a focus on the slowest common denominator. District-wide, for example, there has been a focus on excessive math-facts drill for the first month or two every year lately.


Striving to increase my rate of flow, and fight forum gloopiness. sick