Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments When DO you change schools??

We decided to change schools after realizing that even though the school was offering to offer more differentiation and some acceleration this year, it still wasn't going to be enough.We worked really hard on advocating for the upcoming year, and the school was willing to make changes, but we realized that the even with the changes, the majority of each day our children were still going to be expected to do work they had already mastered. It just wasn't a good fit, and no amount of advocacy was going to be able to make it fit, even though the school was working with us. They are just not set up to offer the type "individualized" education my sons need right now. We left on good terms and may even return to the school district at a later date.

My sons were becoming disengaged and starting to dramatically underperform in subjects in which they their actual knowledge has been documented by testing to be extremely high (in first grade). That sounds like an exaggeration, but as one example, one son was literally at the bottom of his class's performance in one daily activity that should have been easy for him (and one in which the kids tracked their progress on a posted board in class), and he frankly didn't care. This went on for months, and to us it just highlighted his growing disengagement. Frankly, that along with a few other examples scared us enough to make a change. He was developing a pattern of disengagement that was becoming ingrained. Not a good thing for early elementary school...