Thanks for your replies, everyone.
and now the areas where she needs differentiation the most (even though she's one of the top in her other subjects as well) is being extended, time wise, and lumped together, so she basically has 2 hours and 5 minutes straight of being bored and being told to free read. Hey, I like to free read as much as the next bookworm, but it's not what I want for my kid every day.
Last year my son had a half hour where he was in a small group that was supposed to meet his gifted needs (not necessarily a gifted pull out but close...this was the 1/2 hour designated for intensive intervention and support and kids who didn't need that were grouped together for enrichment...were the other kids in his group HG/PG like my son? I doubt it. Bright? sure). So the enrichment group activity near the end of the year got a set of 20,000 leagues under the sea. This is a 10th grade level book (according to AR) and my son was in Heaven. He loved it. The rest of the group hated it and was in over their heads. The teacher dropped it and once again my son read the book all on his own with no one to discuss it with and share his enthusiasm. The teacher tried. But unless we accelerated him from 5th grade to his instructional level of 10th grade...there really is no differentiation/clustering that we could do for him.
Hopefully middle school will be better (his middle school is also a high school...it goes 6-12th grade...so we might actually have options for acceleration).
