Hi Floridamom,
Our school in Ohio tests everyone in 3rd grade. But they routinely test individuals if a teacher recommends it. The teacher recommendations can start as young as kindergarten. It is a bit of a joke here, though, to have a first grader in the gifted program, since they don't provide any additional services until 3rd grade. So after going through all the tests, paperwork, and emotional strain in order to get our son into the gifted program, nothing different occurred. We had a nice piece of paper that said congratulations on being accepted to the gifted program, but no extra services were provided until the rest of the pack was tested in 3rd grade.
The school did provide pullout reading programs in 1st grade (20 min. per week), and pullout reading and math in 2nd grade (40 minutes per week). But they were based on teacher recommendations and not on test scores, which my son would have had without all the testing. In fact, the school sat on the testing results (DS hit the ceiling hard on the Cog At and scored grade levels higher than his present grade on the Iowa Basic Skills Tests) and never thought that maybe this kid needed to be accelerated by a grade???? Things did not improve until DS's second grade teacher decided that he should not be in second grade.
I don't want to depress you, Floridamom. But if you want to fight for testing (and I think you probably should), then at least make sure that the school will use those test results to address educational concerns. We made the mistake of assuming that the school would look at the test results and use them in some appropriate matter.
It sounds to me that your school is throwing up road blocks in order to make most parents give up if gifted services are hard to come by. And schools do run into a great many parents who believe that their little prince or princess is gifted. The difference is that: 1) Most MG parents are relatively happy with what is being provided in the school and are willing to wait until 3rd grade, and 2) The school assumes that they are doing a great job keeping the majority of the kids challenged. The problem seems to occur when your child is so far outside of the normal distribution that the school does not recognize that a problem exists. In this case, I think, it takes some time for the school to recognize how different your child is. But the only way they see that is either though testing or by having a teacher strongly advocate for you. For us, it took the latter.
