Thanks all. eBeth - you are so right about keeping perspective. What we have now is certainly better than nothing.

I didn't go into details about DD8 in my original post, but she has completely shut down at school, spending most of each day reading fiction and refusing to do the schoolwork. It started 2 years ago and got progressively worse. She was in tears again already the first week of school this year telling us she has nothing to learn in the 3rd grade. Up until she started having these 'behavior' problems, we were completely happy with the pullout program.

I am getting frustrated with her current school. I agree that her not doing what the teacher says is disrespectful and not OK, but they act like she is physically hurting other kids. I always imagined behavior problems to be something worse than reading. So while they are focusing all their efforts on behavior modification, I am advocating for them to focus on the curriculum issue and watch the behavior issue disappear. They respond by saying (in so many words) "We're the experts here. You need to let us do our jobs and we'll let you know how it's going at the normal twice/year conference". I made it clear that I would love to, but that strategy didn't work so well for us the first 2 years there.

I didn't mean to knock pullout programs or anything else the current school is doing. I just want DD8 to be engaged in learning again, so I'm researching all options in case our current situation doesn't improve a LOT and FAST. I don't want to be here 2 years from now thinking "I should have done more."

You asked if the GT school pays for testing, and I do think it does since it's a public school, so we will apply and do the testing for sure.

I really like the idea of making sure she knows she should guess if she doesn't know the answer. She is definitely uncomfortable with the idea of getting an answer wrong, so I could see her saying she doesn't know instead of trying to guess.

Thanks again everyone. This is such a great forum. I'm so glad I found you guys - I feel like friends think I'm bragging, so I try not to discuss it much. But I have really learned so much about GT Education from you all.