I am very happy to be able to contribute to this thread.
We've been advocating for DD7 all year with very little success. However, last week DH and I meet with both elementary school administrators, and her classroom teacher as well as her math teacher and "reintroduced" DD to them . In other words, reminded them of what level she was at when we moved here (at the beginning of this school year), what her test scores were, how her intensities come out when in certain situations, etc. etc. etc. Basically this was a meeting to try and get major changes to take place since we had again gotten to the point of DD not wanting to go to school because she was so frustrated with not doing anything all day in school.
After my rather lengthy intro, and me explaining what DD thoughts were about her situation, her teachers had some questions about what we expected them to do, and why was it that they were not seeing her giftedness all the time if "she is as gifted as you say she is". One of them actually seemed to be saying that she was just a spoiled child, and should be made to do all of grade 2 work, even though it is at least 2 grades below her level.
After much discussion, and us giving them some suggestions of some types of differentiation that they should be doing with DD we left the meeting with a promise that they needed a week to get things organized, but that things would change and they would get back to us once they had come up with a plan.
Well, that was on Wednesday last week, on Friday DD came home from school saying that school would be changing for her starting next week (ie this week we're in now). She would no longer have to do 2nd grade grammar or reading, and would be doing independent reading and assignments based on that instead. Her spelling activities would be different as well, although she would still be required to do spelling (a good thing). She was given the option of not continuing to do rocket math (40 simple questions in 1 minutes, which she is convinced she can't do, and as a result she won't do). She chose to continue doing it but is now only required to complete 20 in a minute before moving on to the next level.
Her math teacher has given her options of doing the same homework as everyone else (which is already at gr 3 level), or some enrichment problems instead if she already knows the regular stuff. If she knows the enrichment stuff too she can write a math story about the topic instead.
It is like DD has changed schools! In 3 days the differences we have seen have been amazing! DD is happy to go to school again, she does her homework with no complaints and is doing them well too, rather than sloppily as she was before. She is even getting more encouragement and praise from her teacher, rather than not much response to her work.
So, it appears that the issue all along has been that they really have no idea of how to handle a HG+ kid like DD, and since it is a private school, they do not have anyone trained to handle any gt kid ("we have lots of GT kids here, we all have extensive experience teaching high ability kids"). Since we were able to get a friend to give us suggestions that she has used when she as gt coordinator for a different school, they are happy to try to meet her needs.
