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Hi All,

I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with Renzulli Learning. We're looking into possibly using it in our school to help with differentiation. Thank you in advance!

maybe they've improved it in the last year or two, but we gave it a big thumbs-down. It was basically a giant collection of links. We'd go looking but had to sort through a lot of schlock - AND, and, our first-grader ended up on a dating site for 40-year-olds! The links aren't - or weren't - vetted for ads or age-appropriateness of the other programs linked on those pages. And a lot of the pages seemed to be things like "watch a Facebook game make puzzles out of pictures" - really low yield. I've had far better luck finding good online enrichment resources talking to parents on lists like this. As far as I know, our school has dropped the program.

Thanks for your input, Montana.

Definitely not the news I want to hear, but more reason why it's great to hear from those who have direct experience with it. I have initiated contact with their representative. Hopefully they can show us some significant improvements since you've last used it. Otherwise, back to the drawing board ...

our school ended up dropping renzuli and hiring a half computer/half enrichment teacher whose job is to run around the K-6 school and talk to the kids who need more and give teachers packets/etc for their classroom use. She doesn't have time to do a lot - esp. as she's also responsible for full-classroom enrichment for EVERYone, but she's been there two years now and I can see a difference in the quality of the homework my second son brings home in first compared to my first son's life in first. I know a half-time teacher is a lot more expensive than the Renzuli program... but it got passed in our anti-education town despite years of near-zero budgets, b/c we had about 5-6 families show up at a school board meeting to discuss the problem of the advanced kids getting nothing. I was really shocked at how few people it took to light a fire under the board - I think usually parents don't show, at least here, and they certainly don't organize and bring in signed letters and have several people speak.