Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Which school is right?

Hi everyone,

I am new to this forum and I would like to get some advise on parents who have gone down this path before me. I have a 4 yr old boy who was recently tested and confirmed he's gifted. He will start kindergarten in fall of 2014. My husband and I are deciding whether to send him to our local public school which had its GATE program canceled 2 years ago due to budget cut or a local private school or a school for the gifted. Both the private school and the school for the gifted will put financial pressure on the family. However, I worry that our local public school will not meet his education/learning needs.

Any thoughts on how to navigate this would be greatly appreciated!

You really have to go check out each school to decide. It just depends on your child, and the teachers/administration at each school. Private schools can sometimes work out, but are oftentimes bad choices because they are so strict/structured and they tend to think all their students are gifted, so there's no need to do anything different or special.

Also, there's the issue that testing at age 4 is highly unreliable and is oftentimes more an indicator of exposure than intelligence. So what he actually ends up needing in school could vary wildly.

I'm going to dissent that a high IQ result in a very young child is "oftentimes more an indicator of exposure."

I agree that the result could be unreliable due to the sensitivities and unpredictable nature of very small kids during a test taking situation. There are probably elements of brain development that can change IQ over time.

It's very hard to suggest anything because of the "levels" of giftedness. Truly, it may depend upon how "gifted" your son is, his personality, emotional/social development, and his areas of pronounced strengths and weaknesses after those areas stabilize (brain development). We know an exceptionally gifted teen who opted for a high school with excellent sports. It's probably not his long term area of talent, but the kid loves sports.

Anecdotally, we saw *a lot* of change in my son between age four and age six related to better emotional control, changing interests and emergent abilities (especially after he became skilled at reading for enjoyment and information, and his fine motor skills developed). Flexibility is a great quality in whichever school you select.

Thank you to cammom and epoh for your responses.

DS took the WPPSI-III and he scored:

Verbal 127 (96% percentile)
Performance 148 (99.1 percentile)
Full scale 139 (99.5 percentile)

I think the scores place him in the moderately gifted to highly gifted category.

We (the psychologist who administered the test and me and my husband) think he didn't do as well on the verbal subtests because he speaks predominately mandarin Chinese and he attends a bilingual preschool (English and Chinese). He's raised trilingual: Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese and English. He speaks in 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 English in a given sentence. We are thinking of having him retested in 1-2 years to see if the scores change.

The reason why we had him tested at such a young age was because his preschool teacher suggested we have him tested. He started writing at 1 year 10 months old, reading at 2 years old and doing simple additions and multiplications at 2 1/2 years old. He has a crazy imagination and started arguing with me when he started talking at 1 year 3 months old. He plays board games fitted for 6-8 years old and can play poker by age 3. Also, when he was around 2, I was describing him to my family therapist trying to get some parenting tips because he's highly sensitive, and my therapist suggested to me that he may be gifted. To be honest, I am slightly embarrassed to say that I find the news distressing. Am I the only parent who feels that way? I don't know how to raise a gifted child. He is very intense and actually became more mature when he turned 3. However, now that he's 4, he has regressed a bit and I think it may have something to do with us having a new baby in the family.

Anyways, I am trying to get help and support by participating in forums like this one and educate myself by reading books on gifted children.

I will take your advise and visit the schools to see which environment is the best for him. I guess I am afraid he will stagnant and not reach his full potential if I don't find the right school for him.

Welcome. You have definitely come to the right place. You will find we all worry if we are doing enough for our kids to help them become their best selves. Unfortunately, the answer will always be that each child is an individual and we just have to pay close attention as to whether what we are doing is working. A school that is great for one HG child may not work for another... It is great you have some options.

We are leaning towards homeschooling here. Just continuing to follow our son's lead and pace.

It seems like that early exposure might be a factor as epoh pointed out. We all know that no matter how carefully designed it, most of the structured learning environment in school won't fit and would be potentially problematic for a 4-year-old kid, let alone a highly sensitive one. Instead of focusing on school selection, how about pay attention to other things that are essential to smooth out any bumps along the way, such as pencil grip, social skills, resolving conflict positively, attention span, flexible thinking, reading fluency, vocabulary, abstraction and conceptualization skills, analogy and cause-effect, problem-solving skills, etc.

The test scores certainly sound reliable. Does your state have any laws that require schools to have gifted programming of some kind? Is this something you could advocate for, even if the school district has eliminated the program?

Sometimes parent advocacy, as tedious as it is, will reawaken much-needed services.

Good luck.