I learned more about the GATE program in our district of Orange County (Saddleback). Some of their website is outdated but there is useful information at this page:
http://www.svusd.org/p_subject.asp?sid=8127In our district, if your child is identified as gifted, you are offered the opportunity to send them to a Regional School. In our case the Regional School serves five elementary schools, so you will never be sending your gifted 2nd grader to an entire "Special Day Class" filled with gifted 2nd graders. That's because there simply are not that many gifted second graders across the five schools served. What you find out is that your child's current school already has a GATE-qualified 2nd grade teacher, and any gifted 2nd graders will automatically be placed in her class. That's what happened with our DD7. The difference between that arrangement and the one at the Regional School is that the GATE cluster group at the Regional School will always be slightly larger. So our DD7's 2nd grade class might have 2 or 3 GATE-identified students in an otherwise normal 2nd grade class, but at the Regional School the same GATE cluster in the same otherwise normal class might be more like 5 or 6 children.
Apparently at our Regional School these clusters grow in the upper grades, so by 3rd or 4th grade it becomes a more important consideration depending upon your child's needs. If we find our DD7 really benefits from the GATE instruction and curriculum and peers in 2nd grade, we will likely move her in 3rd grade to the Regional School. This was all information we had to work to find out.
Always consider the experience of the teacher. At our Regional School, the 2nd grade GATE teacher had 12 years of experience, but she had since moved to 3rd grade (which was not updated on their website). She was replaced with a 2nd grade teacher who had minimal GATE experience. So we decided to keep our DD7 at her home school because the GATE-qualified 2nd grade teacher there had many more years of experience.
You have to fight for clear answers sometimes. Last week we asked our home school office who our child's GATE teacher would be, and they evaded the question and said "all our 2nd grade teachers are GATE qualified." That was entirely untrue; only one teacher was qualified and that teacher was gracious enough to tell us that when we asked her directly through e-mail.
For some reason I'm finding at the public elementary schools here they do everything they can to avoid telling parents who their child's teacher will be, or even what teachers will still have jobs. In fact at our school, which starts September 13th, they were originally going to announce class and teacher assignments on the 3rd. But then a couple of days later they changed that date to the 10th.
