Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Woohoo, she passed!

May I ask what state you live in? I know that Ohio has an acceleration policy.

Oh I love hearing success stories, Way to go girls!!!

We're in Oklahoma.

I really see the formal statewide policy as a double-edged sword. For a kid who can jump through the required hoops, the policy keeps an uncooperative local school from vetoing acceleration. But if you have a kid who doesn't test well for any reason, or who barely misses the cutoff, there's no provision for a cooperative local district to allow acceleration based on teacher recommendation, for instance.

Plus, the process isn't well-publicized. I went back through press releases, and our district announces only one of the two test dates each year, with that announcement made only on the school website, a week or two before the deadline. If you didn't already know about it, you'd never know about it.

DD's first grade teacher said there were several kids in the class she felt had the skills to go straight to third - but that she wasn't allowed to suggest that to their parents. (I think that's a fair assessment, too - they'd just done achievement testing, and DD did not get the highest scores in her class, although she was in the top group.) I really wish the district publicized the program and encouraged every kid with a GT identification or teacher recommendation to attempt it - if skips and accelerations were less unusual, I think it would be better for everyone's education.

I also wish there were a provision for mid-year skips / accelerations. While we have two test dates (late spring and late summer), the acceleration is effective at the start of the next school year only.

That's awesome! Congratulations!!

So glad this worked out for you and DD. It is always challenging to know how much to say and when. We have learned the hard way to keep info like this within the immediate family until the final decision has been made - and it is tricky with younger kids. We want to have honest communication with our DS, but we also want to make sure there is some restraint in terms of communication with other families. So hard to figure out some times.

Side point, how many of you have deferred to your children re: subject vs. grade acceleration, etc. My feeling is that ultimately it is a grown up decision, and that while I am interested in my DS's opinion, the weight of th decision is on the adults. But how does IAS handle this sort of thing??

Anyway, back to the important bit - congrats!! Cat

IAS version I have says "The student indicates that she does not want to be whole-grade accelerated" is an absolute contraindication to a full skip.

In May, when the misery of being in a not-hard-enough classroom was weighing heavy on her mind, she was wholeheartedly in favor of being skipped - and her reasons were social as much as academic.

In July, when the thought of being in a classroom of unfamiliar kids was weighing heavy on her mind, she decided that she was willing to forgo any acceleration in order to stay with kids she knew. So we said, "Take the tests and see how it goes - there's a possibility you'd be a second grader who goes to a third grade class for the ones you pass in," which was true - but I'll admit to leaving out the "but if you pass them all, you'll be a third grader." And honestly, at the time, I did not really expect her to pass as many as she has so far, whereas now I'd be surprised if she didn't pass the remaining ones.

DD is slow to warm to new situations, and while she's improved tremendously over the last year, she still does not like social situation change. She went up a level in swimming last week, and when we got to the pool for the first day of the new class, she said she wasn't going to go to it - that she wanted to be in her old class, instead. I had to pick her up and carry her (thankfully not crying or kicking!) across the pool deck to the new class - where she settled in just fine. I think she will settle in just fine as a third grader, too.

If she had not originally been so strongly in favor of acceleration, we wouldn't have considered it. I think it's something that the kid has to really want. It's just hard to identify what's "what she really wants" and what's "she needs someone to carry her across the deck." And that's where I see the grown-up decision-making coming into play.

When I was 7-nearly-8, I had the opportunity to skip 3rd, and my parents gave me the choice of whether to do it or not. I chose not to - but my reason for not wanting to skip was that I didn't want to miss learning cursive. Had my parents said "Oh, we'll get you a cursive workbook and you can learn it over the summer," I think I would have taken the skip. (My mother has since told me that my parents were indifferent-to-opposed to the skip.) I don't know whether I'd have gotten a good outcome or a bad outcome from a skip, but I do feel that I turned down the skip for the wrong reasons.

Ah, I stand corrected! We got the results of the remaining test back today: 94 for Social Studies, and an 86 in Science. The district person responsible for the program was the one who proctored the test, and she said that DD clearly knew the science material - but she second-guessed herself, and went back and changed right answers to wrong ones. But that, based on her observations, she was recommending the full skip regardless of the shortfall on one section.

An hour or so later, I got a call from the counselor at our school, saying that she and the principal had both approved the skip, and that DD will be enrolled as a 3rd grader for the coming year.

Also, DD says her objection to skipping is "I don't want to be in a class where I don't know anyone," and that spending the full two hours at Meet Your Teacher night getting to know the kids in her class would be a satisfactory way of making sure she wasn't in a class where she didn't know anyone.

well Congrats on the approval! I wish you a smooth transition. We r also doing a skip this yr. we r skipping 3rd and going into 4th. Keep me posted how it's going for you