Our family will be relocating to Cape Coral, FL withing hte next 18 months. If anyone has any experience with the Lee County School District, I would greatly appreciate it.
TIA
ELH0706

That's weird, we are also looking to relocate to that same area in the next few months. I am eager to hear the responses.

Crisc, We may need to order one of Grinity's t-shirts so we recognize each other as we sit in the office waiting for our meetings

There's a fine school (grades 2-12 I believe) in Sarasota - Pine View School. Of course that isn't Cape Coral - but it's kind of close, and I'm pretty sure it's the only public school for the gifted in Florida. Check it out.
Sheryl

Thank you, Sheryl.
That school looks really nice. However, if I'm reading the information correctly, you have to live in Sarasota County to attend. For some other reasons we are limited to Cape Coral (Lee County)

Ah, zut alors! (That's "darn it" in French.) I thought that might be the case but I did not have the time this morning to check it out out more thoroughly. Good luck with your search!

Maybe someone at the Sarasota school could reccomend a place to start looking in Lee County?

My reason for asking is that I've been researching the schools. The elementary and middle schools seem to be doing pretty well on the state tests. The High schools though seem to have significantly lower scores. That said, I don't know that the school testing scores mean a darn thing once you get to discussing gifted education. I've emailed the special learning office but have not yet received any reply. That in itself is not encouraging.

You can say that again!
Smiles,
Grinity

Our school has consistantly low scores on state tests. This is because of the demographic of our little town and not the quality of teaching. I believe this has actually worked to our advantage because DS really stands out and so teachers and administrators have bent over backwards to accomodate him. I think in a higher performing school, he might have blended in a bit more.

I can't promise that this will be your experience but I have seen many cases in which the lower performing schools were much better in a variety of ways than the their higher performing neighbors.

I doubt that this phenomenon has anything to do with a child blending in. It might have more to do with how much energy the school has to spend defending itself from demanding parents, or how invested the school is in it's own reputation. A little humility goes a long way when trying to met the needs of a kid with unusual needs.
((shrugs))
Grinity

Yeah, there are really no demanding parents in our school. I'm totally serious. Many parents have not even finished HS themselves.

I think many colleges will be very receptive to kids who appear to have a lot of potential but come from poorer performing schools. If two kids have the same test scores and one came from a high performing school and the other came from a low performing school. They will assume that the one from teh low performing school has MORE potential; it just hasn't been tapped yet. Schools like to have a well rounded demographic and don't want to just be filled with kids from prep-schools etc.

acs - you are so absolutely right! Our school does amazing on the tests. GreatSchools.net ranks our school 9 out of 10. It does a fairly good job with MG children. It does not recognize LOG at all and doesn't try to tailor for these kids one iota.

If I could go back 2 years, I would have looked at a totally different set of schools than what we looked at. When I was looking, I really thought we "maybe" had a MG kid.

I also wonder if the average teacher at schools with a wider demographic might tend to be a little more passionate about their jobs?