Even some private gifted schools cannot accommodate PG kids.
Yes, and I think that something that is difficult for others to understand (not having the personal experience of having lived it) is that it is very definitely "cannot" rather than "will not."
A great many schools "will not" accommodate HG+ children... but they probably COULD do so. This is, in my opinion, the real indictment offered in books like Genius Denied. That's actually a LARGER problem by the numbers, because there are far more of those children. It's a terrible thing that schools tell those kids to "just behave" and offer them nothing, even when parents advocate for more appropriate challenges. The difference is that (at least in our experience) when you have a PG child, the school
doesn't offer resistance-- but they simply have no idea WHAT to do. They tend to leap on parent suggestions-- even when they are just
ideas and you don't really know, either.
COULD a school accommodate a child like mine? I'm not sure. Not without drawing exclusively EG/PG kids, probably. Recall, I'm coming at this from the perspective of an insider without skin in the game-- I was a very observant teacher's kid who spent decades as a fly on the wall, and later entered post-secondary ed myself. There are things that present barriers there that parents aren't always fully aware of.
Their needs are just too far outside of what
must be on offer and considered for the sake of students with more normative kinds of needs. Resources ARE limited. Some of those kids, they need everything that can be directed at them in terms of just help reaching basic numeracy and literacy-- and this is a major societal problem if that effort fails. That's a real consideration and a competing one in an integrated classroom setting.
I mean, I look at my DD and she seems "just normal DD" to me and my DH-- and in the right environment you completely forget that there is anything odd about her. The trouble is that "the right environment" is often only transitory.
She is generally happy and challenged for 2-6 months after a jump into novel/challenging settings.
What school
could fully accommodate that, along with her idiosyncratic pattern of asynchrony (and that of other similarly able classmates)?
Maybe a boarding school exclusively for HG+ children could-- but no neighborhood dayschool can hope to meet those needs very well.
