In my DS8's District, they have a very robust gifted certification program that takes 3 years. From everything I've learned about it, it is quite extensive and a large percentage of the teachers in the District undertake the training. However, that does not mean that the schools are structured in such a way as to allow the GT kids to take advantage of this certification process. DS's school is anti-clustering and differentiates only if you consider differentiation to be dividing up the third grade classes into three groups of 35 for reading.
So, it is wonderful that most of the teachers undertake the training, but IMHO, the benefit gets diluted a great deal at this school and in this District. So off to the gifted magnet next year for both my kids to see if that's better.
