Yeah, I think this is what concerns me the most. I hate to judge but I do question the majority of the other students' LOG. I can't see how all 7 out of 50 kids are G&T, and how many of them could be HG like my dd? I think the fact that she has yet to truly connect to any of her classmates tells me that she is not in a group with her peers.
I did talk with a dad of one 1st grader who will be going into the G&T class and he said she was initially not selected for the program. He complained to the district about it and then they let her in. He also told me about how he tried to get his older dd in the G&T 2 years in a row and was denied.
The majority of the kids are screened with the COGAT. The district uses testing, parent reports, and teacher reports to determine eligibility for the program. The district doesn't list any minimum requirement on testing for admission.
Our local districts use the CogAT as well. Kids can be placed in GT programming with any of two of the following: 95th percentile score on any one part of the CogAT or OLSAT, achievement in the 95th percentile in any one subject or in the low advanced range or above an annual state test, high grades, parent or teacher recommendation, behavioral rating scales, and maybe some other things I am forgetting. The reality of it is that it is easier for a straight A student who is well regarded by teachers to get ided as gifted even without the high ability scores (or b/c s/he will be retested by teachers over and over until the group tests scores are there) than it is for a HG+ kid who doesn't fit in the box.
I, too, realize that I am probably coming off as judgmental here and hate to be that. However, the reality of it is that my dd has been deemed to be one of the most gifted kids a number of GT teachers have ever taught not b/c the kid is PG (she really isn't; she's HG+ and very directed), but rather b/c they are mostly teaching bright high achievers and run across gifted or HG so infrequently that it really stands out when they see it.
When I look back @ dd's kindergarten class, a full 20% of the kids in that class were later ided as gifted. It really wasn't that unusual of a class and dd was clearly a bit of an outlier in the class although at the time I didn't realize why she was having such a hard time. IMHO, when schools are iding something like 15% of their students as gifted (that's about avg here as well), you are either living in a planned community of Mensa members or the Silicon Valley or there is a problem with the identification procedures. In the latter instance, it often takes a lot more than GT programming to find a reasonable fit for a HG+ kid. In my older dd's instance, it has taken her bd making her the youngest in grade coupled with a grade skip, further subject acceleration, and the good luck to have a HG-PG girl in her grade who was 18 months older in middle school. In high school, she's wound up finding a good chunk of her friends in higher grades as well.
