"-For those of you with kids in public school, have you ever removed your child from the gifted program?
-If the school won't help me sort out why he's under-performing, where do I go? DS hasn't had formal IQ testing but I'm concerned about spending the money and then the school not caring about them anyway."

Welcome! Your "gifted" program sounds like our gifted program. My DS is also 7. Last year he wasn't asked to be in the gifted program. He never finished their assessments ("too boring") and his classroom teacher didn't identify him as gifted on the behavioral scales. As the divide between what we were seeing at home (DS 6: "Mom, when is that quantum mechanics show coming on again?") vs. school (Teacher: "DS 6 doesn't know his addition facts. He keeps writing out Roman numerals on his worksheets." Here's a scary math fact - the first grade teacher didn't identify that he was answering his questions correctly using Roman numerals.) So, we had him tested. Fast forward several months he qualified and was accepted as a DYS. So, like you, I knew that he was gifted, but I didn't know HOW gifted. This has made all the difference TO US (and to him, of course, as we now are in a better position to advocate for him).

Now, if we hadn't had him tested, I think DH and I would have still arrived at roughly the same conclusion with regard to how gifted DS was. But, I think it would have taken us a little while longer to figure it out. The documentation and evaluation have been enormously helpful. DS was really starting to suffer a bit at school. We have been able to intervene a lot sooner on his behalf since we KNEW what we were dealing with. We have had some success with advocating for him at school (3 grade skip subject acceleration). We have decided to partially homeschool him. Interestingly, he did make it into the gifted program at his school. (Note, it's not really a "program". Once a week, too many kids get pulled out to watch some Brainpop and make paper airplanes.) We let him go to this "program" because he goes with his friends and it occurs during the time he is at school.

If you can swing it, I would recommend that you get your son tested.

Last edited by somewhereonearth; 02/08/14 04:15 PM.