Since the Rocky Mountain School in Boulder closed, I believe that we are without any gifted schools in Northern Colorado. While most of the local public schools do have gifted programming, we've generally found it to be limited in scope and not always geared toward solely gifted kids since achievement scores play as large or larger of a part in identifying kids for TAG than does ability.
We are fairly happy with our older dd's school setting currently and are not gravely unhappy with dd#2's schooling as we are supplementing w/ EPGY at home and she is in TAG reading for an hour/day.
However, I do remain concerned about dd#2's social and emotional well being in the absence of a setting where she can be herself. She feels that I am socially handicapping her by insisting that she use proper grammar for instance when everyone else says things like, "I says...," "me and her went to...," and "There's a lot of things..." I must admit that I do see her point in that I am a bit of a social misfit at work for the same reason and while my co-workers seem to find my speech amusing it does create some degree of cultural misfit and distance. I am usually willing to pay the price for being different in order to be true to myself, but as a young 9 y/o dd is not.
I've, for years, had running around in the back of my mind a career change wherein I am using the education focus of my Masters degree in gifted education rather than health education and running some sort of enrichment program or school or even a homeschooling cooperative for gifted kids. I just haven't figured out a way to make it financially viable as of yet.
Is there anyone in the Northern Colorado area (Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, etc.) who might want to get together and brain storm to see if we could pull something like this together? What are you doing for your kids in terms of community otherwise up here?
