Twinkletoes - you are in the same boat we were when my DS was that age and you are going through the same worries we did so I understand your concerns! everyone has some really good comments and suggestions....I wish that I had found this board way back when...DS7 was in a Montessori program for several years during his preschool time. We knew something was VERY different about him pretty early on. I used to teach Kindergarten for over 10 years in our county and sirens kept going off in my head when I saw that at age 3.5 he had already mastered the Florida Curriculum requirements for Kindergarten. I had NO clue what in the world to do about it. I was just worried about how his needs were going to be met. His montessori class turned into a small nightmare because they had no idea how to handle an advanced, out of the box thinking child.
The year before he was to begin Kindergarten I started asking questions to our local elementary school and tried SO hard to get the ball rolling on some kind of action plan(he has an IEP for speech/OT and had been dealing with the school system since he was 3...and yes, public school systems move like molasses..so if you want anything done, you need to plan on it taking many months before any kind of ball gets rolling). we also heard the "all children are gifted" comment many times. I kept voicing my concern about what was going to occur and how can we best meet his needs. I really tried hard to explain the situation and raise my worries about what do you do with a child who already has the curriculum mastered for the grade he was supposed to be going into and we kept getting passed from one person to the next. Florida does not allow Kindergarten to be skipped so they suggested a charter school that could possibly tweak the curriculum for him.
The charter school pretty much told us everything we wanted to hear because when they found out he had an IEP, they went out of their way to woo us because that meant extra funding for them. We began our K year there and after a few weeks we could see that it was not a good fit and they were not even coming close to doing the things they said they would do with him...the reading specialist one day pulled me to the side and said not to tell the principal or teacher but that DS needed to be grade skipped one or possibly 2 grades and she was the first one who recommended homeschooling to us. It boiled down to the fact that there were too many kids in one classroom who had different needs that were much lower and they did not have the resources or staff who could meet his needs.
So, we pulled to homeschool for the rest of K. DS asked to try school again when it came to first grade this year and I gritted my teeth but agreed to let him try the local elementary school. First grade was our nightmare year from hell. The class was WAY overcrowded and with the huge budget issues occuring across the country in most schools, they were not able to hire any more teachers...he was lost in a huge classroom that had many, many special needs students. (my last year of teaching, I had 12 children on IEPS and 7 of them were severe...I felt absolutely horrible that year because it turned into a 3 ring circus in my class with me trying to juggle such an enormous gap between students). Add in the lovely FCAT hanging over all the teacher's heads and you can guess where the main focus of the teacher was...on the lower children....so I agree with everything Katelyn'sMom wrote...I don't mean to bash public school because there are some amazing ones out there but with all the budget cuts occuring everywhere and all the silly standardized testing stresses put onto schools/teachers...many gifted children are getting lost between the cracks because focus is shifted to the lower level students....I would keep your options open and look at other situations other than public school.
