A lot of schools feel like they shouldn't start gifted services until 3rd or 4th grade. At that point, they reason, a child who wasn't getting the appropriate educational environment at home will have been in school long enough to have overcome this home-environment deficit and could now accurately be compared to all the kids who do have enriched home environments. This is their way of overcoming a cultural or socio-economic bias. Or, in some cases, it's all about the money.
Clearly, gifted kids are gifted before 3rd or 4th grade.
Of course, of major importance is the quality of a school's gifted program. If a school has a one-hour-per-week enrichment program, that is not going to meet the needs of any other than the most mildly gifted. Other accelerations would really be needed anyway. So, IMO, it doesn't matter if this type of program is offered in 1st grade or not until 4th -- either way it just isn't enough. If, instead, the school has a full-time gifted class or cluster, when that starts would be of more interest to me.
So, when you're looking at schools, ask not just when the gifted program starts, but how extensive it is, and if there are policies in place to graduate gifted services if their standard offerings are not enough for your child.
In our case, our school has a 1-hour-per-week pull-out that is fun but mostly useless. My kids needed something before then. My DD8 was first allowed to enter K early. By 1st grade we were very aware that more needed to be done. She then did subject accelerations. It quickly became clear that this was not enough either, so she moved on to a full grade acceleration. My DS6 skipped K and now in 1st we are working to figure out in-class differentiation and/or enrichment before we proceed on to possible subject acceleration. My point being, we have had to work within the system well before the gifted program kicks in, and because the gifted pull-out is so minimal, it just almost doesn't matter at all that there is a program, and it wouldn't have if it had started in 1st or 4th.
Last edited by mnmom23; 01/31/10 03:57 PM.
