If the kid can’t handle the gifted level after skipping, then they are not ready for a skip.

Programs set up for the top 5% (about as selective as most districts can get and still have enough students to form a class) don’t do much for the EG kids, who need to skip and then get placed in a top-5% program.

Both acceleration and clustering are needed interventions—they are rarely competing options.

My second complaint is that it fosters no cohesiveness or sense of community among very gifted kids. When I was in school, if I could have chosen between being put in a class with older kids or being put in a class with other gifted kids (and I mean really gifted kids, not the mildly gifted crowd that so often ends up in those programs), I would have definitely chosen the latter, because then I would have been with kids who were both age and intellectual peers. I would have been normal. Because EG and PG kids are so rare in the general population, attempts by the public schools to create programs that cater to them specifically will be thwarted if most of them choose not to participate and to skip grades instead. Such programs are virtually nonexistent anyway, but there’s no way the schools would consider them worth the expense if they didn’t get full participation from the few students who qualified. If a school considered creating such a program, but canceled it because most of the qualifying students preferred the prestige associated with grade-skipping and eventual early high school graduation, what would happen to the few qualifying students who needed it, and for whom whole-grade skipping was, for one reason or another, not a viable option? Would they have any opportunities available to them that would enable them to get both an advanced curriculum and regular, face-to-face interaction with intellectual peers studying the same subjects? If schools consider grade skipping a good option for some highly gifted students but not others, what options will be available for those “others”?

Yeah, we’re the bad family. And we pulled a child right before the MSAs too.

Yes, accommodations need to be designed for individual children, but what is the total demand for these accommodations and services? And the statistics need to include the children at the many fine private schools in the area.

With the huge size of the MCPS student population and the fascination of the bureaucracy with numbers, this should be a no-brainer.

BTW, your children are contributing to the level of transiency in the local schools. C. might be counted 3 times, leaving the love school, leaving the HGC, and then leaving her middle school. That’s an interesting idea.