Gifted programs in public schools are typically aimed at moderately gifted students in the 115 to 130 IQ range. A child who is either above that IQ generally or especially talented in a particular area tends to not be adequately accommodated by public school gifted programs.

To make matters worse, it's quite common for very gifted students to also have issues like ADHD or OCD, which qualifies them for a label of twice exceptional. When I was raising my now adult sons, schools typically wanted to label a child either gifted or special needs and often seemed incapable of comprehending that a child could be both.

I ended up homeschooling and as a consequence I was involved with an online voluntary health and welfare organization for the gifted. My impression was that it was pretty common for people with very gifted or twice exceptional children to homeschool due to frustration with how schools handle such students.

They need custom help that few people are qualified to adequately provide.

Edited because: autocorrupt.

>Edited because: autocorrupt

I'm going to have to steal this one. It gave me a big chuckle!

Sorry if I'm not using the terminology correctly. What I was trying to say was that they asked almost entirely addition and subtraction questions and then decided that she was just above grade level. If they had asked questions about fractions, multiplication, division, or geometry, they would have discovered she is well above grade level.

They did the same thing with reading: don't give a student the chance to show higher proficiency, and you effectively cap the level a student can be 'assessed' at.

It’s probably worth going somewhere specifically for testing giftedness so you can see if your child (on that day) is more likely gifted, highly gifted, profoundly gifted, etc. Also it can be helpful to find out if there’s other 2E (twice exceptional) things at play such as ADHD, etc.

We took our kiddo on a trip to Colorado to the Gifted Development Center which was a good helpful first step (and connected a lot of dots for us). More than happy to share experiences at matt at mindvault dot com.