I’m thinking it’s about time to get out of New York City. It’s not worth going into why we want to move, but it has a lot to do with work. One thing that keeps me here are the educational opportunities for my children. They are all in excellent schools and probably will be through high school if we stay. Also, the college choices between Washington, DC and Boston are pretty impressive. It counts a little that if we stay they could go to pretty much any type of college and not have to travel that far.
I’m wondering how it is where you live. How are the regular mainstream school programs? Are there gifted programs there? Are they worth anything? Private schools?
I’d appreciate hearing from parents, students, recent students. Anyplace in the country is in play right now. Small towns, suburbs, cities. Anywhere.
Teacher checking in. I would venture to say that you could find a school with an excellent gifted program in almost every major city. I am sure that they exist in some of the smaller towns as well, but you are taking your chances in those cases. I teach in a small, rural school district, and we just happen to have a great gifted coordinator. We are lucky. She has told me of plenty of schools in our region that basically do not care about that end of the spectrum.
Unfortunately, I think the only way to find out if the school is going to meet your needs/wants is going to be a visit to the school. Another factor to keep in mind would be school funding in the area you plan on moving to. I am in Ohio, and our school funding has been ruled unconstitutional. It remains unchanged, however, and many schools are being forced to cut more and more of their extra programs. If this is the case in any town you are considering, then I would have to say that Gifted programs are going to be the first to go.
Don’t know if my ramblings help, but I would like to say that it is encouraging to see a parent that cares so much about their children’s education. Good luck!
I was in the East Baton Rouge Parish gifted program from ~1990 (kindergarten)-2000(eighth grade). It was really fantastic. Because we went through the required work so quickly, we learned all this extra stuff - in my eighth grade Louisiana History class, for example, we had units on architecture and Cajun dancing. I think the gifted program, education-wise, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
In high school (2000-2003), I transferred to the magnet program. There was only one high school in town that had the gifted program, and the magnet school was considered one of the top 3 in the state. I liked being in an environment where almost everyone cared about their grades and studying but the magnet curriculum wasn’t nearly as exciting as gifted. There’s a lot of homework and studying but not much more actual learning. It was sort of disappointing.
There are also TONS of private schools here (thanks to the large Catholic population and to the forty-year-long school board desegregation case), but I don’t have any personal experience with them.
Louisiana’s not really known for its colleges being academic havens, except maybe Tulane, though I think LSU is better than most people give it credit for. However, under the TOPS program, the tuition is waived to any public university in the state and many private universities give discounts. It was enough to make me stay.
Last week I had a conversation with two friends, in which we agreed that we had never lived anywhere that offered as many options in a good setting as exist here. In the elementary schools, parents can choose and apply for several programs besides ordinary school:
GATE (test in, starts in 3rd grade, apparently quite lovely)
Academics Plus – heavy on the skills
Open Structure Classroom – cooperative, freeflowing
Spanish Immersion – half Spanish, half English instruction
Several charter schools with different approaches – one small, one Waldorf, one tribal, one independent study
An independent study program (homeschooling with a supervising teacher and electives)
GATE continues in the junior highs, and the two high schools offer a lot of AP and several languages, as well as a program that focuses on dramatic arts. Not bad for a cash-strapped district with overcrowded high schools. There’s some downside too, but overall, a kid can get as good an education here as anywhere in California, with the exception of special magnet schools for very gifted kids; we don’t have the population for that kind of thing.
There are several private schools, for different religions, and a Montessori.
Naturally therefore, we’ve decided to homeschool our children. But everyone else is quite happy with their chosen path, and if we wind up sending our kids to school, I’ll be pleased to send them to the local elementary and see if they test into GATE.
I went to an accelerated private high school in the Cincinnati, OH area. I was, and remain, quite pleased with the program it offered. Can’t really offer much input on the mainstream system, though.
This isn’t going to help the OP much with this part but I will respond to this and be more relevant in a minute. I grew up in rural Louisiana in one of the most horrific school districts this side of Afghanistan. However, the state started the Gifted and Talented program in my Parish (county to you foreigners) and I was the only child that qualified. The parish had funds to hire a teacher, buy two computers (this was in 1981), and dedicate money to travel and cultural activities. Since I was the only one that qualified at the time, all of these resources got directed only to me as a 4th grade child. Talk about a dream come true. Lousiana also has one of the only Gifted and Talented (paid for) boarding schools in the nation. Incidentally, I did up up going to Tualne and then Dartmouth to graduate school. That was kind of unprecedented for where I came from.
Now, I live in the Boston area. Some suburban schools are top-notch. The city schools can be pretty bad except for the test-in schools. The deciding factor tends to be how wealthy the town that you live in is. Is you move to Weston or Winchester (where my wife is from), then you have no proble. If you move to a cheaper area like Lynn or Revere, then you probably will not be happy. I was surprised when someone told me last week that Massachuestts doesn’t have any dedicated Gifted and Talented programs. I assume that they knew what they were talking about.
The moral to this story is that there are opportunities for education no matter where you live but if you are playing the odds, a suburban, wealthy town is the way to be more consistent.
There were gifted programs in New Hampshire public schools. Up until around 1990. I don’t know of any public schools that still have them, and it’s a shame. I suspect the timing had something to do with the Claremont case and them being decided to be “frivolous spending.” All I know is that we said good-bye to our Enrichment teacher in June of 90 and returned for eighth grade in September with new space in our schedules since the program had been unceremoniously cut. From talking to people I’ve worked and gone to college with, this seems to have happened pretty much state-wide.
If you unschool (or homeschool!!) your gifted kids, they can learn much more and pursue their interests without being tied down. Then you don’t have to worry about the quality of schools in your area. (YMMV.)
You’re going to find people that make strong cases for their schools from everywhere in the country. I really liked the schools my kids were in near Cincinnati. Here in Florida, not so much, even though local parents will go on about how lucky we are to be in the schools were in. Not that they’re bad, just not quite as good as before.
If you are a native New Yorker you’ll probably have a strong bias against the south, so don’t fight that. In a general sense the schools are not as good as the northeast, and the exceptions are a crap shoot. The midwest (Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc) have some very good schools, if that’s where you find work, then you can narrow it down. But from what you’ve said I’d try and look maybe somewhere near Washington, DC. It’s an expensive area, but no worse than New York, and there are lots of cool supplementary education opportunities nearby.
If you care to spend a college-like amount on a private school - my kid sister attends Cranbook in Michigan. (She’s a boarder, on a scholarship, and its still a small mint - but she’s bright and special and was miserable in public school, so we think its worth it.)
The quality of education is not just prep school level, but truly college level - plus it has a focus on the arts, just because of how the school is set up. (they have an artist colony on campus, its not required to take an art class, but if you do teh teaching and equipment are top notch.) She has taken a 4 hour twice a week art class in jewelry making that covered all sorts of techniques in silver. The loom room has 30 tapestry size looms.
Other than that, stick to population centers with money and you’ll probably find a reasonably decent gifted program. Interview and tour them to make sure, and let your kids get their impressions too.
It may be individual to your child - personally, my years in the suburban school were a nightmare, and the poverty stricken inner city school was a haven. The former was constricting, their idea of gifted enrichment was to tell me to teach my ‘peers’ and the social situation was a hell, the latter gave me the freedom to go learn what I wanted to (ie. everything, with no one telling me that I had to be bad at math because I wrote poetry and read Kipling) and support when I needed it. Meanwhile, my younger sister couldn’t stand that high school, and adores her clean, pretty, private boarding school.
If you move someplace that doesn’t have a gifted program you can do what my aunt did for my cousins: Make one.
Physically/mentally challenged kids get individualized lesson plans made up for them. That the same opportunity wasn’t offered for otherly-talented kids pissed off my aunt to no end so she hounded her school district until they came up with the same thing for not only her kids, but any other kid (well, ok, parent). Both of my cousins were math geeks so she made the school district tailor the course to their abilities - jumping ahead to junior high math while they were in 2nd grade, for example.
That was 20 years ago, of course, and schools are a lot more flexible today than they were then. It’ll probably be much easier for you now no matter where you go.
I’m from a smallish town in downstate Illinois (community of about 35,000) and the public school system here has a gifted program serving third-grade and up. It’s pretty good and the highschool has quite a few Advanced Placement classes. I’d also recommend checking into extracurricular programming. My school had chess, scholastic bowl and Latin club (among others), all of which I participated in and learned a lot from.
I’m also familiar with Champaign, Illinois, which I’ve heard has a pretty good school system and excellent learning opportunities with the University of Illinois right there.
If you’re looking at colleges already, I’d also suggest Illinois (mostly since that’s what I’m familiar with). We’ve got a pretty good community college system and quite a few pretty diverse schools that won’t cost an arm and a leg (if you’re paying in-state tuition, that is). The University of Illinois is a good all-around school with excellent engineering and agricultural programs (among others). Southern Illinois has one of the top communications programs in the country (or so I’ve been told). There’s Eastern Illinois University, Illinois State, Western Illinois, Northern Illinois, and there’s also about ten billion colleges in Chicago, but those are more expensive. Wikipedia has a very small sampling.
We have an Academically Talented (AcTal) program from grade 5-8, and then an advanced program for 9-12. I was in both, and it is definitely an advantage. The environment is one where every student wants to be there to learn, so you end up learning a lot more.
Are you talking about private or public school? Because you could move to conneticut or new jersey and still send your kids to private school in the city. It costs an arm and a leg and the commute’s a bitch, but it works for me.
Ah pooh, you stole my oppurtunity to talk about my really awesome school.
In any case, a few corrections. You are required to take an art class at least once or twice over the four years. And if you’re me, you aren’t allowed to take enough of them. The weaving studio actually has around 75 looms, and the jewelry people do more than just silver, I just happen to like it.
The Midwest in general is known for its high quality of schools. I went to all public schools. Most of my schooling was in an Iowa town of ~20,000 residents. When I was in elementary school, there was a special TAG (talented and gifted) program kids were bused to ~1 afternoon a week. In 7th grade they started the advanced math track. The high school offered several AP courses–US government, computer science, art, English, calc AB, biology, Spanish, macroecon, chemistry.
Then I moved to Madison, Wisconsin. It being a university town, I was worried that they other kids would be way ahead of me, but I did just fine. In some areas (grammar) I had been taught quite a bit more. Though the two high schools I went to were roughly the same size, the one in Madison offered a few more AP classes–they did both English tests (there are 2 AP English tests: Literature & Composition and Language & Composition), French, calc BC in addition to calc AB, microecon and macroecon, and maybe a few more. And I took the Physics–Mechanics AP test even though we didn’t have an AP physics class.
But everyone else is quite happy with their chosen path, and if we wind up sending our kids to school, I’ll be pleased to send them to the local elementary and see if they test into GATE.