Reply to S/O - Potential defector from ACPS to APS, how does the gifted program work?

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Reply to "S/O - Potential defector from ACPS to APS, how does the gifted program work?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In my experience, APS gifted services are under-whelming. I have an ES child tagged in math, language arts, social studies, and science. They really don't do anything for social studies and science at our school. As one of the PPs said, there is "push in" for math and language arts, but that basically has meant that the gifted teacher comes into the classroom 2x a month and does little lessons with the kids in the corner while the rest of the class works with the classroom teacher. My sense is that the gifted teacher spends more of his time "training" the classroom teachers in how to differentiate lessons for the gifted kids (e.g, the gifted kids might be clustered into one math group and do a different activity than the rest of the class during math workshop time, but all with the classroom teacher). At the upper grades, they do divide the kids into different classes for math and they rotate teachers, sort of like middle school. APS is definitely strongest in gifted services for math. Everything else is hit or miss. I've heard this is an area that Tara Natress (the new Asst Super of Instruction) is interested in beefing up as part of her "personalized learning" focus, but I'm also afraid that she is going to get too bogged down with the high school overcrowding situation to really focus on it. ([b]Honestly, my advice to you before you move is to make sure you understand that issue before you move-- we've got a real capacity crisis coming at the high school level, and our School Board and Super seem to be totally without a plan to handle it[/b].)[/quote]

Thanks for the input.  I've found that gifted services in ACPS are hit or miss as well, but have been told that the higher grades are better (for example, them doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th, for the math-identified kids).

As far as the HS/bold stuff goes, I have been trying to follow along about all of this.  I understand this is a real issue, and from what I can tell the school board isn't handling things well.  That being said, ACPS also has overcrowding issues (despite being a not-very-good school system on paper), and at least in a vacuum, we'd rather have our kid in a better crowded system than a worse crowded system.  Moving into other jurisdictions isn't an option (spouse and I work in opposite directions), nor is private school, unfortunately.  [/quote]

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