Gifted child in California of 2024

Giftedness alone does not make kids qualify for IEP. We went through the evaluation with OUSD and the psychologist, who was so nice and helpful, lamented that CA does not have accommodations for advanced or gifted children unlike where she was from.

If your child is twice exceptional, he may qualify for IEP/504.

However, the evaluation through OUSD focused solely on assessing whether the child is below the grade level and thus required support.

You may get lucky and encounter 1-2 teachers who try to differentiate, but our experience was that teachers don’t and can’t help gifted kids. They have too much work and too many kids to support.

If your son is highly or profoundly gifted, a special school for the gifted or homeschooling may be the answer. For our moderately gifted with a mild ADHD, a small progressive private school ended up being the answer. 

I don’t have any experience with IEPs, but I chimed in to say that private school likely won’t be much better, unless it is a school specifically for gifted kids. My child is not “gifted” but was above grade level in everything and bored in public school. In search of more challenging academics, we chose a rigorous private school for middle school. It is not challenging. We likely will switch back to public for 8th grade, because why be not challenged for $2900/month when you can be not challenged for free?

Your research matches our lived experience.  Gifted students (who don't have a disability) do not qualify for an IEP full stop.  And even when the district or teacher tries, the supports and differentiation have in our experience been puzzling at best.   

As an example, PUSD explained that gifted children may absorb information more quickly and grasp information or concepts after 1 iteration.  Other kids may require 2-3 days to cover the same information.  So the differentiation for our daughter was to be sent to sit in the hallway while teachers taught/repeated a lesson for 2-3 days. 

Logically speaking, if a kid gets it after the first pass, providing the so-called 'differentiation' to sit in the hallway while a teacher teaches the content to the rest of the class makes sense.  However, I don't think anyone would say this was positive or meaningful. It checks the box that differentiation was provided (I guess?) and that's all.

Many gifted students leave the district for this reason.  Before we started to live this, I used to wonder why people would pay the premium to live in Piedmont, yet send their kids to private school.  Now I understand.

When my kids were in school, they both went through periods of what they called boredom. It may have been because the work was too easy, too hard, just plain boring or maybe something else was going on in school that made them less than enthusiastic. One thing that helped my kids was that they attended a public elementary school that had mixed grade classrooms which allowed them to do work/read books at their level even if it was above grade level. Other things that challenged them (in a good way) included working in groups, helping their peers with classwork, and understanding how to navigate social dynamics with their older and younger classmates. So, I suggest you consider this option if you can find it. Good luck!

One of the best ways to help your child is to brainstorm with them what things they can do when they are done their schoolwork— reading/writing/math puzzles/daydreaming. Then work with the teacher to facilitate that. My kid’s teachers were almost all pretty tolerant of quiet alternatives my child found for themself. Your child can be the one who writes two pages when everyone else is writing three sentences. Also sign them up for as many enrichment activities as they want. The Bay Area , especially in SF and Berkeley, is full of them.