| My personal experiences are as follows: 1. I was also in a couple of gifted programs in school that didn't do much. They were fun at the time, but I don't really think they helped me develop much personally. 2. I participated in some out of school gifted programs that helped me tremendously. I also just learned things on my own time for fun. 3. I went to 2 different middle schools and 3 different high schools (one of them being the school recieving the lowest amount of funding among all the schools in the state). Most of them were really tight on money and were cutting a lot of programs, both academic and otherwise. While I do wish that school sponsered gifted programs could get more funding as I know gifted programs can be great, if money is tight, I'd rather money go to other programs. There are many ways a gifted child can learn on their own if they choose to, if some one has an undiagnosed learning disability they can't just change that on a whim. Really I wish schools just got more funding in general. It varies greatly from school to school (I reccently saw my partners old high shcool and I was amazed at how nice the they had proper gym equipment and clean facilities, I don't know about their actual programs, but it looked like they'd have the money to spend on gifted programs), but at the schools I went to there simply wasn't enough money to go around. |