Looking for opinions on best school environment!

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

I am looking for opinions on the best environment for an elementary school for

my son. He is currently in preschool and has AS and is also gifted. I think that

my main question is about balancing out which is more important - a smaller

school with a more peaceful environment that might have limited options for

gifted education vs. his neighborhood public school that has the gifted

specialists and exceptional education programs (assuming that he can get an IEP

for elementary).

We visited a K-12 charter school today, and I loved the small size of it (2

classes of 16 kids each per grade in elementary). Being a public school, they do

have an EC coordinator, but their small size and limited funding means that

there is no gifted program. (They have honors and AP classes for high school.)

The small class size would presumably allow for somewhat individual instruction,

although they do not have a specific policy in place about using differentiated

instruction.

Then there are private schools which have been recommended to us, particularly

Waldorf. The environment there is very peaceful, with a lot of good sensory

activities built into the day. While it is theoretically more child-led (and

they don't have to " teach to the test " because they do not do the standardized

EOG testing), all the kids are together in each grade, again without having an

official gifted instructor on campus. As a private school, they also don't have

an EC dept., of course, but I also hear that because they are more flexible and

nurturing than a public school, there may be fewer issues which arise.

I would love to get opinions from parents who have been through this before,

particularly when it comes to picking environment or instruction.

Thanks!

Bridget