Introduction The following article was written by Meghan and details her experience having her daughter identified and placed within a congregated gifted class.  If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact Meghan.  Our Daughter's Identification and Placement Process When we first started this process, of having our daughter identified as gifted and arranging for an appropriate school placement, I felt as though I was feeling my way forward in the dark. It would have been nice to have been given some light and a road map. I’ve written up our journey so far, on the hopes that someone else might find the road easier as a result of knowing ahead of time what to expect. I have tried to stick mostly to the facts of what happened. I won’t go into all the e-mails that flew back and forth, the rumours and conflicting information. When my daughter was very small, people kept telling me that I should home school her, because she was obviously gifted and, "they don’t do anything for gifted kids until after grade 4!" I was even told that by one elementary school principal when I called, trying to find out if there was any such thing as early entrance. My tall daughter, with her birthday right after the cut-off, already reading and writing, seemed like a perfect candidate for early entrance to junior kindergarten. Unfortunately, the cut-off date is not negotiable in Ottawa. Private school, I was told, was my only other option. But, given that private school do not generally offer academic scholarships at the kindergarten level, it was not an option we could afford. Nevertheless, we decided to have her tested when she was 4, the summer before she started junior kindergarten. She was a very active child, several people had already said, "hyperactive," and we wanted a snapshot of where she was intellectually and academically before she started school. We hoped there wouldn’t be any problems, but we wanted to be prepared. I brought the issue up first with my family doctor, and he referred me to the Turnbull Learning Centre. I called them, explained the situation, and they referred me to Dr. Sandra Nandi. Dr. Nandi was the first person to alert us to the presence of one more possible option. If my daughter tested above the 99.6th percentile on an IQ test, then she would qualify for the Primary Gifted Program. This is a congregated gifted class offered by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board for profoundly gifted children. Testing was partially covered by my husband’s insurance, under "psychological services". We ended up paying about three hundred dollars out of pocket, after asking our family doctor to write a very carefully worded referral for us. Dr. Nandi was a great help in leading us through the intricacies of the insurance system. We had an initial intake interview with Dr. Nandi, then two days of testing with the WPPSI-r and assorted achievement tests, then a final meeting with Dr. Nandi. We were very pleased to discover that our daughter most definitely qualified for the Primary Gifted Program. But now there were two years of kindergarten to get through. After much debate, we finally ended up sending our daughter to the local alternative school, on the hopes that they would be more flexible about accommodating her academic abilities. It did not turn out entirely satisfactorily. My daughter’s academic abilities were accelerating to the point where, if she didn’t get into the gifted program, I was prepared to home school her. We did not much find use to the academic levels testing we’d had done. Her teacher refused to look at any of it, and with 25 children in her class, including special needs, I could see her point. My daughter’s attitude towards kindergarten quickly became one of. "How much work can I avoid doing?" But in the end we did manage to get through the next two years with only minor bumps and a certain amount of anxiety on my part. I don’t play the waiting game well. I called board’s Special Education department in December of my daughter’s senior kindergarten year, and the Gifted Co-ordinator faxed the application forms to the Special Education Resource Teacher at my daughter’s school. Her teacher of the past year and a half was due to retire at the end of December, but before she left she filled out the Teacher Evaluation form and left it with the SERT teacher. I was also given a checklist to fill out on my daughter, formally requesting that she be considered for the program. Under normal circumstances my daughter would have been tested by her school using a group test called the CCAT. But since she had been previously tested privately, she did not have to be tested again. All we had to do was continue to wait. In March the Primary Gifted Committee met and reviewed the applications to the program. Unfortunately, the school board was fighting with the province and the form we received said our child had been accepted, "placement pending budget". More waiting. Finally, this past May, we were informed on the Friday before the Victoria long weekend that our daughter was finally being offered a spot in the program. We needed to fill in the sheet indicating whether we accepted or rejected the offer, and return it by the next school day - a Tuesday. The school orientation and information session on the Primary Gifted Program was that same night. I turned our acceptance in to our school that morning, but at the orientation session I discovered that many parents had managed to negotiate an extra day, so they would have a chance to check our the school and the program before making a decision. We found out a great deal about the program at that session, and while the commitment to enrich rather than accelerate the children worried us, we liked the emphasis on independent work and the arts. Later that same month we were invited to visit the school while classes were in session. The program had much the same feel that the alternative school had, with many children of different ages and grade levels working together on projects. All the children seemed happy and self directed and the level of work I observed was very high. My daughter left with the phone numbers of two little girls who will be in grade one with her next year. Her formal IPRC (Identification, Review and Placement Committee) meeting will be held in June. The school did not want to formally identify my daughter as gifted until they knew whether she had been accepted into the program. That makes the IPRC, and the resulting IEP (Individual Education Plan), just a formality. All in all we are feeling very optimistic about our daughter’s future in the public school system!