Gifted Education in the Schools

All public school systems in Georgia must offer gifted services in order to receive the state’s per-student funding for gifted students, in accordance with the state law that governs gifted education (PDF).

Counties have a choice of delivery models, and implementation of gifted services is left up to the governing boards of each county (or city) system. Visit the local system pages on this site to learn more about the specific programs offered.

State law prohibits one type of gifted service: early entrance to school. By law, a child must be 5 years old or older to begin kindergarten in a Georgia public school, and must be 6 or older to begin first grade. This means that if a child is bright enough to merit a grade skip (grade acceleration is the term educators use), they must nevertheless complete kindergarten and begin first grade with their age peers. They may be able to advance into second grade after their first-grade school year has begun, or may complete the entire year of first grade and skip second grade.

  1. August 16, 2017 at 3:47 pm

    could you please send the list of gifted elementary schools

    • August 17, 2017 at 9:45 am

      I’m not sure what you’re asking for. Here in the metro area, we do not have public elementary schools that exclusively serve gifted students. There are some private schools that target gifted students. Those are listed on the Private Schools page of this site.

  2. lauragneher
    October 15, 2021 at 12:29 am

    Hi Dori, it’s not clear to me why a student evaluated in late kindergarten for skipping first grade has to attend one or more days of first grade at the beginning of the year before making the skip? I haven’t found an answer to that yet. Is 1st grade attendance somehow mandatory?

    • October 15, 2021 at 11:06 am

      Hello. Thanks for writing. This is a great question. I don’t know the answer with certainty, but I can guess at the answer, based on what I do know. What I know is, Georgia law doesn’t allow children in public schools to skip from kindergarten into first grade. Therefore, my guess is that the extensive paperwork that’s required for a grade skip can’t be submitted until the child is enrolled in first grade.

      While we’re on the topic, I will say that it can take a while for the county office to process a grade skip request, so it may take a while before the student is approved to advance to second grade. (I can share more about this privately if you contact me directly through the Contact page.)

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: