Gifted School
If you're part of a big city or sprawling suburban school district, it's possible your school's version of a program for gifted and talented students involves a magnet school affiliated with your traditional schools. Magnet schools were first developed in the 1960s as a way to ensure racial segregation but today's magnet schools often provide an education a bit more focused than that presented in a traditional classroom.
Many school districts use the magnet school approach as a way to enhance the learning environment for students enrolled in the district's gifted school program. Like a magnet draws iron from across known boundaries, so do magnet schools draw kindred students from across individual school jurisdictions within one larger school district.
Magnet schools serve other purposes, too, and aren't limited to gifted school programs alone. Some magnet school missions may be to work especially with students looking to earn a job-related degree, such as might be gotten from an education based on the subject matter dealing with agriculture, technical, or some other type of vocational curriculum.
Many a magnet school is chartered with the goal of becoming a gifted school for students who function exceptionally well from an artistic perspective. Such a facility may be dedicated to performing arts or limited to the visual arts alone. Exceptional levels of creativity qualify for gifted and talented designations in a growing number of school districts across the United States.
Students who demonstrate a high command of mathematics, the sciences, or even engineering and high technology are likely candidates for a gifted school program designed to help students excel in these disciplines.
Where once the status of gifted was bestowed only on students who scored exceptionally high on IQ tests, the administrators of schools today understand that there is more than that to being gifted and each child is talented in his or her own unique way. As a result, magnet schools and other specially designated programs designed to be gifted school facilities for exceptional students are now dedicated to developing even more of a child's abilities and aptitudes than intellect alone.
Some smaller school districts also offer specially designed programs that are incorporated frequently into a conventional school curriculum, although they may not have a specially designated, stand-alone gifted school facility dedicated to just this need. More and more school districts are acknowledging that special children, even the highly intelligent or gifted ones, need special education geared to their specific needs and they strive to make an adequate education available to all.