Even the best schools offer little for the brightest students, DiMare says.

That's an understatement. While public schools statewide spend more than $9,400 per pupil with special needs, there are few if any programs for kids with high IQs.

In fact, Massachusetts ranks 48th among the 50 states in the percentage of its schools that offer gifted programs. Spending for high-achieving youngsters statewide comes to just $438,000 this year, putting Massachusetts in the company of states like Mississippi.

This means many gifted kids like the DiMares' son can get special instruction only by enrolling in pricey private schools--which, in many cases, also aren't particularly well equipped to single out the smartest students.

Even the sweeping 110-page 1983 Education Reform Act includes just brief references to gifted and talented students, none of them mandating that school districts offer special programs for such students, as 33 other states require by law. Instead, the ed-reform plan established an advisory council on gifted and talented education, which has so far done little.

"In Massachusetts, funding gifted and talented education is regarded as elitist." says Carole Ruth Harris, director and founder of Gifted and Talented Education Services, a private assessment and counseling service based in Winchester. "You have a lot of educational services for kids who are on the low end of the curve but almost nothing for kids on the high end."

As many as 10 percent of students are considered to be gifted, meaning that they have an IQ of 130 or higher. The "super smart" category begins at about 160.

Yet educating these children to their full potential is hardly a political or fiscal priority in Massachusetts. Only 75 of the state's 352 public school districts even have programs for high academic achievers. And while 150 school districts asked last year for a share of the approximately $438,000 the state allots for gifted education, only 52 got any, and those in amounts so measly as to be nearly insignificant.

Framingham, Andover, Arlington, Salem, Cohasset, Beverly, Somerville, Plymouth, Bedford, and Wakefield were given $7,500 each, for instance. Reading took home $1,540. Boston, Worcester, Springfield got $25,000 apiece. That's negligible compared with funding for children on the other end of the spectrum. Of the $6.26 billion spent on education last year in this state, $907 million went to special education.

"We're obviously not a priority in this state," says Beverly Quilty-Dunn, head of gifted services in Plymouth and chairperson of the Massachusetts Education Reform Advisory Committee.

By comparison, Virginia, with a population about the same as Massachusetts, spends more than $21.3 million a year educating gifted children. Missouri spends $32.1 million. Oklahoma earmarks $71 million. Florida allocates $437 million for education for the gifted.

Money is nor the only problem. Many teachers don't know how to deal with their smartest students.

"A lot of teachers are very threatened by gifted kids," says Harris.

Massachusetts teacher-training programs, already under fire for producing less-than-stellar graduates, offer almost no courses in gifted education.

Sensitivities about whose kids are the smartest also play a role. "If you had a program for the gifted, that would mean that there are children who aren't. That's a truth a lot of parents here won't tolerate," says a therapist who lives in Lexington.

"Let's say there are two parents chatting over the fence," says Joseph Harrington of Stoughton, a European-history professor who founded the private academic-enrichment summer programs College Gate and College Academy.

"One can brag about a child hitting three home runs. But the other can't do the same about the kid reading Darwin in the eighth grade. That would be taken as, What are you saying -- my kid is dumb?"

For this and other reasons, affluent suburban towns are among the many that do not have programs for gifted children.

"I wouldn't want a gifted and talented program in Lexington," says Joanne Benton, director of elementary education in that town, which has no special program for high achieving students. "That's elitist. I think the very term 'gifted and talented' is elitist. I think that all children have different gifts and we should be trying to provide for them."

Weston's public schools also offer no programs specifically for gifted kids. "You know, the whole idea of 'super smart' is a loaded term," says Paul Naso, principal of the Country School, one of Weston's two kindergarten through-grade-three schools. By keeping class sizes low, he says, "we like to think we are making accommodations for all children" (though with enrollment increases, class size at the school has crept back up to 23-24).

Framingham has one of the largest programs for gifted and talented students. There are also programs in towns such as Brookline, Arlington, Methuen, Dedham, and Wellfleet. Quincy and Brockton have tried another form of education for the gifted by simply bucking a trend toward putting all skill levels together all the time. Another form of gifted education, the advanced-placement class, is available in several subjects in many high schools.

Plymouth, which has had a gifted program for 12 years, has some 180 kids in grades four, five, and six in special classes. In fourth grade, gifted students meet for one hour each week. In fifth, they gather together for three-quarters of a regular school day once a week. In sixth, kids identified as gifted are pulled from class for two 45-minute periods a week for special sessions.

But even the best existing programs for gifted and talented kids in Massachusetts don't really meet the need. "It's minimal at best," says Plymouth's Quilty-Dunn. "I'11 be honest. We have only three staff members. They work in 10 different locations in three grade levels running two separate programs, the in-class and pullout. It's the best you can be with the limited amount of time we can spend. Is it the best you could have? No."

This situation has led to the surprising reality that as many as 11 to 20 percent of dropouts are actually among the smartest students in their schools, and not the dumbest.

"If you have kids who are over 150 or 160 IQ, they are just ignored," says Harris. "They begin to hate school."

It's not always the school's fault. Even in towns where there are programs for gifted and talented students, peer pressure to fit in is powerful, especially for middle school children. An Arlington father, a computer entrepreneur, says his daughter begged to be removed from the town's program that pulled bright kids into special classes. She was tired, he says, of being mocked by other kids as a "brain" who thought she was better than them.

Her parents let her leave the program and the girl, now 16, pretends to be just an average student. "It's just not considered cool to be smart at that age," her father says.

Laurence Osborne, lead teacher in Quincy's Advanced Placement Center for gifted and talented students, says super smart students need to be around kids like themselves even more than they need teachers. "If the norm is being smart," he says, "you'll act smart."

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