Elisandra Fernandez first heard of the “gifted kid” label one morning in her first-grade class, when a teacher told her she was a good test-taker and belonged in the gifted student program — a program to academically accelerate high-achieving and fast-developing students.
Fernandez didn’t understand what being ‘gifted’ meant, but when she took a school-distributed IQ Test at the end of her third grade, she became part of the 6% of public school students nationwide that score above average intellect.
She was then placed in “gifted classes,” each grade level with rising rigor and taught by teachers who would constantly mention how gifted students were the crème de la crème. Fernandez’s small gifted class was slowly secluded from the rest of the school, and a scent of competitiveness began permeating the air amongst gifted kids.
At nine years old, Fernandez already had an archenemy — a pale boy named Tyler. Every week, they would compete for who had the best test scores, culminating in Elisandra’s win in the sixth grade when she scored higher than Tyler in an English Diagnostic Test.
Tyler inconsolably cried into his paper, and Elisandra mockingly hummed to a singsong.
It wasn’t until four years later, as Fernandez quietly cried inside one of Miami Lakes Educational Center’s locked storage rooms while staring at her own low-score English test, that she had a rather dark realization about what being “gifted” truly meant: she, like many other kids, was raised around the idea that all her worth laid in academic scores.
The education system had failed her.
Academic Pressures and Struggles
Every year, millions of elementary students across the nation are given an IQ test to determine their eligibility for their school’s gifted class. There is no official U.S. organization that collects these students’ statistics, but the gifted program is globally recognized as prestigious.
Gifted students enter a system which prioritizes their intellectual advancement by placing them in difficult courses, setting them on a path to take high-school-level classes during middle school. The program has been largely criticized for perpetrating inequality in education, where low-income students who can’t put education as a priority due to family circumstances or otherwise afford tutors are often ignored. Nonetheless, it is a system that has existed for decades across the continental United States.
The program generally extends from elementary to middle school — but in high school, where the accelerated courses dating to middle school dictate one’s schedule, the pressures of being gifted continue. It is a weight exacerbated by expectations of getting into a top college and acing college-level examinations such as those of AP courses, IB classes, and AICE level.
Fernandez followed this exact path when she began her first year at MLEC, taking an AP course and entering her school’s prestigious Cambridge Academy, which she quickly found out was the school’s headquarters for previous gifted students.
She finished her freshman year triumphantly with an “A” Grade Point Average and being awarded “Top Ninth Grader in English Honors.” In sophomore year though, everything changed — it was a year where she constantly had to juggle between living in different family houses, extra responsibilities with her two younger siblings, and managing a new load of hard classes. She stared at her Pre-Calculus Honors homework and thought about her gradebook with a glowing red “F.”
“I’d [usually] be the one to wake up my entire family [in school days],” says Fernandez.
“It got so bad that I would lay awake in bed… and just wait for my mom to wake up just so that I’d be late for school and miss [Pre-Calculus] class.”
Instead of asking why she was late and absent, or why she sometimes didn’t wear the school uniform given she had to sleep at different family members’ houses, school administrators scolded Fernandez. She was never asked why her absences had gone up and grades had gone down — it was always just warning after warning of “we will kick you out of Cambridge and you won’t graduate if you keep this up.”
It all finally crumbled down when Elisandra scored a “B” — what she considered a low grade in English — in a vocabulary test in her English class, the course where she had always effortlessly aced with an A+.
She felt she couldn’t breathe anymore. She didn’t have a hold of her home life nor academic life, not even in what she had always been “gifted” in. She thought about reaching out for help to an MLEC counselor, but she remembered how she had done so already a few months prior, and all she had received was a religious sermon on how praying could improve her life.
“[The school counselor I visited] told me I had to rely on three F’s: Faith, Family, and Friends,” says Fernandez, jokingly pointing out that she is atheist and that at that time she spoke with the counselor she was struggling with family stability and school friendships.
Fernandez began thinking about committing suicide daily, and she was soon diagnosed with Major Depression and involuntarily locked in a psychatrical ward for a week.
“[School administrators, who knew I was locked up,] had a meeting where they spoke about me getting help from the school and [me] having more meetings with them but that never actually happened.”
“I just didn’t have the motivation to do anything [from then on],” recalls Fernandez of what she thought after coming out of the ward, where she felt she didn’t receive proper help. “[I] was just coasting by and lowkey crying in every class with my head down and hoping nobody noticed,” she continues.
“[I] was… planning on running away and offing myself over the summer.”
No Help From Florida, Miami-Dade, MLEC
Research by the Cambridge University Press points out that, like Fernandez, most gifted students suffer psychological difficulties including depression, anxiety, high levels of stress, and isolation.
With suicide being the second leading death cause amongst high school teenagers, the mental state reality of gifted kid raises a slew of alarming questions of what the gifted program creates — does the label put too much pressure on young students? Are the high expectations to blame? What should schools’ role be in helping these teens?
In Florida, the response to this has been to require students to watch a mental health video series in Edgenuity, a platform that operates on a per-student licensing model and costs the state around $350-$1,000 per student. The videos aim to tackle depression, anxiety, and how students can cope with these issues, recommending in an overly positive note actions such as meditation and taking study breaks.
As someone who is diagnosed with Depression, Fernandez points out the videos do not help at all though — the series is but a mini bandaid on a miles-long dam fissure.
“The [state] can do so much better than wasting money that could go towards the schools [instead of paying for] those useless videos, which are just to absolve themselves from any blame when someone eventually kills themselves,” weighs in Fernandez.
“For example, the professional school district therapist that I met up with once at the end of sophomore year [said she] could only come to [MLEC] like two-three times a month cause she was spread so thin,” she continues.
In all of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, there are only four professional support specialists to aid struggling students across what is the fourth largest school district in the nation. Neurodivergent students like Fernandez then find themselves speaking to non-professional counselors.
“I’m diagnosed with stuff that obviously affects my motivation and I can’t really get actual help,” stresses Fernandez. “We could do better.”
Often, former gifted students’ pleas are reduced to calling their struggles “the gifted kid burnout” too, when in reality there’s a much bigger picture schools should be focusing on to help their struggling students.
This student-life structure, where there’s an overwhelming emphasis on valuing academics with no regard to mental health, is creating a generation of neurodivergent teens who are shut off from receiving any help.
For students like Fernandez, the issue then doesn’t lie on the gifted program, underfunded districts, or uncaring school administrators — it lies on the entire system that permits all of these to exist.
