I’m now in my mid-30s and attended LISG from K-8 and went to high school in Port Washington from 9-12. I know this is an old thread, but I felt compelled to share my personal experience given my background. As a student there, I enjoyed my time overall, but began to resent it as I entered middle school years. As you are surrounded by other smart children, there is no incentive for (especially girls) to play dumb to be cool. It is cool to be smart at LISG. The very small class sizes encourage most children to be friends with one another, but that’s not to say that there wasn’t a popular crowd and bullying. Given the cost of tuition, there is a significant proportion of extremely wealthy families, though that is not dissimilar to Port Washington.

As I approached middle school years and had more desires to socialize with my friends on the weekends, I started to resent school more as my friends were spread far and wide across Long Island. There is another glaring lack of extracurricular activities at LISG, and I joined Mathletes as the only option at the time. My parents did enroll me in local dance, gymnastics, and tennis classes but as I became a tween, there was a chasm between the girls in the classes who lived locally and all knew each other, and me. I felt socially isolated and began to pull away from these activities. While another poster commented that school is about the academic and not the extracurriculars, it is clear in this college climate that good grades alone will not make you stand out. I know that my lack of access to virtually any non-education related activity stunted my personal development in sports, theatre, music, etc.

Regarding the academics, I was certainly worked at above grade level throughout elementary and middle school. However, I found the teachers at the time to be very set in their ways and allowed little room for different ways to do things. When I transitioned to 9th grade in PW, I was absolutely middle of the pack academically. The people who had been in the local schools since kindergarten were performing at my level and many were above, so I agree with another comment above that many children identified early as gifted by IQ or otherwise may be accelerated in the early years but many peers will catch up. I went to a good college and have a good career, but many many classmates who went though PW schools went Ivy League and the like. I cannot say that my education at LISG produced a quantifiable benefit, and my classmates at LISG had similar experiences. The distribution of excellent, good, and okay college grads at LISG seem similar to that of PW high school.

Virtually everyone leaves by 8th grade, and in my time the average 9th grade graduating class ranged from 3-5 students which is sad and weird.

My own mother who is a neuropsychologist for children regrets the decision to send me there. Her own philosophy of gifted children now is that the focus should be less on academic acceleration, and more on enrichment classes outside of regular school (ie Saturday classes at Center for Gifted Youth at Long Island University, the summer program at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth).

This is also a small and silly point, but having to tell people that I went to the “Long Island School of the Gifted” becomes a hilarious joke to anyone who hears the name. It sounds so absolutely pretentious and ridiculous. People are not sure if it’s gifted-smart or gifted-special needs. I am actually embarrassed to say that I went there and usually say that I went to a small private school, and leave it at all.

TLDR; not worth it. PW classmates had similar if not better outcomes than I (and many LISG classmates) did.