<p>Marite, It is great to hear that there are so many opportunities for acceleration in both the younger grades and the h.s. level in your district! Our school's philosophy is that the students would "run out of math courses" if they accelerate, and, as I said, there is no mechanism in place for taking college courses. My son was in three seasons of sports (soccer or xc, winter track, spring track) and often arrived home very late especially after away games/meets. All in all, as I said, things worked out fine for him and the sports involvement was very beneficial to him from both a socialization and physical fitness standpoint. And we have had a serendipitous experience in the case of my daughter (currently a h.s. senior). She is not a math/science person and is challenged sufficiently by her humanities APs, so she does not have the problems we have been discussing here. However, she has a strong interest in art and art history, and, by luck, a teacher who taught one of her AP history classes and is also the advisor of a school club in which my daughter is an officer also has a lot of knowledge and strong interest in art history. She agreed to supervise my daughter in an independent study to prepare for the AP Art History test. The teacher may possibly teach this on her own in the summer to interested students in the future, so it is beneficial to her as well as she is preparing her syllabus by doing the course as a "pilot" with my daughter. So far, my daughter has put more work into this than any of her other regular classes, and she is enjoying it very much. I think the teacher is enjoying it too, as they have visited museum galleries relevant to the topic currently being studied together on days off from school. All of this is totally outside of the official school curriculum - it will not appear on her transcript as our school does not provide for independent study. Sometimes you just get lucky and something really good like this happens where you least expect it to!</p>