Not from CA but had this experience growing up. I was bored in school so I hummed, read books from home, took naps and so on during lessons. Evidently that led to a discussion between my first grade teacher and my parents where they wanted to shunt me off into the developmental disabilities program. Thank God my mother was as involved as she was because what my teacher was reading as disability was merely the disinterest of someone hearing for the tenth time something they understood before they were told about it the first time. Had they put me in special ed in the first grade I'm sure that by the time anyone realized the mistake (assuming they did) I would have been so far behind that there would have been no fixing it. Instead my mom objected in the most vehement terms and they actually gave me some one on one time to assess my ability to learn material that was new to me and I ended up in the gifted program instead. My brother in law is similarly intelligent but has emotional processing issues among other things. He was put into the same program they wanted me to put into. He said he basically had to educate himself while the "teachers" just let them watch movies all day, and it was clear that the special ed program was nothing more than a sink into which they could dump problematic kids to ensure they don't disrupt the kids that the school hasn't technically given up on yet.