Poverty prevalent in rural areas is associated with unequal representation in gifted programs. Some impediments to equal access include cultural prejudice, family distrust of schools, the stigma of academic success, inappropriate identification practices, and poor funding for rural programs. Five rural states have adopted measures to promote proportional representation, by developing adequate funding for rural gifted programs and fair identification practices. To identify the brightest students in isolated rural schools, norm-referenced tests can be used with local standardization. Three approaches are proposed: (1) create a pool of referrals from students whose achievement test scores fall in the top 50% for that school, administer a group IQ test to the referrals, refer the top quartile for individual IQ and achievement testing, rank students, and select top scorers until 3% of the school population has been identified; (2) create a pool of referrals from the top 25% of all scores on a group IQ test, administer an individual screening-level IQ test, rank the scores, and select the top scorers until 3% of the school population has been identified; (3) use an entire rural district to develop local norms and apply the norms to the test performance of referred children. (Author/JDD)