Gifted Students

Seated at folding tables in a Widener University lounge, 30 students were asked to think about their own learning styles. Did they like everything in their life to be organized, or were they risk- takers? There were no right or wrong answers, Arlene Wartenberg, Widener professor, said. All the answers would simply help the students learn more about themselves. "I jump right into things without thinking things out, so I'm more of a right-brain than a left-brain thinker," said Tarah Brown, 12, of Yeadon.

The Challenge Program for Gifted Children in the Lower Merion School District will be evaluated by outside experts from Columbia University's Teachers College in New York on Monday and Tuesday, Ceil Frey, coordinator of the Challenge Program, said at Monday's school board meeting. "This type of evaluation is done all the time," said Frey. "Parents for the Committee for Special Education - comprised of parents of children who are either gifted or have learning disabilities - asked for outside evaluators to come in and take a look at our program.

They are the promise of the future - the leaders, inventors and scholars of tomorrow. But often, their abilities go unchallenged and their special needs unmet as the public schools grapple with the question of how best to serve them. Quick to learn, yet quick to bore, the nation's gifted students pose a special challenge to educators, according to experts in the field of gifted education. At a forum sponsored by the New Jersey Department of Education last week at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, instruction for the gifted was described as having gained strength and legitimacy, despite the contention by some educators that bright students would succeed without it. Federal law entitles all students to a "thorough and efficient education in the least restrictive environment.

The Abington school board has unanimously approved a change in the way academically gifted children will be identified, and officials projected that the change would increase the ranks of those students by about 20 percent. However, the nine-member board voted, 7-1 with one abstention, Tuesday to postpone action on a revised educational program to deal with gifted students - those with IQs of 130 and higher. Board president Leonard M. Rosenfeld voted against the postponement. Board member Muriel J. Alt cast the abstention.

A controversial program for gifted students in the Wissahickon School District was approved by the Board of Education members Tuesday after they were assured that no additional staff would be hired. But that did not satisfy some opponents of the program, who argued that the kind of topics the program would encompass were inappropriate for high school students. A subject such as bioethics or medical technology "requires months or years of study before the students would be ready to render an informed opinion," said parent Job Luning Prak.

Every spring, Ed Stevens watches his academically talented sons waste valuable classroom time as their teachers drill slower learners for the important PSSA state tests. "High learners are being held down," said Stevens, whose two children attend schools in the Tredyffrin/Easttown district in Chester County. "They're not getting what they need to grow. " With public schools across the region focused on aiding struggling students to meet federal mandates, many area parents believe their gifted and talented children are being shortchanged.

As a group of gifted children determined whether certain products were acids or bases, their parents and teachers learned about the newest thinking on gifted education. Both the children's and adults' events were part of the State Conference of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE) this weekend at the Sheraton Valley Forge Hotel, attended by more than 400 people. Keynote speaker Sally M. Reis, an associate psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, pointed to studies showing that missing large chunks of regular class time while participating in enrichment programs has virtually no effect on the grades of gifted students in reading, math, social studies or spelling.

By pulling fewer students out of regular classes for the district's Gifted and Talented Program next year, school officials hope to create more enrichment opportunities for students in mainstream classes. That is the strategy behind a proposal to revamp the district's Gifted and Talented Program, which was presented to the Board of Education Tuesday night by program coordinator Linda Goldkrantz. "We were servicing a specific group of students and were looking at how the program could be broadened," she said.

Multiple crises are forcing elected officials to focus almost exclusively on near-term challenges, ignoring areas that could lead to more vexing predicaments. Perhaps nowhere is this shortsightedness more apparent than in our nation's disregard for educating our most promising students. While emerging nations are redoubling their investments in their brightest minds, the United States has opted for neglect. Washington invests a pittance in gifted education - about 2.6 cents of every $100 in federal education funds.

Katie Devanney, a 16-year-old from Paoli, likes the high school she has designed for herself. She takes three courses online through a Chester County cyber charter school but also takes a literature course for gifted students in the basement of a former church in West Chester. The arrangement makes her a cyber-blended student who takes courses on a computer but also at the cyber school's gifted education center, where she is taught in person by teachers and sits next to other students.

In the coming weeks, Gov. Corbett and State Education Secretary Ronald J. Tomalis will make decisions that will determine the future of Chester. Following the secretary's court-ordered meetings with representatives of Chester Community Charter School, the Chester Upland School District, and others, the city's schools may get the funding they need to provide a constitutionally mandated education to more than 7,000 young people. Or commonwealth officials may deprive the schools of adequate resources or, worse still, close them down.

Ann B. Kanar, 78, of West Deptford, a former teacher in the Philadelphia schools' Gifted and Talented Program who also coached many student teachers over the years, died of heart disease Tuesday, Oct. 26, at her home. After a few years of teaching second and third graders at two Deptford schools, Mrs. Kanar received a master's degree in education from Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in 1968. For her thesis, she took a bold stand by designing a sex-education curriculum in which students would learn everything from genetics to the anatomy and physiology of sex, said her son, Aaron.

Olney East High School freshman Nadiyah Young signed up for a mentoring program for all the wrong reasons. Young wasn't expecting her life to be transformed when she joined Health Tech, which places high school students at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children to learn about health careers. "I heard about this program where you get out of school on Friday and get paid for it," said Young, now a senior. "I didn't have any motivation at all. " Three years later, she's hopeful she's on a fast track to a medical career.

At Springfield High School in Delaware County, the expression they use is, "I'm going to Trout. " The kids all know what it means. It's shorthand for the furniture-making taught by George Trout, who is single-handedly responsible for beautifying the homes of Springfield with more handcrafted furniture than you'd find in a Shaker village. When his students talk about him, they use words like passionate, caring, inspiring. Declares one admirer: "He's the man!" He is one of those teachers who teach more than they seem to be teaching.

Multiple crises are forcing elected officials to focus almost exclusively on near-term challenges, ignoring areas that could lead to more vexing predicaments. Perhaps nowhere is this shortsightedness more apparent than in our nation's disregard for educating our most promising students. While emerging nations are redoubling their investments in their brightest minds, the United States has opted for neglect. Washington invests a pittance in gifted education - about 2.6 cents of every $100 in federal education funds.

Pennsylvania is taking steps to make gifted education available to more students, but that has done little to quell long-standing tension between parents and school districts over how the state's brightest are educated. The proposed changes on course to become final this summer make clear that districts must use more than an IQ score to identify gifted students - as most other states do. The state sets a 130 IQ as the trigger for gifted education and allows districts to choose the other criteria, such as teacher recommendations and classroom work.

Make-believe detectives examined fingerprints and scribbled clues in their notebooks. Nearby, children launched a rocket fueled by Alka Seltzer and water. Despite appearances, this was not the school science fair. Instead, it was a social mixer for an unusual peer group - youngsters often set apart by their high intelligence and sense of social unease. The 17th annual conference of the New Jersey Association for Gifted Children drew roughly 700 people to a hotel and conference center in Princeton two weeks ago. Among them were kindergartners to middle school students who learned together, and parents and teachers who attended workshops and listened to lectures.

The Writers Guild strike is still crippling Hollywood productivity, but there is no work stoppage among the creative minds in the West Chester Area School District. On Saturday night, 17 young filmmakers from all three West Chester high schools will present their original works in the auditorium of Bayard Rustin High School at the 2008 West Chester Student Film Festival, the first of its kind in the district. The festival, rescheduled after inclement weather closed schools on Feb. 1, is the brainchild of Aya Hoffman, a Rustin student who came up with the idea for her senior project.

Katie Devanney, a 16-year-old from Paoli, likes the high school she has designed for herself. She takes three courses online through a Chester County cyber charter school but also takes a literature course for gifted students in the basement of a former church in West Chester. The arrangement makes her a cyber-blended student who takes courses on a computer but also at the cyber school's gifted education center, where she is taught in person by teachers and sits next to other students.

Four Faust Elementary fifth graders sat in a circle sharing questions they have for U.S. troops. "Why did you want to be a soldier in Iraq?" Kristina Ignatova, 10, asked on a recent morning at her Bensalem school. At Pemberton High School in Burlington County, Brendan McCartney, 14, and Sankalp Kulshreshtha and Josh Muckelston, both 15, wrote and performed a rap song they call "Soldier's Life. " Their class wrote poems, songs and letters about those fighting in Iraq. As the war enters its fourth year, teachers around the region and nation are finding ways to teach students about the war and Iraq.