I have to say, I’d been having my doubts whether anyone in Montgomery County gave a fig about GT education, but a modicum of my faith was restored on Wednesday, when I was invited to participate on Gifted Centers/Magnet School Roundtable at the girls’ former elementary school.
Just to back up… At the end of October a message was posted to the school listserv announcing that the Gifted and Talented Committee was looking for alumni parents and students to participate on a panel about the Centers and Magnets. Be still my heart! There was actually a GT committee! Listserv lurker though I may be, I whipped off an email to the chairperson to introduce myself, to let her know that I was thrilled that she was breathing some life into GT at the school, and to offer to serve as a resource, because back in the day I had been the GT chair. She wrote back and we agreed to meet for coffee that weekend.
I knew we were going to hit it off when she told me that one of her first moves was to have the school PTA formally change the name of the committee from “Highly Able Learner Committee” back to Gifted and Talented Committee. You go!
It was a really good meeting which took the form of “You me tell your story and I’ll tell mine.” Her story included the nugget that that her son had been whole grade-accelerated in Kindergarten—in fact six children had been in her child’s year. But then a new principal came in—and rescinded the skip for four of them. Man, that took my breath away. I can’t imagine being one of those parents. We must have talked for two hours and we covered a whole lot of ground: William and Mary, MAP-R’s, the political context of the Centers and Magnet, etc. etc. In the days that followed I sent her more resources, including a 33-page “Highly Able Learner Handbook” that I had put together when I was the GT chair. I had forgotten about it, but she was thrilled (“This is GREAT!!! Why didn’t I get this handbook two years ago?”). She quickly decided that the committee would update it and post it to the PTA’s website. By January. Awesome.
And then there was the panel. She already had commitments from the school counselor, a couple and their child attending the Center, another parent and child attending the Humanities and Communications Arts magnet, and a student attending the performing arts lottery magnet. She asked if I could join as well, because in addition to having had a child in both the Center and a Magnet—and the experience of leaving those programs early—I could speak about the larger MCPS policy context. I said I’d be happy to participate.
The panel went really, really well. The GT Chair did a super job of organizing. The turnout was decent—all the chairs in the media center were taken—although afterwards she noted that no one from the PTA’s leadership came, nor school staff besides the counselor. And it was great to hear the perspectives of the kids and their families, the “been there, done that’s”, and the utter randomness of it all. The one mom and I actually went back to preschool days, and it was great to catch up. Her older child, a year ahead of C., had been in a Center—but not gotten into a middle school magnet. Her younger child didn’t get into a Center—but got into a middle school magnet. The one who ended up at “regular” middle school thrived there and loved it. M., same school, not.
The comments from the school counselor were particularly interesting to me. She had been a counselor for many years at an elementary school that houses a Center Program, and she described the efforts they made to bond these highly gifted kids, who had all been stars at their respective home schools, into a cohesive community. She also admitted the difficulty in bridging the tensions of the Center/home school divide. A parent asked if the counselors from the schools housing the Centers ever collaborated. The answer: no. Wow, I thought, is that ever a hole in the support services to gifted students. In fact I would guess that your average MCPS school counselor has little-to-no training whatsoever in giftedness. This certainly has been our experience, especially at the middle school level in the Down County. When a counselor is dealing with gangs, teen pregnancy, truancy, homelessness… the “angsting” of “privileged” gifted kids is going to be ignored—until it rises to the level of setting a fire or being insubordinate. But that doesn’t make it right.
There were lots of great questions, about homework, about what happens to kids who don’t go to the Centers or magnets, about what happens in high school. I was so busy listening or talking that I didn’t take notes, but if a summary comes out I will share it here.
