Editor,
I am writing to express my concern and disappointment with Carmel Clay School’s decision to do away with the Challenge Program for high ability/gifted children at the elementary school level. My daughter is a first grader at Forest Dale Elementary and from a very young age was tested and identified as highly gifted. My family specifically chose to live in Carmel due to my own positive experiences being educated within the Carmel Clay Schools gifted and talented program, and we were happy to know that our daughter’s exceptional academic potential would be recognized, appreciated and nurtured in classrooms of intellectual peers.
The importance of situating gifted children among their intellectual peers and recognizing gifted children as having different academic needs from their at-grade-level peers has been documented. Meeting the needs of gifted children requires more than simply giving them a harder book to read, a more advanced assignment or extra work. These children require different work than their grade-level peers.
According to the Indiana Association for the Gifted, gifted students require a separate curriculum that is accelerated, that fosters interdisciplinary connections, that requires critical thinking and that taps into the students’ abilities of in depth analysis. IAG also highly discourages classroom models that require the gifted students to spend too much time self-teaching or learning from technology rather than from an instructor, models that provide gifted students with extra enrichment activities which never tie into a greater curriculum whole and models that simply give gifted students coursework designed for normal learners at a higher grade level.
Just as teachers who work with special needs students must obtain training to meet the particular needs of their students, it is also important for teachers who will be working with gifted and high ability students to be trained to recognize that this subset of students does indeed have special learning needs, and to then meet those needs.
Given that gifted students are not only capable of learning more and in greater depth than their grade-level peers, and that they require different education then their grade-level peers, I am dismayed that Carmel Clay Schools has decided to do away with classrooms in which gifted students’ needs can be addressed. Within the Total School Cluster Grouping model, teachers must make one curriculum work for all ability levels and be pulled in different directions by the unique needs of different learning clusters. Gifted learners cannot be expected to thrive and reach their academic and creative potential in a model in which their needs are only addressed 30 percent of the time within a curriculum designed for grade-level-peers.
It should also be noted that the importance of separating gifted students from their grade-level peers is recognized by the existence of the Math Explorers program. Elementary schools already take students that excel in math and educate them separately with an advanced and accelerated math curriculum. It is recognized that to have a teacher instruct one group of children in multiplication while also trying to teach basic addition to another group is counterproductive to all students. The same logic should be applied to other disciplines.
I am deeply dismayed that Carmel Clay Schools has abruptly put an end to services at the elementary level that were intended to meet the needs of gifted students. These students’ learning needs are so remarkably different from their grade-level peers that one teacher cannot adequately address them within a typical grade-level classroom environment.
I am also dismayed that the Total School Cluster Grouping model was adopted without a vote from the school board and without the general knowledge of the Carmel parent community. It is my understanding that most elementary school teachers were not even aware of this fundamental change for the 2018-2019 school year until a few months ago.
I would like to encourage Carmel Clay Schools to return to an educational model in which gifted children are educated within a classroom and curriculum designed to meet their needs and in the company of their intellectual peers, as is the recommendation of specialists in gifted and talented education.
Jennifer Zivoin, Carmel
