Two Emporia educators have managed to turn the governor’s attention to gifted and talented children in Emporia and across the state.
Ginger Lewman and Marcia Law, as teachers of gifted children and members of the Kansas Association of the Gifted and Talented and Creative, wrote a proclamation and petitioned Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to use it to recognize the needs of those children. The governor notified the women late last week that today had been designated the first-ever “Gifted and Talented Day in Kansas.”
Lewman is legislative liaison for the association and Law is president-elect. Both will go to Washington, D.C., in March to meet with other states’ leaders in gifted education, as well as senators and congressmen.
On Tuesday, an informal party was held at the Turning Point Learning Center for students and parents from Emporia high and middle schools and the center. There are approximately 75 children in gifted programs in the Emporia district.
Lewman and Law said that many gifted and high-ability students are slipping through the educational cracks and are in danger of not reaching their potential.
“We know classroom teachers are currently overworked with the constraints of NCLB (No Child left Behind) and meeting the needs of so many diverse learners, that often high-ability students are left to make it on their own,” Lewman said.
“Gifted students require challenge to reach their full potential just as any student deserves, but the rigor and depth is not always provided in the very classrooms where they spend the huge majority of their time.”
Lewman said that these children recognize they are “different” as early as kindergarten or second grade and, left educationally unnurtured, they may “decide to go underground or hide, never reaching their full potentials,” she said.
“This is a tragedy played out in schools all across Kansas and the nation,” Lewman said.
The general public may not realize the degree to which gifted students are affected.
“When students are identified as gifted, they are as far from the average IQ as those who struggle at the lower end,” she said. “Research tells us that many gifted students enter the school year knowing up to one-third of the content (to be) covered. So then in an optimal situation, students would be learning new information daily.”
When these students are not encouraged or allowed to reach their potential, this failure has far-reaching affects. Globalization, particularly with new competition from India and China, has revealed educational gaps between the United States and other countries in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“Our nation cannot afford to ignore the needs of these future leaders one more single day,” Lewman said.
Law agreed.
“We, as gifted educators, see one of the major skills being weeded out by NCLB is student creativity,” Law said. “Our students need to practice real-life, 21st-century skills. Flexible and ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking is something that business leaders desire in job applicants, and this is where gifted students typically excel.”
Parents, as well as educators, want the high-ability children to have academic challenges, intellectual growth and social/emotional support “every single day in every single classroom,” she said.
“We need to begin to look at children based on their skills where they are, and stop tracking by perhaps the least-appropriate method — age.”
During the next round of strategic planning for the district, the women want the district to set a primary goal of higher expectations for those who already are achieving above the “proficient” level and who are college-bound.
The women want high-achieving students to have academic opportunities to take advanced-placement classes, subject and grade acceleration, distance and virtual learning and possibly international baccalaureate classes, among other goals.
“One of the beauties of new technology is that we can bring these programs to any child, regardless of school location,” Law said.
Membership in the association is open to “all friends of gifted education, especially parents,” Lewman said.
For information, call her at 481-6047, or e-mail gingerl@essdack.org.