Last week, about 50 parents attended a workshop on meeting the
social and emotional needs of gifted children. The presentation was
outstanding. It was such a pleasure to hear parents share stories
and commiserate with other parents of gifted children.
Last week, about 50 parents attended a workshop on meeting the social and emotional needs of gifted children. The presentation was outstanding. It was such a pleasure to hear parents share stories and commiserate with other parents of gifted children. I look forward to these Gilroy School District GATE meetings becoming monthly again.
When you look at the state of education in Gilroy, it would be easy to overlook gifted children. They are a distinct minority in the general population, and they are a minority in our schools as well. But when you look at the number of children who have been GATE identified in Gilroy, it is a larger percentage of our student population than one would expect, higher than the three to five percent which is found in the general population. More than 600 students in Gilroy are currently GATE identified.
At the January Superintendent Parent Advisory Committee meeting, a presentation on GATE was given by Dr. Joe Guzicki, who oversees the GATE program for GUSD, and Janneke Brown, an Eliot School parent who serves as the district GATE representative on the SPAC.
I am a believer in GATE, so I didn’t need to be convinced that it is imperative that we serve this population of students. Without exception, every parent on the SPAC was impressed with the information presented. More than half of them had never heard of GATE.
That night, we outed the GATE program. It was heartening to hear Spanish-speaking parents ask why their children were not being tested for GATE, why their schools had not made GATE testing information available to all the parents. What the parents asked for that evening was that information about GATE be made available to ALL parents of elementary school students.
A commitment was made to make that information available.
So, if you are the parent of an elementary school child who would be interested in having your student tested for GATE, keep checking your mailbox. I assure you, the information will be coming. If you get nothing from the school district, just drop me a line.
While this was happening, I was also meeting with Rucker parents who are worried that the school district’s commitment to providing a self-contained GATE program might be waning. Is the Rucker GATE program in danger of being abandoned? I have tried my best to get a definitive answer to this question. The best answer I could get was that the district has no plans at this time to make any change to the Rucker program. The district is also looking at other ways to serve GATE students who are not in self-contained classes.
I have been around long enough to know that sometimes good programs do not survive. The switch from magnet schools to attendance area schools spelled the demise of the Slingerland program at Eliot. I believe that there is a good chance that this could happen to the GATE program at Rucker just as quickly if the powers that be can convince us that the demand for GATE services does not exist. A demand cannot exist for a program unless the availability of that program is widely known.
I have sat through meetings with other GATE parents over the years. The parents of children in the self-contained program at Rucker have been overwhelmingly pleased with the program. Rucker parents believe that their children are best served by being in a class all day with other gifted children.
Some parents elected not to send their gifted child to Rucker, and opted to stay at their own school. And then there were the parents who wanted to send their student to Rucker, but were unable to due to the limited number of available spaces. These parents were the ones who felt that their child’s needs were not being met.
While the district makes decisions that affect all of our children, remember that it is their job to meet the needs of all students. The GATE program at Rucker School is like a well-oiled machine. The teachers are in place and they know how to teach GATE students. Keeping the Rucker program is such a no-brainer that I give it about a 50 percent chance of survival.
It requires nothing more than a room full of students to keep it going. If the Rucker program is allowed to fade into the night, we will have more children whose needs are not being met, more unhappy parents, and another fine mess for an already bruised school district.
