The criteria for being identified as a Scholar in Progress, or gifted and talented, have not changed, but it has been opened up to the community to ensure that students are identified.
“With COVID, we have a pretty good idea that we missed quite a few, either from having to stay home, or just the insanity of trying to do everything. We didn’t necessarily get everybody identified that probably should have been. In an effort to ensure that we got everybody, we opened it up to the community to be able to nominate this year,” Director of Advanced Academic Services Kristen Vesely said.
A Parent Committee will be starting for the first time in January and there also is an advisory committee established a few years ago.
The Parent Committee will have two representatives from each campus to voice their concerns and what their students are saying. The feedback from the Parent Committee will go to the Advisory Committee.
Vesely said they are hoping to get a five-year plan written.
Then they’ll tweak the program and then take it to the ECISD Board of Trustees for next year.
“Our ultimate goal is to become an exemplar district, according to the state plan,” Vesely said.” We’re not there yet. We’ve got some really good pieces in play, but we’re not where we need to be, but we’re definitely not where we want to be either.”
Vesely said the characteristics sought are given to the community along with a Google form. If someone knows a student that they feel meets the criteria, they can fill out the form, provide their contact information, and the school and student ID number, if they know it.
If not, Vesely said they can look it up.
“What we do is once we get that information, we contact the parent and let them know hey, your child has been nominated. We’d really like to test them for gifted …,” she said.
Every parent they have talked to so far has consented to having their child tested for the program. She noted that the program doesn’t discriminate and it doesn’t cost anything.
“We’ve got a little bit of an uphill journey, but we’ll get there and we’re working on that education piece. I think as we engage the parents in the parental advisory committee that we’ll be able to talk about how can we communicate better with the community …,” Vesely said.
Vesely said 108 nominations have submitted so far.
“And so we begin the gathering of the data and the different artifacts at that point. The first round of testing … We’ve had a substantial number of kindergarteners and first graders that have been nominated through that process. We still have the application process from the classroom teacher. That hasn’t changed,” she said.
“The classroom teachers have the opportunity at every elementary in the district to identify gifted students within their class, and they turn those forms in to our GT program teachers. And then those applications started getting turned in yesterday (Nov. 17). …,” Vesely added.
In addition to gifted, advanced academics is also in charge of SAT/PSAT standardized tests.
Gifted learners tend to look for questions “that are beyond, as opposed to creative thinkers who see the exceptions.”
“Now the biggest difference, the biggest misconception that we get is that we get the high achievers and those are the kids, they’re super smart. They’re teacher pleasers, but they’re not that next level. They’re not quite gifted. They’re interested, but they’re not curious. They don’t wonder … It’s nuances, so when we look at the matrices, we actually look for superior performances and superior artifacts. We get lots of kids that are borderline, which means they’re really … good. They’re really, really smart, but they’re not quite in that 95th or higher percentile,” she said.
There are a little less than 3,000 students in the gifted program.
“The numbers get a little skewed when they start getting up into their dual credit options, because they take classes at OC or at UTPB. Those teachers are not GT trained, so they have to make a choice right now whether they want to keep their GT designation or if they want to do dual credit. … A lot of our GT kids go dual credit and so they’re no longer designated as GT because we’re not serving them in the district. They’re getting all of their services through college classes. So our numbers are not quite as high as they should be if we were really tracking them all the way up to senior,” Vesely said.
If students are taking a class with a GT trained teacher, they are still designated as gifted and talented. If they are taking an online class, as opposed to face to face, and their instructor is at Odessa College, they’re not designated as GT.
“It’s just little pieces of the puzzle that we’re working through, but every dual credit teacher right now is either trained or in the process of being trained, if they are an ECISD employee,” Vesely said.
If students are in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, they maintain their gifted and talented designation.
“When they get to high school, they have several different avenues of acceleration and extended depth of complexity in their coursework,” Vesely said.
The reason for the community nomination piece was two-fold.
“The first is, as I said, with COVID the number of students that we had apply over the last two years was lower. Just when I went back and looked at our historical numbers, we were several 100 lower in the last few years. Last year, we had a couple of elementary school campuses that actually nominated no one for various reasons. That’s no shade on any of those schools. COVID was very difficult. … It’s really hard to see a kid’s full potential in a virtual environment when you’re not used to teaching that. And so we turned very quickly into virtual and the teachers did a phenomenal job meeting the needs of the kids. … We felt like we possibly missed kids, so that’s one of the reasons.”
“The other reason is the state GT plan says that we should have it open for the community to nominate. It’s something that probably should have been going on for a while. We just didn’t have the infrastructure and we didn’t have the pieces in place to be able to nominate with the ease that we do now; to do a quick Google form on your phone is so much easier than trying to come to a school and nominate somebody, or come to this office and nominate somebody. Our thinking has changed because of the virtual, so some of the resources that we have that are available to the community and to us it’s just made it a little bit easier for that feedback to be able to come back to us,” Vesely added.
Applications for seventh through 11th grade will be taken until Dec. 10.
Kindergarten students are automatically tested on two different exams.
“I believe kindergarten and third grade are automatically tested on the two different tests. But the idea is that not every kindergartener is going to show their giftedness in exactly the same way. And so what we’re testing for in kindergarten is potential. So if they’re one of those kids, and we’re actually looking at expanding this for everybody, starting next year, if they show potential, then they’ll be put into a classroom with other cluster GT students so that they get the benefit of exposure to GT kids,” she said.
“Then if their teacher feels like they’ve progressed and they still show potential, they can be re-tested in first grade to potentially get into the program. So a parent, if they wanted, they could test their kid every year until their kid got in. … Most parents don’t most often test once and they go okay, well, we were close but we’ll just continue on our line.”
With the matrix, Vesely said, they look at several criteria.
“We don’t just look at the one test, and they either take the CogAT (Cognitive Abilities Test) or the Naglieri (Nonverbal Ability Test) and that gives us kind of a baseline. But we also look at their achievement scores or their MAP growth. So we look at STAAR tests; we look at how much they’re growing in the year. So if we have a student that’s grown exponentially in a year, that’s possibly a gifted learner, and so that’s a kid we need to investigate.”
“They also get from the teacher an inventory. You know, how often does the student talk? What kind of work do you get from the student, so the teacher gets to give us some qualitative data. We also get samples of the student’s work from their classroom teacher. We can usually take all of those pieces and then part of the committee’s job, which makes it a little bit difficult, when we get one of those kids, that maybe their scores aren’t exactly where they need to be. But everything else looks really high. Then we can take into consideration circumstantial stuff. Where do they come from? What are their demographics, some of those kinds of things? Are they gifted from their background? You know, because not everybody has the same opportunities as other people. And so those pieces are taken into consideration by the committee before they’re placed and gifted or not. We do try to make it as fair as we possibly can. Because we know, at the end of the day, you have to have a rubric, but we do take it on an individual basis,” Vesely added.
The Naglieri is what the kindergarten and first graders take. Students whose first language isn’t English have an opportunity to take that test as well.
There also is Logramos, a test for Spanish speakers.
“And then we do have for kindergarteners, DAP, which is draw person. It’s a draw person test. Which is really crazy, right, you think just draw person but when you tell a kindergartener draw a person and you kind of start talking about characteristics with them, you can see do they think stick figure. Do they actually have further thinking and what they’re doing when they’re drawing the person? Do they think about ears? Do they think about fingers and toes and articulated joints and things like that? So when you start looking at some of our gifted kids, they get into the program, you look at their person compared to a normal kindergartner. You can see how it does test and it’s another opportunity for them to show their ability and their potential outside of just a standardized test.”
Across the country, about 8 percent of the population is usually identified as gifted.
“There are some places that are more than that. There are some places that are less than that. We’re sitting a little less than 10% right now. My concern is not that we have more kids. That’s never my concern. My concern is that every kid that’s gifted is identified, okay, so if that means we have 3,000 gifted kids and every single gifted kid is identified, then they’re identified and then they’re served so that they can reach their full potential. That’s what we’re looking for. If that means we only have 1,000 kids that are gifted, then we have 1,000 kids. But when I look at our community numbers and having been a teacher, I was a teacher for 12 years in the classroom in the district. We had kids and I was in secondary, and there were kids that came through my door that were not identified as gifted, had never been tested as gifted. And I nominated them and they would test and they would become gifted as 11th graders, so they would only get one year of benefit of gifted services. It wasn’t a lot, but even one kid is too many. And so that’s why we’re really pushing identification and we’re ensuring that our identification processes match our services, because we’re an academic GT program. We’re not leadership; we’re not creativity; we’re academic,” she said.
“Now if they’ve got leadership, they’ve got creativity than those pieces we still help them with those. We help those pieces grow because those will help them academically, but we focus in academics. And that’s just because that’s the way our program is. As we’re developing our plan with our advisory committee, they’re wanting us to kind of start growing into creativity and leadership and those aspects are just not there yet, as a program,” Vesely said.
She added that they are looking at trying to expand the summer Camp SIP (Scholars in Progress) program.
“Because right now, only 200 kids out of our 1,200 have access to Camp SIP simply because of manpower. Up until this year, we had 22 GT teachers. This year, we have 11 and so we’re stretching our capacity in what our teachers are doing …,” Vesely said.
