Batavia considers grouping gifted kids together

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

BATAVIA — A proposed retooling of the Batavia School District gifted education program would group all gifted students in a single classroom per upper grade in each elementary school.

“Right now we have students identified as gifted spread out among the classrooms in third, fourth and fifth grades, and we pull them out of those classes for gifted math lessons 50 minutes per day,” Associate Superintendent Jan Wright told the School Board.

“I find that to be a concern because we’re not serving students who are gifted in the arts or other subjects, and we’re not serving students who have been identified as high achieving but not gifted.”

The “budget-neutral” proposal would maintain the same staffing level as the current gifted program, but would rely more on regular classroom teachers who host the “gifted” classrooms, Wright said.

Those teachers would get additional training on how to plan lessons for gifted students and how to create multi-level assignments to accommodate gifted students and their regular-ability classmates. The three full-time elementary school gifted teachers would continue to spend a half-day at each school, running some lessons and coaching the classroom teachers.

Each “gifted” classroom would include all the gifted children in that school at that grade level, plus a mixture of high-achieving and average students. Low-achieving students would not be assigned to those classrooms.

“We’re trying to narrow the range of abilities in those classrooms,” Wright said.

Each “gifted” class would subdivide by ability level into smaller groups for math and reading. Students gifted in math would not automatically go into the highest reading group, and vice versa. High-achieving students in other classrooms could be brought into the “gifted” classroom to take part in advanced lessons and projects, said Wright.

The “cluster model” program would increase the number of students receiving advanced instruction and the number of subjects in which advanced instruction can be offered, Wright said.

Classroom teachers will have to put in extra effort to make the program work, noted board member Jack Hinterlong.

“They will have to understand coaching as well as giftedness,” he said.

The board is expected to vote on the proposal in the spring, said Superintendent Jack Barshinger.