 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Showered with attention: North Allegheny makes sure high achievers get the advanced programs they need
Monday, June 11, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Everything about North Allegheny School District is big, big, big. With 8,000 students, it's the second largest school district in Allegheny County, after the Pittsburgh district. The mall-like campuses, spread over many acres and across four communities, are clogged every afternoon at closing time with yellow school buses taking off in all directions. Marshall Middle School's auditorium is bigger than those in some local colleges.
The district's gifted program is big, too.
Gifted Opportunities for Advanced Learning, or GOAL, as it's called, serves more than 1,200 students -- nearly 15 percent of North Allegheny's enrollment and more than the total population of some school districts.
If North Allegheny doesn't exactly celebrate its gifted children, it certainly recognizes them, without ambivalence or self-consciousness, and provides them with one of the more elaborate programs in the region.
While most other districts provide some kind of a "pullout" enrichment program for gifted students once or twice a week, not all of them provide the kind of additional options that North Allegheny does. For example, Chartiers Valley pulls its gifted students out of regular classes twice a week for enrichment, but then generally sticks to mixed-ability grouping in regular classes.
At North Allegheny, elementary gifted students and other high achievers can take advanced classes in math or reading; work at an accelerated pace or skip grades; or tackle a "compacted" curriculum, which might allow them to complete a course of study in two months instead of a year, freeing them to do special projects for the rest of the term.
There also are special field trips, and a resource room for "GOAL students," as they're called, where they can work on projects, play chess or talk with a teacher of gifted programs. The "GOAL" room at North Allegheny Intermediate High School is in the middle of the cafeteria and is a favorite place for gifted students to congregate during the lunch hour.
While some districts shy away from separate regular classes for gifted students, North Allegheny starts doing it in first or second grade. It continues its gifted program in high school, where students can meet once a month with a mentor to discuss upcoming events and opportunities for competitions.
Widespread support
For the most part, there seems to be little resentment among "non-gifted" students or their parents, although when some complained that the average child was getting lost between special needs and gifted students, the district convened a task force to study that population.
"There's always the gifted wannabes, there's some of that," says Ann Marie Breaux, president of the North Allegheny chapter of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education, a statewide advocacy group composed of parents, teachers and other supporters of gifted education.
"But in North Allegheny there's almost always more support for achieving than non-achieving students."
The school district sprawls across one of the fastest-growing areas of Western Pennsylvania. There is no central, densely populated community where parents can easily meet to make comparisons.
"It's very competitive and there's lots of new wealth," says Judy Cunningham, who runs gifted programs for the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, which provides special educational services to the county's 42 suburban school districts. "The parents there want their children to be at the top. You don't get that attitude so much in more established communities."
There seem to be few public critics of gifted education in the district, but there are some. Outgoing North Allegheny School Board member Joy Allen repeatedly has called for the GOAL program to be open to all students.
School board member Chris Molnar remembers when she was a vocal critic of the district -- but for entirely different reasons.
When the district decided in the early 1990s to eliminate ability grouping in math and reading following a national condemnation of the practice by many educators, there was an outcry against the change from many parents, and Molnar became president of a newly formed PAGE group.
The objections in North Allegheny mirrored those in dozens of other affluent communities across the nation at the time. Parents jammed school board meetings to furiously protest what they believed was the loss of services for gifted children.
"We stormed the barricades, as it were." Molnar says. "Parents sometimes lobby school administrators to put Johnny in a higher group than Johnny needs, and administrators want to paint parents like that, but in reality, those parents do know their children."
Like many affluent districts faced with angry parents who can afford to send their children elsewhere, North Allegheny responded quickly.
It restored ability grouping with two advanced programs: "Communications Arts Plus" and "Math Ability Plus" in the elementary school. It also changed the "pullout" programs, in which gifted students get special enrichment, to tie the content more closely to one of four areas of the curriculum: science, social studies, math or communication arts.
The value of 'pullouts'
Some parents still worry that pullout programs might be too divorced from the business of learning and too much like a reward to gifted students. You don't really need an IQ of 130, some say, to go on a whale-watching trip.
But GOAL's coordinators say that the pullout programs are open to all motivated, high-achieving students, if there's space, not just those labeled as gifted.
"There might be a situation, for example, where we observe a surgery" at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital, says Lynn Kovacic, director of special education and pupil services. "If we have two extra places available for a trip involving six students, we'll offer it to other children with an interest."
Some experts have criticized enrichment programs for gifted students as mere window dressing. A couple of hours a week building a bridge out of Popsicle sticks "is what practitioners of medicine would call a 'non-therapeutic dose,' " says James Gallagher, an education professor at the University of North Carolina.
Others say pullout strategies can be a wonderful experience for students, if done correctly. Under "enrichment clusters" model developed by nationally renowned gifted expert Joseph Renzulli, students who share common interests come together, usually for about one half-day a week, and "everything the students do in the cluster is directed toward producing a product or delivering a service for a real-world audience," Renzulli says.
That way, he says, the student's role "is transformed from one of lesson learner to first-hand inquirer."
Is that happening in North Allegheny?
Dan Williams, a gifted coordinator for Marshall Middle School's eighth graders, ticks off the examples:
Children sound off
North Allegheny school officials seem to be bending over backward to accommodate families of gifted children.
The school newsletter has devoted a page to the activities of "gifted parents." There's even a school sanctioned committee -- the Gifted Advisory Council, composed of parents, teachers and school officials -- that meets once a month.
Such a group would be unheard of in some districts, where these parents are sometimes regarded as nuisances.
At the advisory council's April meeting, a group of sixth, seventh and eighth graders appeared to talk about what the school's gifted program means to them.
After a slide show featuring a trip by eighth graders to an island in the Chesapeake Bay to study the isolated community's people and habitat, the children took the stage.
Chrissy Cholewinski, an eighth grader at Ingomar Middle School, bluntly told the group that "we did a horrible job" during a recent attempt at doing a radio program on the Holocaust. "We weren't dramatic enough," she said.
But she loves the pullout program "because it seems to be the class that really helps me with my life ... with problem-solving and communication. Plus I met a whole bunch of people from other grades and schools."
The bottom line, according to eighth grader Katherine Kunkel:
"The most important part about GOAL is that it's fun."
Kunkel has some basis for comparison, having moved to North Allegheny last year from Altoona, where her parents had moved her from school to school in an effort to find the right place to accommodate her needs.
In her early days in elementary school, "I never had homework. I finished it all right away and spent most of the day reading books or tutoring the other children."
That changed when her parents found Juniata Gap Elementary School in the Altoona district. It had an unusual program in which gifted children were separated permanently from other children, in their own classes, five days a week.
Now, at Marshall Middle School, Kunkel seems to have settled comfortably into the business of being a "GOAL kid."
She is getting straight A's in all her classes, and has accelerated to 10th-grade math. A whiz at public speaking, she delivered a speech several weeks ago during the school's Civil War Day, solemnly musing on the meaning of life and death, before returning to her seat to play French horn with the orchestra.
But there have been some setbacks. Even gifted children may occasionally take on too much. For the first time this year Kunkel failed at something -- an audition for next year's North Allegheny Intermediate High Wind Ensemble.
Perhaps she didn't practice enough -- but whatever the reason, "I came straight up to the GOAL office and burst into tears. Mr. Williams and I talked about it and it made me feel so much better."
Are other children jealous that she has such a place to go?
Katherine's eyes widen.
"All sorts of children come to the GOAL office. Mr. Williams coaches track, and the team hangs out here a lot, and when there are spaces available on field trips they can come on those, too."
Being a gifted kid, at North Allegheny, means never having to say you're sorry.
"No one ever makes fun of you for being in GOAL," Katherine adds. "It's like being part of a really big club."
|
||||||||||||
His students play stock market games and learn to invest money by researching the Internet and by writing to companies for information.