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Rural school districts struggle with funding, bias in teaching gifted students
Tuesday, June 12, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Jean Westerman was tired. After six years as Central Greene County School District's gifted teacher for elementary and middle schools, she estimated that she had spent thousands of dollars out of her own pocket on her program -- from field trips to assessment tests.
She had watched as a new school principal moved her classroom into a minuscule space. And she had constantly wrangled with teachers who didn't want gifted children leaving their classrooms to meet with her.
And now, she was sitting quietly at a meeting, watching parents of gifted children pepper Central Greene Superintendent Donald Painter with complaints and questions: Why can't my child use a calculator in class? Why don't you accelerate elementary school children in math? Why isn't there foreign language instruction in middle school? Why are regular classroom teachers discriminating against gifted children?
So it went on April 26 during the first meeting of the Central Greene chapter of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education, an advocacy group of parents who had asked the superintendent to explain the district's gifted program.
Some of them even criticized Westerman, saying her "pullout" program for gifted students was inadequate. Others jumped in to defend her.
In the end, though, even supportive parents were not enough to persuade Jean Westerman to stay on the job.
Several weeks after that meeting, Westerman, 57, announced she was retiring. "I really could not go on," she sighed.
In six years, she had identified more and more gifted students while money to serve them dwindled. "I feel I've established a beachhead, at least. But they just don't have the money. It just frustrates the heck out of me."
In many rural districts like this one, gifted education limps along, a victim of scarce revenues and cultural biases. Gifted education is funded out of a special education formula based on overall pupil enrollment, so a school district with large percentages of children with physical or learning disabilities -- which is often the case in poor districts -- may find itself in more difficult straits than a more affluent one.
Rural disregard
A recent study by the University of Iowa came to the unsurprising conclusion that gifted students are overlooked in rural schools. The study said gifted students lacked advanced placement courses, were socially isolated from peers, and didn't have access to cultural opportunities.
Negative attitudes toward gifted children are deeply ingrained in many rural districts.
Jim Winegar, a former school board member in the West Greene School District, remembers that when his child's team won the regional championship for Odyssey of the Mind, a creative problem-solving competition, the administration balked at sending them to the state finals, saying it wasn't budgeted.
But when Winegar checked school regulations, he found that they required "any team" that wins at the regional level to be funded at the state level, "not just a sports team."
"After that, we didn't have any problems," he said wryly.
While it's located in one of Pennsylvania's poorest counties, Central Greene, in Waynesburg, is better off than some. Waynesburg College is there, and the town includes many residents employed by nearby West Virginia University. Central Greene offers five advanced placement courses on site, and four more through computer or video transmission.
Last year's graduating class had state assessment test scores in the upper 6.5 percent and there is a brand new elementary and middle school complex about a half-mile off Interstate 79 on a wooded campus.
But nearly half the students are on the free and low-cost lunch program provided to low-income families. And at 18.8 percent, Central Greene's special needs population dwarfs the gifted population, which is about 3 percent.
Facing hard times
"That's a tough cultural and socio-economic situation for any school administration to deal with," said Farley Toothman, who is not only a strong backer of gifted education, but also a county commissioner.
"Believe me, I know what it's like here. Up in Cranberry, they're building houses. Here, we're mining coal off properties that then go off the tax rolls" after the coal has been extracted. "And how can I expect the poorest county, that struggles under such an unfair school funding system, to do all this?"
But he's still angry about how gifted students are treated here -- especially his own.
"It's assumed the smart children have an advantage and they will take care of themselves." But school officials sometimes won't even spend modest amounts on gifted programs, like paying the $100 fee to send a student on a field trip to the Challenger Learning Center at Wheeling Jesuit University, a hugely popular destination for students that features a simulated space station.
Toothman was particularly frustrated that the district wouldn't accelerate his daughter, a fourth-grader who was exceptionally able in math. Her individualized education program, a state-required document known as an IEP that spells out how the district will meet a gifted child's needs, "barely addresses academic basics. Heck, I want her to learn spreadsheets!"
Painter, the superintendent, says the district does accelerate children in math after fifth grade, if it's needed, either by putting them in a higher grade level class or providing special instruction from the gifted teacher.
But Toothman's concerns are echoed by Gary Winn, a professor at West Virginia University with children in Central Greene.
"My daughter's fourth-grade teacher told us clearly, 'I have to dumb down the curriculum to reach the bottom level.' My daughter was capable of passing 95 percent of all the math she was ever going to see in fourth grade by the second week in school.
"And when we met with school officials to ask, how can we enrich, enhance, get her out of the humdrum, and into things that are going to get her into college, like math and science, they told us they couldn't do it."
Are pullouts irrelevant?
Part of the problem is the district's reliance on a pullout program, which Winn doesn't believe addresses the real needs of gifted students.
"I like Jean Westerman as a person, but she thrives on 'fluffy' things that can't be measured, like self-esteem and enrichment. What does that do to get the child into college?"
"If there's a choice between having my child stay in a regular class and going to the pullout to play Scrabble on a computer, I would prefer that my children stay in a regular ed class," added Teresa Semple, a parent of three gifted children who also works as a teacher's aide in Miller Middle school. "While I thought it was a good thing for my children to be with others at the same level, a lot of the time they didn't want to go either. It wasn't worth it."
But Lori Duer, another parent, defended Westerman.
"To a lot of people, the pullout program is just play, a waste of time. But they do all sorts of problem solving and brainstorming activities. They produced the student newspaper. They won the academic quiz bowl at Waynesburg College. But some people just have a problem that they're not practicing their multiplication tables."
Duer thinks more problems occur in the district's regular classrooms, which include children with a huge range of abilities, from special needs to gifted. While her daughter had a positive experience in first grade with a teacher who recognized the girl's writing ability and put her in a third-grade program, the second grade teacher was not as responsive, and Duer remembers her child coming home from school in tears from boredom.
"She would be sobbing. 'Oh Mommy, the day was so long, and I missed you so much,' she would say," recalled Duer, who, along with her husband, eventually persuaded the school to place the girl in the gifted pullout program.
"It really did help," she said. "It was something she could look forward to and it really came as a relief for her."
Still, because the gifted program has been scheduled during regular class time, "kids are missing out on meat-and-potato subjects like math and science -- so they can do painting," Winn complained.
And in this rural district, where so many children contend with poverty and learning disabilities, some teachers resent bright children who whizz through their coursework while others struggle, Semple said.
"One of the values in this culture is hard work, and some perceive gifted children as having things come too easily to them. That means the 'B' student who works his butt off may be more valued than a gifted child," she said.
District officials said they are doing their best to accommodate the needs of a varied group of learners.
"In any rural school district, finances are a challenge. Teachers would love to have more, but it's a balancing act to allocate those funds as needed. Will we satisfy all those teachers? No," said Peter Rameas, principal of Miller Middle School.
"You have to draw the line someplace. A teacher might want to take a trip to Ohio, when there's a perfect place nearby. Do we offer our gifted students all we can? No, but no one ever does. Do we challenge them? Yes, I think we do," he said.
Still, added Lori Duer, Central Greene has some work to do to alleviate parents' concerns.
"My sense right now," she said, speaking slowly and carefully, "is that the gifted program is in disarray."
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