La Grange School Board Hears From LEAP Coordinator

LGISD gifted and talented program coordinator and teacher, Tenille Adamcik, was at the board meeting last week. She gave a report on the district gifted and talented program. Adamcik began her presentation by explaining the need for a gifted and talented program in the district. She stated:

• The Texas Legislature has mandated that every school district will have provisions for gifted students in kindergarten through grade 12 (Section 29.1221, Texas Education Code.)

• Each district in Texas is charged with developing their own service type model.

• LGISD’s model is called LEAP (Learning Experiences for Advanced Performance.)

• The purpose of the services is to provide opportunities for gifted children to develop their individual potential.

She went on to say that the state of Texas defines a gifted and talented student as a child who performs at or shows the potential for performing at remarkably high level of accomplishment when compared to others of the same age, experience, or environment and who:

• Exhibit high performance capability in an intellectual, creative, or artistic area

• Possess an unusual capacity for leadership

• Excels in a specific academic field La Grange ISD serves the needs of those students who demonstrate above average achievement or potential in the areas of general intellectual ability, and specific academic ability as evidenced by standardized achievement tests, including those that measure creative and productive thinking.

Adamcik said that people often ask why all the bright students are not in the LEAP program. She gave some examples of the differences between bright students and gifted students. Here are a few:

• The bright student knows the answer – the gifted student asks the questions.

• The bright student is a good memorizer – the gifted student is a good guesser.

• The bright student works

(23Fa-B1)

hard – the gifted student plays around and then tests well.

• The bright student had good ideas – the gifted student has wild, silly ideas.

• The bright student is a technician – the gifted student is an inventor.

Gifted and talented services in different districts take on different forms. In LGISD, the students in grades kindergarten through grade 6 are served in a pull-out program. The students meet as a group, pulled from their regular classes during SPOTS intervention time to participate in units of study in the four core subject areas, giving attention to higher level processes of thinking in a selfdirected learning atmosphere with instructional facilitation/ guidance.

The students in grades 7-12 receive services in the four core content areas through advanced curriculum (AP coursework, dual credit courses, and honors classes.)

She also informed them on the ways students are identified in the district.

• All kindergarten students are screened using the NNAT3 online ability test.

• Kindergarten students are then evaluated through four academic tests and a reasoning test (Iowa Test, NNAT3, HOPE scale.)

• Grades 1-11 are tested through five academic areas, a creativity test, and a reasoning test. (Iowa Torrance Test, Sages 3, and a classroom rating scale.)

Anyone can nominate a student to be tested for the gifted and talented program. Parents, community members, peers, and teachers are all able to nominate students for the program. The nominations must be received between October 1-November 15 for kindergarten students, and January 1-February 1 for grades 1-11. The nomination committee reviews each student’s scores. Students who score in the 95 percentile in at least three of the tested areas are identified as having gifted and talented characteristics.

Currently LGISD has 130 students who have been identified as gifted and talented, and 54 of those are in the daily pull-out program in grades 1-6.