Mineola Schools Consider Revamped Gifted Program

Bouncing off of a proposed for students in the Mineola School District, Superintendent Dr. Michael Nagler is also proposing changes to the district’s program for gifted students.

“Gifted children are few and far between,” the superintendent said in his presentation to the at the January 5 meeting at the . “Statistically it’s impossible, but we do not have a lot of gifted children; we have a lot of smart children, we have a lot of children who work very hard... but the sense of gifted of a cognitive ability we do not have a lot, no school district has a lot.”

The term “gifted” is usually be applied to students who achieve a score of 140 or above on the COGAT (cognitive ability) test, but local districts – including Mineola – use a score of 130 or above to identify such students. Only 24 students out of 103 across grades 3-7 in the entire district have a score above 130.

While a typical gifted program accelerates children, Dr. Nagler said that “it’s not an acceleration, so at the end of the year, they’re not anywhere further in the content then they started; it’s enrichment, they do a lot of great activities.”

The superintendent is proposing a new academically gifted program (AGP), establishing a multi-grade program that combines fifth, sixth and seventh graders, putting them in one class all day and with the same teacher for 3 years.

“The benefit of having a teacher, the same teacher for 3 years is, they’re going to know the kids,” Dr. Nagler said. “This teacher that eventually does this has to be very talented because not only do they have to know the math... at the same time, they need an elementary certification that allows them to accelerate the math.”

The teacher will typically teach a group lesson to the entire class and then the students will conduct independent work “where they are” in terms of content with work plans designed by the teacher.

“It’s a way to manage children where they are and assess it,” the superintendent said.

The superintendent feels that the multi-grade environment would make for an easier transition for students and alleviate any stigma involved in an accelerated class.

“Most parents that I speak to of gifted kids, they don’t want to accelerate, they don’t want to put their fifth grader in the seventh grade math class or their third grader in the fifth,” Dr. Nagler said. “They don’t want to do that because it’s a stigma to a child, one child going into that class. When you have a mix of several children in a class, it takes on a different feeling.”

There would be eight spaces per grade, with admission into the program based on qualifications from the COGAT test. Entry would be voluntary, with fifth and sixth graders comprising the program in its first year. One of the goals is to eventually have every seventh grader taking algebra.

“The purpose of doing that is to accelerate them in the content, specifically and with the hope that these children will then become our Intel science researchers in the high school,” Dr. Nagler said. “This is not for everybody. The cognitive ability of the children in this class should greatly challenge their ability to do things.”

With the elementary’s new focus on science, for future fourth graders in this gifted program, the science lab teacher would work with them for half a day in the lab once per cycle and future third grade students would also have half a day in the lab.

Dr. Nagler stated that gifted students tend to pick up math skills that are not taught to them formally, but which leave “gaps.” His “presumption” is that the fifth graders are already operating beyond the fifth grade in math and beyond cognitive ability in science.

A preliminary schedule for students in such a program was presented with the superintendent noting that he had not worked all the details out fully.

“There’s a lot more work to be done on this,” he said.