Unable to contain her excitement, Hailey Smith, junior, watched her cardboard boat “Pippy” beat all the other boats in the heat.
As part of her eighth grade Academic Stretch class at Crestview Middle School, Smith and her peers built boats and then raced them in the school’s pool in a cardboard boat regatta.
“I felt like an engineer,” Smith said.
Smith is 1 of 321 number of students at Marquette enrolled in the Rockwood Gifted program. Academic Stretch is the middle school level of the gifted program. Smith has taken classes tailored to gifted learners and received services from a Gifted Resource Counselor (GRC) throughout elementary, middle and high school.
“I think it’s great that there is recognition of the difference in thinking of gifted students and helping develop that can be very good,” Smith said.
Rockwood funds a Gifted Program that provides services to 13% of students across the district, according to Dr. Denny Rhodes, director of Gifted Education for the Rockwood School District (K-12).
Dr. Rhodes said the goal of the gifted program is to help students understand who they are as a learner, show students there are others out there like them and provide students with people who understand and help them.
“Research would say that gifted individuals have a tendency to feel a higher sense of isolation and also have problems talking with peers,” Dr. Rhodes said.
Dr. Rhodes also said there is a spectrum of giftedness across gifted classrooms.
“At one point, you’re going to be talking to them and it’s going to be like talking to somebody who’s 24, and in the next instance they’re going to be acting like typical 9/10 year olds,” Dr. Rhodes said.
Across the country, school districts are debating if students should still be labeled as gifted and how to best meet their needs, according to the New York Times.
After testing for the gifted program in early elementary school and not passing, Lizzie Nicastro, sophomore, started to feel different compared to her peers.
“I worked really hard and stuff, and I thought I was really dumb,” Nicastro said. ““It affected my self confidence because my brother was in it and I wasn’t.”
A common misconception is gifted students don’t need a separate program, said Dr. Robin Crosby, adjunct professor in Truman State University’s Masters of Arts in Gifted Education program.
“We have gifted programming for students that are advanced in sports, that’s called sports teams,” Dr. Crosby said. “We have an orchestra and band and choir for students that are advanced in those areas, but it’s kind of difficult to wrap our heads around what a gifted program looks like for kids that are advanced academically.”
Dr. Crosby said having a true gifted program, not just advanced classes, is vital.
“Every child deserves to learn something new every single day, and that includes gifted kids,” Dr. Crosby said.
Dr. Megan Burian, gifted resource teacher, agrees.
To aid students with this neurodiversity, Dr. Burian and Maryann Immordino, gifted resource teacher, work one-on-one with students and provide monthly help sessions in Ac Lab that focus on executive functioning skills gifted learners may struggle with.
“What we see with gifted students is if they are not challenged they can often disengage entirely,” Dr. Burian said. “And then you actually see some of our gifted students failing or just doing bare minimum because they don’t see a purpose, and that need for a purpose tends to be a really prominent characteristic of gifted people in general.”
