S/O - Potential defector from ACPS to APS, how does the gifted program work?

[Anonymous]

Saw the recent post from someone considering move from ACPS to APS (or other jurisdictions), and we are in a similar boat, but are looking only in Arlington. How does the gifted program work at APS? DS is 3rd grade and is in the TAG program at his school, and I understand that in 4th and 5th grade in ACPS they have subject specific TAG classes, so he'd be doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th grade, for example. How does this work in APS? We're not sure exactly when we will ultimately move, but it likely will be before he finishes elementary, and I would like to know more about how this works. I've looked at APS website, but don't have a great sense of how things really work (and also would appreciate input from those with personal experience)

[Anonymous]

At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

Forgot to add my personal experience, which is that the system seems to work well for typically gifted children, but very highly gifted children may not be sufficiently challenged because so much of the gifted programming is done at a grade-wide level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

Forgot to add my personal experience, which is that the system seems to work well for typically gifted children, but very highly gifted children may not be sufficiently challenged because so much of the gifted programming is done at a grade-wide level.

Thanks, PP!

[Anonymous]

In my experience, APS gifted services are under-whelming. I have an ES child tagged in math, language arts, social studies, and science. They really don't do anything for social studies and science at our school. As one of the PPs said, there is "push in" for math and language arts, but that basically has meant that the gifted teacher comes into the classroom 2x a month and does little lessons with the kids in the corner while the rest of the class works with the classroom teacher. My sense is that the gifted teacher spends more of his time "training" the classroom teachers in how to differentiate lessons for the gifted kids (e.g, the gifted kids might be clustered into one math group and do a different activity than the rest of the class during math workshop time, but all with the classroom teacher). At the upper grades, they do divide the kids into different classes for math and they rotate teachers, sort of like middle school. APS is definitely strongest in gifted services for math. Everything else is hit or miss. I've heard this is an area that Tara Natress (the new Asst Super of Instruction) is interested in beefing up as part of her "personalized learning" focus, but I'm also afraid that she is going to get too bogged down with the high school overcrowding situation to really focus on it. (Honestly, my advice to you before you move is to make sure you understand that issue before you move-- we've got a real capacity crisis coming at the high school level, and our School Board and Super seem to be totally without a plan to handle it.)

[Anonymous]

10:21, are your kids at McKinley? Our child was identified this spring and this is our concern in the coming years. We've heard rumors that the gifted resource teacher has admitted that he is completely overwhelmed in a school of over 700 students. He's great and completely committed to gifted education but the planning factors at the county level only allow for one GT teacher per school, and pushing in to 30 classrooms simply doesn't give him the time to really serve the kids in the way he'd like. What that means is that the individual teachers are really the ones who impact your child the most in terms of differentiating the classwork.

If your child is already tagged, that carries with them into the school system, I think so that's one less hurdle in APS. Don't trust Nattress to fix the problem, her plan is to hand each kid an iPad and let them challenge themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, APS gifted services are under-whelming. I have an ES child tagged in math, language arts, social studies, and science. They really don't do anything for social studies and science at our school. As one of the PPs said, there is "push in" for math and language arts, but that basically has meant that the gifted teacher comes into the classroom 2x a month and does little lessons with the kids in the corner while the rest of the class works with the classroom teacher. My sense is that the gifted teacher spends more of his time "training" the classroom teachers in how to differentiate lessons for the gifted kids (e.g, the gifted kids might be clustered into one math group and do a different activity than the rest of the class during math workshop time, but all with the classroom teacher). At the upper grades, they do divide the kids into different classes for math and they rotate teachers, sort of like middle school. APS is definitely strongest in gifted services for math. Everything else is hit or miss. I've heard this is an area that Tara Natress (the new Asst Super of Instruction) is interested in beefing up as part of her "personalized learning" focus, but I'm also afraid that she is going to get too bogged down with the high school overcrowding situation to really focus on it. (Honestly, my advice to you before you move is to make sure you understand that issue before you move-- we've got a real capacity crisis coming at the high school level, and our School Board and Super seem to be totally without a plan to handle it.)

Thanks for the input. I've found that gifted services in ACPS are hit or miss as well, but have been told that the higher grades are better (for example, them doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th, for the math-identified kids).

As far as the HS/bold stuff goes, I have been trying to follow along about all of this. I understand this is a real issue, and from what I can tell the school board isn't handling things well. That being said, ACPS also has overcrowding issues (despite being a not-very-good school system on paper), and at least in a vacuum, we'd rather have our kid in a better crowded system than a worse crowded system. Moving into other jurisdictions isn't an option (spouse and I work in opposite directions), nor is private school, unfortunately.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

At what grade does the testing occur?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, APS gifted services are under-whelming. I have an ES child tagged in math, language arts, social studies, and science. They really don't do anything for social studies and science at our school. As one of the PPs said, there is "push in" for math and language arts, but that basically has meant that the gifted teacher comes into the classroom 2x a month and does little lessons with the kids in the corner while the rest of the class works with the classroom teacher. My sense is that the gifted teacher spends more of his time "training" the classroom teachers in how to differentiate lessons for the gifted kids (e.g, the gifted kids might be clustered into one math group and do a different activity than the rest of the class during math workshop time, but all with the classroom teacher). At the upper grades, they do divide the kids into different classes for math and they rotate teachers, sort of like middle school. APS is definitely strongest in gifted services for math. Everything else is hit or miss. I've heard this is an area that Tara Natress (the new Asst Super of Instruction) is interested in beefing up as part of her "personalized learning" focus, but I'm also afraid that she is going to get too bogged down with the high school overcrowding situation to really focus on it. (Honestly, my advice to you before you move is to make sure you understand that issue before you move-- we've got a real capacity crisis coming at the high school level, and our School Board and Super seem to be totally without a plan to handle it.)

Thanks for the input. I've found that gifted services in ACPS are hit or miss as well, but have been told that the higher grades are better (for example, them doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th, for the math-identified kids).

As far as the HS/bold stuff goes, I have been trying to follow along about all of this. I understand this is a real issue, and from what I can tell the school board isn't handling things well. That being said, ACPS also has overcrowding issues (despite being a not-very-good school system on paper), and at least in a vacuum, we'd rather have our kid in a better crowded system than a worse crowded system. Moving into other jurisdictions isn't an option (spouse and I work in opposite directions), nor is private school, unfortunately.

First poster who responded to you here, I think this is a good perspective to keep on APS. The system is working through some tricky issues, and I won't claim the school board get everything right, but I think too many people lose sight of the fact that so many school system are worse in these regards, and that, even with issues like the overcrowding, we still have one of the best school systems in the country with fantastic resources. I have two kids in elementary school, and each of their classes was on the class-size bubble for next year, just a few kids shy of hitting the APS policy limits for adding another class. In both cases, the principal requested additional teachers and those requests were granted, so instead of my kids having 25-27 kids in their classes this year (different grade levels with different maximum class sizes), they're going to have 17-21. There are an awful lot of school systems where this wouldn't even be a possibility because they don't have the resources.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

At what grade does the testing occur?

I'm not sure that the process is the same at all APS elementary schools, but at our school class-wide testing of all students is done at the beginning of second grade via the NNAT2. If your child scores sufficiently highly on the test, they are automatically evaluated for gifted services. Before that (or after, even if the NNAT2 score wasn't high enough), a teacher can refer a child for evaluation for gifted services if they feel the child would benefit from it, and parents can refer their child for evaluation as well.

[Anonymous]

My daughter wasn't identified until 4th grade, but was then deemed gifted for all academic areas. I was a little surprised she wasn't identified in 2nd, but her teacher was just "meh" on her and we didn't ask. Her 4th grade teacher was very excited about teaching and seemed to be more on the ball. It didn't hurt that she had a perfect SOL score in math from 3rd grade and only a couple of points off of perfect for reading/language arts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

At what grade does the testing occur?

I'm not sure that the process is the same at all APS elementary schools, but at our school class-wide testing of all students is done at the beginning of second grade via the NNAT2. If your child scores sufficiently highly on the test, they are automatically evaluated for gifted services. Before that (or after, even if the NNAT2 score wasn't high enough), a teacher can refer a child for evaluation for gifted services if they feel the child would benefit from it, and parents can refer their child for evaluation as well.

Being Arlington, I'm guessing there's a lot of parents referring their own kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At the elementary level, testing into gifted services is done by the individual elementary school. They will do an assessment for a variety of subject areas, and a determination of giftedness is made for each individual subject area. So, for instance, you might have a child who is deemed gifted in math and science, but not in reading or social studies (or vice versa, or any other combination); a child can also be deemed gifted in all subject areas. How gifted services are delivered can vary by elementary school, but APS policy is for push-in rather than pull-out. At our elementary school, this means the gifted services teacher periodically comes into each classroom and does lessons is various subject areas for the entire class, and then provides some one-on-one attention to children receiving gifted services to supplement the lesson. Additional supplementation materials are given to the classroom teacher to give to children receiving gifted services for their subject areas.

At what grade does the testing occur?

I'm not sure that the process is the same at all APS elementary schools, but at our school class-wide testing of all students is done at the beginning of second grade via the NNAT2. If your child scores sufficiently highly on the test, they are automatically evaluated for gifted services. Before that (or after, even if the NNAT2 score wasn't high enough), a teacher can refer a child for evaluation for gifted services if they feel the child would benefit from it, and parents can refer their child for evaluation as well.

Being Arlington, I'm guessing there's a lot of parents referring their own kids.

Some do, but the program puts your through your paces if you want to do it. You can't just put your kid's name on a piece of paper and get an evaluation, there's a lengthy form to fill out where you have to give examples of several different ways in which your child demonstrates their giftedness, and then the gifted services teacher reviews the form along with class work to decide whether it warrants an evaluation. Purely anecdotally, it seems like parent referrals are more common in K/1, when a new student enters APS, and when a child gets unexpectedly high SOL scores. I haven't heard of anyone saying, "My kids NNAT2/SOL are meh and the teacher doesn't agree that my child is gifted, but I'm going to have Larla evaluated anyway."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Saw the recent post from someone considering move from ACPS to APS (or other jurisdictions), and we are in a similar boat, but are looking only in Arlington. How does the gifted program work at APS? DS is 3rd grade and is in the TAG program at his school, and I understand that in 4th and 5th grade in ACPS they have subject specific TAG classes, so he'd be doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th grade, for example. How does this work in APS? We're not sure exactly when we will ultimately move, but it likely will be before he finishes elementary, and I would like to know more about how this works. I've looked at APS website, but don't have a great sense of how things really work (and also would appreciate input from those with personal experience)

Don't you realize, OP, all the students in Arlington are gifted. It's like Lake Wobegon.

- mom of 4 APS students, told 3 of them are gifted and think it's a load of crap

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw the recent post from someone considering move from ACPS to APS (or other jurisdictions), and we are in a similar boat, but are looking only in Arlington. How does the gifted program work at APS? DS is 3rd grade and is in the TAG program at his school, and I understand that in 4th and 5th grade in ACPS they have subject specific TAG classes, so he'd be doing 4th and 5th grade math all in 4th grade, for example. How does this work in APS? We're not sure exactly when we will ultimately move, but it likely will be before he finishes elementary, and I would like to know more about how this works. I've looked at APS website, but don't have a great sense of how things really work (and also would appreciate input from those with personal experience)

Don't you realize, OP, all the students in Arlington are gifted. It's like Lake Wobegon.

- mom of 4 APS students, told 3 of them are gifted and think it's a load of crap

Yeah, sure you do.