Reply to If you were designing the AAP program, what would you keep? Add?

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Reply to "If you were designing the AAP program, what would you keep? Add?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The most important thing an advanced or gifted program can do for kids is to help them in dealing with the emotional aspects of being highly intelligent. Highly intelligent kids can benefit from learning how to deal with being different from their peers. They can benefit from learning study techniques: many learn so easily that they truly don't know what studying means. Yes, challenging academics across the board (not just STEM subjects) are important, but helping kids deal with the psychological aspects of being so bright will have long term benefits in all aspects of a child's life.
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You are describing a gifted program.  The kids in AAP are, by and large, not gifted.  They are not the children who are "different from their peers" and who "learn so easily".  Those would be the exceptionally gifted, who are few and far between in AAP.[/quote]

+1.  AAP has become the filter school for learning "disabled" students who are by and large average/above average kids struggling to say focused and/or interact with peers for various reasons.  It is a great place for them but it provides an artificial and temporary comfort zone as they eventually have to function in the real world own their own.  As it stands today, the AAP center program is absolutely not an "exceptionally gifted" center anymore.  The name given to the center and the assumption given to every center child that they are "advanced learners" needs to be revamped, or, the center program needs to go back to it's original reason and provide advanced academic enrichment for only the "exceptionally gifted" children.  IMO it is just another FCPS school and what is the point.[/quote]

Absolutely agree.  I have older kids who were in elementary school when the GT program was around.  That was when only the exceptionally gifted kids made up the program but the vast majority of kids (like my own) were in Gen Ed.  No one resented that system because it was very clear that only the kids who absolutely needed a different learning environment were in the program; it was special education.  To be frank, it was obvious who needed to be in GT; those kids were extremely quirky and so bright that they often had a hard time socially, so it made sense to give them their own peer group.  AAP is very, very different; the majority of kids in it are indistinguishable from the majority of kids in Gen Ed.  It is such a shame that FCPS has allowed it to grow into this ridiculous, bloated program that essentially does nothing more than divide two virtually identical groups of kids.[/quote]

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