How may the Halton District School Board defend its decision to implement a Gifted Primary program requiring approximately 360 children to be tested while many of the most vulnerable may wait their turn on a list?
Now that the national media has focused on this issue, is their recent decision based on a 2 month pilot going to cause them to rethink this program or how/what they implement at our board?
Note: We want to be clear to readers that we have no information if they plan to provide comment or additional information on this program other than their quotes in the Toronto Star.
Based on the information they provided to the Toronto Star and assumptions/issues/comments sent to us in the community, we are providing how they may respond and community rebuttals.
1. Existing staff can still handle the other pending assessments.
With no additional staff hired to complete the 360 partial assessments that did not previously exist before this program, it would seem that someone has to be affected. Although it was initially noted that the ‘time sensitive’ assessments for this new group would be completed and then the staff would continue with the full assessments, staff could now be required to continue some of the regular assessments while doing the new Primary Gifted ones. In doing so, the HDSB could say they are not suspending the original group’s assessments entirely but rather continuing alongside. It would seem that some children would be affected as you can’t do 2 assessments at the same time can you?
2. Staff do other work already so the Gifted Primary assessments are done instead of the ‘extra work’ thus again not affecting children waiting on the original list.
To make a claim that the staff do other things thus having some ‘free time’ that now is being allocated to the 360 Primary Gifted assessments could mock the very effort staff is making asking for additional man hours and funding. If such a explanation is provided, parents could argue that the staff should not be wasting time while hundreds of needy children wait and have their academic future affected. If you can clear up 360 extra partial assessments and still state that the wait list is not affected suggests priorities need to be re-evaluated.
3. Impact does not affect wait list so why was funding for additional man hours requested.
How can existing staff perform this amount of extra partial assessments without an effect on the daily workload? The request for more man hours in the report indicated a man hour shortage. The department doing the assessments was the area submitting the report asking for money to fund additional man hours through March break, summer break, and outsourcing.
4. Wait list time is excessive.
Our wait list timing is far greater than Toronto. Toronto has issues far in excess to Oakville in servicing the needs of many types of communities. How can their wait list time be 4-6 months with ours ranging up to 2 years. Toronto as well has 2,000 on their wait list while ours is approximately 700 but they still manage to clear up the backlog in far less time.
Could it is because they actually put a priority on helping the most vulnerable instead of serving and/or prioritizing only a select group of the population. Why is your child more needy than mine?
Hello,
I found about your blog through the Toronto Star / Halton Peel website, and have read your various posts. You have made good points, and thoroughly understand the intricacies of local politics. I feel I can add a perspective – although I pondered submitting an email, I prefer the blanket of anonymity (and yes, I have supplied an apocryphal email)
Your website, as does The Star article, highlights the growing need for psychoeducational assessments. While not directly mentioning it, the rising tension of “anti-elitism” continues to erupt from society’s underbelly, with gifted children erroneously painted with this same brush. Yet how different is this passive-aggressive arrogance than the entitlement of parents who do not pay for these “$2,000 to $3,000” psychoeducational assessments, yet assume they have the right to one (and one at their preferred time). While Ms. Allison McDade created a firestorm in the board, she has quickly reverted to a more measured approach using diplomacy, as revealed by her on-air interview with John Tory.
In theory, I do agree with the perceived inappropriate timing of the moving considering there are many children waiting to get tested; but I also recognize that board has exceptionally qualified individuals who are constantly examining regional priorities. Moreover, the continued neglect of gifted students is incomprehensible – students, even adults, continue to stereotype these young men and women on the basis of “well, you’re smart so why don’t you just do well and help the class?”
If anything, school boards continue to be oh-so-Canadian about it using political correctness and sensitivity to an uneducated, if not delusional public: the stark reality is that many of these gifted children have the potential to be future leaders in their field based on intellectual prowess. Statistically, some of those measured with the highest IQ’s have become some of the world’s greatest philosophers, thinkers and critics:
Sir Isaac Newton, John Stuart Mill, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Nicolaus Copernicus, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Gates, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Mozart, David Hume and a plethora of others.
And for those that were not given the necessary support? Meet Chris Langan. Langan, whom has a reported IQ of 195, spent 20 years being a bouncer at a bar. His inability to achieve success was detailed in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers,” as well as a recent BBC documentary. Langan, like most gifted children, was incredibly bored at school. What news outlets don’t tell you is that many highly-gifted students are at-risk of dropping out, and even social ostracization on the basis of “intellectual boredom.”
There have been decades of research on the profound need for gifted programs. Stanford’s quasi-independent Hoover Institution recently focused on gifted children and included students like Alex Wade, a 13 year old enrolling in courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, in Basque, linguistics, and microbiology. These students are “the likely people to make the big discoveries,” says Bob Davidson, founder of the Davidson Academy, an institute for gifted students.
I as a teacher every day challenge my gifted students who continuously fall into a slump of boredom with progressively-dumber curriculum. Perhaps Ms. McDade and the common public need to educate themselves on the swift need for these programs before waving their entitlement card. Would Ms. McDade be complaining if her child was in gifted?
Why do I say all this?
I have a learning disability, and my brother is a gifted learner.
I really like your comments and I do agree – but I think with the gifted who are identified so early are the exception not the rule.
In Halton we already have a gift program, and perhaps it can be moved forward 1 or 2 years as opposed to waiting til grade 5. Why not identify the same way they identify LD kids? the major issue here is it isn’t equitable.
But what about the kids whose parents are not advocating for the kids with LD issues, because that can be fixed so easily if identified. I am a parent who advocates extensively for my child he is doing really well, but before we got here it was a long road too.
It is the same no matter how you slice LD or gifted but they both deserve the same attention and not place one over the other.
Thanks…