Gifted education audit in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner via a kind reader's email:

In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.

At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.

But district officials acknowledge difficulty without speciality staff.

"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 12, 2009 3:44 AM
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