A black father’s lessons in getting sons in school’s gifted program

Sonja Isger:

Eric Davis is black. His twin sons, Nigel and Elgin, are black. When they loaded their backpacks and headed for first grade years ago, Davis made sure they walked into a racially diverse elementary school in suburban Boynton Beach.

And yet in their classroom then and for the next eight years, Nigel and Elgin didn’t have any classmates who looked like them – no other black boys.

That’s because from elementary through middle school the twins were in the gifted program. Despite being in separate classes, their experience was similar in one way: the program’s overwhelming whiteness.

Their father, a school police officer at the time who visited the campus to deliver lessons on bullying, couldn’t help but notice.