Update on Proposed Changes to the MCPS GT Policy
During our Jan. 13th general PTA meeting, we discussed that revisions are underway to the current Montgomery County Board of Education (BOE) Policy for Gifted and Talented Education. Proposed changes may include eliminating the global gifted and talented screening for 2nd graders, eliminating the use of the term “gifted” throughout, and elimination of specific accelerated curricula guidelines, thus weakening the policy overall.
Many items covered by the current policy may be removed and instead become Superintendent’s regulations. These program items, once removed from the policy, would then not be ensured to be implemented and the Superintendent may then choose to provide or discontinue any item, at his discretion and without BOE approval.
To address these concerns, the Montgomery County Council of PTA’s (MCCPTA) Gifted Child Committee (GCC) has drafted a resolution to make it known to the BOE that the current policy should not be weakened. Some gifted and talented parent advocacy groups feel the resolution should be stronger, in order to more effectively state the community’s goals for high quality gifted, accelerated and enriched education. The MCCPTA resolution will be discussed at the next Delegates Assembly on January 28th, at which time amendments will be offered. It will then likely be brought back to the local PTAs for a vote. The current MCCPTA Draft Resolutions is as follows:
Update on MCPS Proposed Changes to GT Policy
We invite your comments and input for amendments to the above proposed resolution. One possible amendment discussed at the last PTA meeting is to keep the resolution consistent with the state policy’s use of the term “gifted”. This would align the resolution with the designation currently used by the state for accelerated learners.
As your FMS GT Liaison and MCCPTA Delegates, we will take the message back to the MCCPTA Assembly that we do not wish to have the current policy weakened in any way. We will only support an MCCPTA resolution if that is explicitly stated. Please provide your input to us no later than January 25th. Thank you for your time and thoughts on this critical educational issue.
Jean Rager, FMS PTA GT Liaison
Email: william.rager@verizon.net
Dinitri Danley, MCCPTA Delegate
Email: DINIDANT@comcast.net
Betsy Sirk, FMS PTA Vice President for Education and MCCPTA Delegate
Email: betsy.sirk@nasa.gov
Link to the current (under review) MCPS Policy IOA – Gifted and Talented Education http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/policy/pdf/ioa.pdf
Posted: January 18th, 2009 under In the News.