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Ina Woolman, was working one day per week as the Coordinator of Gifted Education for the Rhode Island Department of Education. Ms. Woolman has retired and no one has been hired to replace her. The State Advisory is no longer meeting.

Report: Rhode Island State Advisory Committee of the Gifted and Talented -- September 29, 2005 - by Kerry Joyce

Does New Wording In State's Basic Education Plan Suggest New Paradigm for Rhode Island Gifted Education?

Beyond Grade Level

At the Rhode Island State Advisory Committee of the Gifted and Talented meeting held on September 29th, 2005, Ina Woolman, coordinator of Gifted Education for the Rhode Island Department of Education announced that she is working to have the State Education Department phase out the term gifted and talented, in some cases, and replace it with beyond grade level.

The new term has already been written into the state's Basic Education Plan, Ms. Woolman said, and may soon replace Gifted and Talented as a designation within the organizational structure in the Department of Education's Office of Special Needs.

RIAGE President Carolyn Rosenthal said that RIAGE does not endorse the change in wording, expressing the view that the Education Department should continue using the term Gifted and Talented. While acknowledging the importance of providing curricula beyond grade level for children who need it, it is nonetheless true that many gifted and talented children are not working beyond grade level for a variety of reasons, including poverty and minority status, according to Rosenthal. These students also require programs and other assistance that addresses their unique needs, Rosenthal said.

State Offers Some Backing To Proponents of Gifted Education

Also at the meeting, Ms. Woolman explained that a long held interpretation of state regulations pertaining to gifted and talented programs, was that these rules were only in effect in cases where gifted and talented programs were actually funded by communities. But this is no longer considered a proper reading of these regulations at the state level, she said. Ms. Woolman also announced that The Department of Education's Office of Special Needs is preparing a letter advising the state's Superintendents of Schools of this revised interpretation of these regulations.

This change was viewed as a potentially positive step forward by Ms. Rosenthal, depending on how aggressively the State Department of Education promulgates this new interpretation. But we need to find out more about this, she said.

Advisory committee member Vanna Donoyan suggested that school departments would be more likely to take this change in interpretation more seriously if the advisory was signed by the Education Commissioner, Peter McWalters. Ms. Woolman replied that she was working on that, but it was unclear at this point whether that would happen.

RIAGE urges Commissioner McWalters to support this initiative by Ms. Woolman.

RIAGE representative Kerry Joyce said he didn't think parents of gifted children would wait for their Superintendents to receive this advisory, and might very well invoke these changes made to the Basic Education Plan now in place, in seeking more individualized curricula for their children. Ms. Woolman acknowledged that these changes as they stand now could offer parents and students some leverage in working out arrangements with schools and school departments.

Vanna Donoyan also said that in the course of her work with the RI Department of Education in the areas of state science standards and the new proficiency-based high school graduation requirements, that programs for gifted and talented students are beginning to be viewed more favorably, and that she believes these programs will garner more support at the state level in the not so distant future.

RIAGE hopes to find out more specifically what Ms. Donnoyan is referring to in this regard and plans to address the issues with her at the next meeting. RIAGE member Deirdre Lovecky, Ph.D. Director of the Gifted Resource Center of New England was skeptical that these new standards would in and of themselves benefit gifted and talented students, and might well have the opposite effect, if the central focus of the state's initiative in this area was another round of general proficiency testing. These proficiency tests do little to meet the needs of gifted and talented students who generally are not challenged by the tests or by the way the material designed for preparing students to pass the test is presented, according to Dr. Lovecky.

Program Inventory

Ms. Woolman also handed out a draft of a questionnaire, called (Note the title!) The Learning Beyond Grade Level - Inventory. The questionnaire covers programs, plans and progress within four areas:

  1. District Level Context, Policies And Supports, which seeks to find out to what extent school departments currently support and plan to support learning beyond grade level expectations.
  2. Classroom-Level Curriculum & Instruction That Supports Learning Beyond Grade Level, which looks at how teachers determine structural levels, classroom strategies used, percentage of students involved and district tracking of these efforts.
  3. School-Level Strategies That Extend Learning Opportunities Beyond Classroom Level, which is intended to determine what schools are doing to offer extra-curricula activities, such as Science Olympiads, etc as well as concurrent enrollment programs (middle and high school, or high school and college) to facilitate beyond grade level opportunities.
  4. Specialized Programming Providing Support For Specific Abilities and Interests of Students, which would include things like mentors, advanced subject area tutors and distance learning etc.

The inventory will initially be sent out to three school departments, that are considered generally supportive of gifted and talented initiatives: Coventry, Cranston, and Pawtucket.

RIAGE President Carolyn Rosenthal welcomed the progress being made in this area, while taking not of the use of the term Beyond Grade Level in the title of the questionaire.

These developments announced by Ms. Woolman leave many unanswered questions for RIAGE members such as:

  1. How exactly did this new interpretation of the regulations come about?
  2. Is the new interpretation less subject to change than, say, the old interpretation?
  3. What was the process involved in changing the wording of the BEP from gifted and talented to beyond grade level?