03/17/2007

By JULIA SILVERMAN  / Associated Press

Natty in his pinstriped suit and polished wing tip shoes, with an American flag pin winking neatly from his lapel, 9-year-old Ralyn Case stepped up in front of Senate Education Committee members this week to testify that he and 41,230 of his peers in Oregon are being left behind by the state's public schools.

Case, whose tested IQ tops 150 and who mowed down opponents this year as a member of Creswell High's chess team, is a poster child for the thousands of students across Oregon who are classified as "talented and gifted," meaning that they've scored in the 97th percentile on a nationally recognized standardized test.

The state mandates that school districts provide special programs for its brightest students. But since 2002, that mandate has been unfunded, resulting in a hit-or-miss situation in the state's schools. One district may have found room in its budget to fund programs for talented and gifted, or TAG, students, while a neighboring district will have cut its gifted students' program completely.

Now, after years of tight schools budgets, gifted student advocates are finding reason to hope that some funding may be restored to their cause.

Case's testimony was warmly received by Education Committee members this week, with Sen. Vicki Walker, the Eugene Democrat who chairs the committee, promising him she'd fight for a bill to fund a permanent gifted students coordinator at the Oregon Department of Education, plus six regional centers to train teachers in working with gifted students.

What no one is offering is any more per-pupil money to individual school districts to pay for higher-level classes and extra services for the brightest students. Instead, advocates are working a "smaller steps" approach, hoping this session will yield a framework to build up TAG programs in the future.

"There is a huge variation between districts, between what they have provided," said Margaret DeLacy, a TAG advocate who has filed a long-running suit against the Portland school district over its lack of options for top learners. "In the name of equity, we need to do something about this situation."

At least 32 states provide some state funding for the education of gifted students, according to the National Association for Gifted Children, at an average of $244.01 per student — which would equal $10 million per year if Oregon matched it.

Some states go far beyond that. Georgia, for instance, spends just over $1,000 extra for every gifted student. Neighboring Washington, Idaho and California all provide some per-student funding, from the extra $37 per gifted pupil in Idaho to $131.70 in Washington.

Without any financial help from the state, families are left to fend for their own students, and several of the parents who testified this week said their local school administrators now duck and cringe when they approach, knowing that complaints are forthcoming.

The assumption, they said, has been that their children can flourish without special attention because they're bright. Instead, they say, their children are at a high risk of getting bored and tuning out school completely.

To cope, some have gotten creative. Case's parents, for example, placed him in middle school math and science classes, and agreed that he should skip an elementary school grade.

Before his parents intervened, Ralyn Case testified, he'd spend much of his class time, "bored, disinterested, waiting for the rest of the class to catch up."

Larysa Pavelek, an 8th-grader at Salem Middle School, tells a similar story. Only one of her classes is challenging, she said. In the rest, she'll read a book, or do homework from another class.

"The classes I don't like are the ones I don't have to work hard in," said Pavelek, who plays piano and French horn. "The only thing stopping me from going to private school is the music program and my friends," she said.

Lobbyists for school administrators and school boards said they're on board with the current proposals, to allocate about $800,000 for the regional centers and a full-time gifted specialist at the state Department of Education. But they scolded lawmakers, too, for not providing broader funding for TAG students.

"If you want to make these programs meaningful, you need to fund them," said Jim Greene, a lobbyist for the Oregon School Boards Association.

A separate bill, to require school districts to file specialized plans for the education of each individual gifted student with the state has been far less popular in the state's 198 districts, Greene said.

"They say, 'It's just one more piece of paper we'd have to file,' " he told Walker's committee.