While school districts nationwide struggle to balance equity with excellence, the Warren County R-III District has a rare middle ground.

The district’s gifted program treats intellectual potential as a resource to be mined, rather than a problem to be managed.

At the R-III monthly school board meeting, Emily Turner, Director of Special Services, shared an overview of the growing program.

“The gifted program falls under the office of special services,” Turner said. “The gifted program has been doing amazing things this year. We’ve got two amazing teachers with us who have really worked hard to streamline the program and who have some great goals for the upcoming year. They have worked really hard on updating pamphlets and practices.”

While the size of the program hasn’t changed – 71 elementary students and 76 secondary students when combined with attendees from Holy Rosary – the scope of services and expectations is growing.

The goals of the program include developing creative thinking and reasoning abilities through inductive and deductive reasoning to make predictions and arrive at conclusions, as well as to produce original and unique ideas or products.

Also important are the development of communication skills through presentations, both oral and written, for a variety of audiences. Development of skills needed to be an independent, self-directed learner responsible for decisions, choices, and evaluation related to projects. Personal and social growth through recognition of and responses to the strengths and needs of self and others.

To support students' growth, the gifted program’s entire screening system has been revised.

“Our elementary program has developed some online screeners,” Turner said. “The practice screeners will help them get ready for computer-based assessments and then create an online storage for assessments. Each of our first graders is screened for the discovery program so, naturally, that leads to a lot of paperwork. We’re working with our Infinite Campus program to create that. The secondary program is going to work on streamlining some Discovery projects and assignments.”

Turner said that the work put in by Jocelyn Krueger in the elementary program and Chad Berrey in the secondary program has been instrumental to its success.

“I’ll just brag on Ms. Krueger for a minute,” Turner said. “She created a Discovery open house series earlier this year. We have an open house, and kids come from different buildings, so they don’t always get to go to her classroom and see that. She created that so families can see the great things happening in her classroom and there has been a great response from that, too.”

When asked whether students have a dedicated gifted learning class, Turner said that it is being looked into.

“At the middle school, they are pulled out,” Turner said. “There has been some talk of that (making it a dedicated class). There has to be a discussion about logistics.”

Turner added that there have been 211 elementary discovery screeners for first-grade students, 15 Holy Rosary screeners, two Wesleyan Kiddie Kollege screeners, and 38 screeners at various other grade levels.

The program also had 15 secondary discovery screeners and 10 IQ tests this year.