Classes for Gifted: End in Sight? : Supporters Rally to Save Enriched Studies

When Carrie Quinn first read Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in January as part of her fifth-grade assignment at Eader Elementary School in Huntington Beach, she didn’t understand it much. The play had so many hard words, “like doth and hath. “

Last week, however, Carrie talked glowingly about the haunting beauty of the “language of the play” which had helped her understand the finer points of tragedy in literature.

“Lady Macbeth talks her husband into killing (Scottish king) Duncan so that he can be king, but she goes crazy and kills herself. She can’t get everything done her own way and feels guilty that Duncan was killed.”

Carrie, 10, doubts that she would have mastered the Elizabethan English of this classic if she had not been cast as Lady Macbeth in the play her classmates will put on later this month. They are part of Eader’s Gifted and Talented Education or GATE program.

An estimated 21,000 students in Orange County public schools are enrolled in GATE because they have been identified as mentally gifted on the basis of IQ tests, standardized achievement tests or grades, said Pat Phelan, president of the Orange County Council of Gifted. The organization is made up of GATE coordinators from the 18 county school districts with the largest enrollments in the program.

GATE offers enriched or advanced placement classes, said Phelan, GATE psychologist for Santa Ana’s junior high schools. California launched the program 25 years ago, and today it is offered in all of Orange County’s 28 school districts, Phelan said.

Educators and parents say GATE keeps gifted children from becoming bored in regular classes, which they say could cause these students to develop academic or behavior problems.

Phelan and other GATE supporters fear that the program may be eliminated because Gov. George Deukmejian has proposed phasing out state funding for the program over the next two years. They have launched an intensive lobbying effort to save the program.

This year, the state is spending $21.5 million on GATE. While no figures are available on the amount received by county schools this year, Jeff Wells, Orange County Department of Education GATE coordinator, said the county received $1.6 million last year for the 21,219 students then enrolled in the program.

Deukmejian spokesman Bernard Kalscheuer said the governor proposed phasing out GATE to finance a reduction in the average size of first-grade classes from 28 to 22 pupils.

“When the governor met with education leaders last December their chief topic of concern was the need to reduce class sizes,” Kalscheuer said in a telephone interview from Sacramento.

Kalscheur said Deukmejian was forced to fund this class-reduction proposal using money earmarked for six special education programs, including GATE, because of limitations on spending caused by a shortfall in revenues and a constitutional limitation on expenditures.

Even with these constraints, Kalscheur said that the governor’s budget proposal for public schools calls for an increase in spending. Deukmejian has recommended that state spending for education be increased by $621 million, or 4%, over the current year’s budget to $17.2 billion in the 1987-1988 school year.

Kalscheur rejected the contention that the elimination of state funding will result in the end of GATE, noting: “Individual districts are free to continue the program if they want to.

Only three of Orange County’s 28 school districts--Cypress, Centralia and Fullerton Joint Union--are able to fund GATE programs on their own, Phelan said. The remainder must rely on state money to partially underwrite GATE costs.

‘Within two years Deukmejian’s proposed budget will effectively eliminate a program we’ve built up over the past 25 years in order to provide quality education to gifted children in this state,” said Ron Fontaine, a Bakersfield school administrator and president of the California Assn. for the Gifted, a group of parents and educators that promotes GATE programs. “There is no evidence that most individual districts will be able to continue the GATE program using their own funds.”

John Ikerd, acting superintendent of the Orange Unified School District, said the elimination of GATE would be “a terrible loss because the program offers the qualitatively different curriculum that gifted students deserve.”

With 1,714 students enrolled in GATE, Orange Unified has the third-largest program enrollment in the county, Phelan said.

The district this year received $141,000, or $82 per student, from the state to fund GATE, said Iris Yamaoka, program coordinator. Figures are not available on the amount the district spends on GATE because the program does not have a separate budget, Yamaoka said .

Survey on Spending

The cost of Orange Unified’s GATE teachers, for example, is included in separate budgets for each school--a fairly typical practice, said Phelan, who is conducting a survey to determine how much each district in the county spends on GATE.

The end of state funding would result in the termination of GATE or cause severe cutbacks in the number of classes in most of the county’s school districts, he said.

This would be devastating, according to Ardis Bucy, Carrie Quinn’s teacher at Eader Elementary. “Gifted children become frustrated when they aren’t in situations where they’re not with their intellectual equals,” said Bucy, who has taught both GATE and regular classes during her 15-year career.

“They can go over materials in 10 minutes where it will take average, but very competent, students 40 minutes. . . . Gifted students in a regular classroom get tired of waiting. With time on their hands, they get into trouble.

“They become discipline problems, or at the other extreme, they become very withdrawn.”

Jerri Hespirch’s son, David, 14, and daughter Lucretia, 12, are enrolled in the GATE program at Marine View School in Huntington Beach.

David, an eighth-grader, did not enter GATE until the fourth grade. “If it hadn’t been for GATE, he would have turned into a juvenile delinquent because he was so disruptive in the regular classes he attended,” Hespirch said.

Lucretia, now in seventh grade, enrolled in GATE in the third grade. “When she was in regular classes, she was withdrawn and not interested in her studies,” Hespirch said.

Hespirch, a homemaker, said she and her husband, Glen, an engineer, have such unpleasant memories of what their children went through in regular classrooms that they have decided to enroll them in private schools should GATE be ended in the public schools.

No information is available comparing the performance of students before and after entering GATE, said Wells of the county Department of Education. However, a study of GATE released by the California Department of Education in September found that: “Data from the California Assessment Program (CAP) show that GATE pupils as a whole, score significantly above the statewide mean and that they increasingly do so as they progress through the grades. Test data reveal that gifted pupils who are served with an appropriately rigorous program score extraordinarily well.”

The study said third-grade GATE students scored better on the CAP than all third-graders by 47% in reading, 37% in written expression and 42% in mathematics.

By eighth grade the disparity is even more marked, with GATE students scoring better than all eighth-graders by 70% in reading, 67% in written expression and 66% in mathematics.

Promised Support

Last month, 2,200 delegates to the annual statewide conference of the California Assn. for the Gifted were promised support by state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Honig told the Feb. 20 gathering, which a conference spokeswoman said was attended in Los Angeles by “several hundred” parents and educators from Orange County, that he would work with them to “turn up the flame” under the governor to get him to reverse his decision.

Deukmejian said he is opposed to a larger school budget because spending for education has increased dramatically since the first year of his Administration. He said that competing demands for state funds, combined with a constitutional spending limit, have made large increases for education impossible this year.

On Feb. 24 in Sacramento, 15 parents and teachers from Orange County joined 800 other GATE supporters from throughout California for a rally on the steps of the Capitol to protest Deukmejian’s proposal. They also lobbied state lawmakers to win support for continued funding of GATE, Phelan said.

On Feb. 25, Phelan presided over a meeting of the Orange Council of Gifted in Fountain Valley to mobilize the estimated 42,000 parents of GATE students in the county for a campaign to persuade state legislators to support GATE.

“We’re going to have parents phone, write and visit their legislators to make sure that state funds for GATE are restored,” Phelan said.

Without such funding, Carrie Quinn could be the last Lady Macbeth at Eader Elementary School, said Principal Dareen Yonts.

“Some people look at our teaching ‘Macbeth’ to fifth-graders and ask whether it’s appropriate for children this age when it’s so difficult for adults,” Yonts said.

“And they ask how ‘Macbeth’ is relevant to educating fifth-grade students. . . . Well, studying ‘Macbeth’ is a good way for gifted students like this not only to learn about literary techniques like plot and character development but also about music and history. And by acting in the play, students can improve their oral language skills and develop an appreciation for the fine arts.”

About half the students in the “Macbeth” production come from Bucy’s class, the others from the classroom of Ginny Ellenson, who teaches the school’s other fifth-grade GATE class.

During the last hour of each school day, Bucy directs rehearsals for the 25 students in “Macbeth” while Ellenson helps another 25 students prepare an animated film featuring characters from Greek mythology, in addition to working on scenery for “Macbeth.”

Before Bucy’s class dispersed to rehearse “Macbeth” on a recent afternoon, she conducted a discussion in a science class on chain reactions. Using an overhead projector, Bucy superimposed on the blackboard a cartoon of an 18-part “moth killer” by the late Rube Goldberg.

When Bucy asked if anyone knew who Goldberg was, Ryan Brandos answered:

“He drew inventions that scared dogs and did a lot of things to get just one thing to happen in the end.”

Marcus Chan said Goldberg “used chain reactions because he caused one thing to happen, triggering other things to happen.”

A Rube Goldberg-looking mechanized page turner had been assembled by Kelley Roe for the upcoming schoolwide science fair. Kelley, 11, explained that the device was very practical.

Once Burned Fingers

“I got the idea because I once burned my fingers,” she said. “It was hard for me to turn the pages.”

With some help from her dad--because she had never used a hammer, nails and saw before--she built an inclined wood platform to hold a book. A pulley was attached at the rear of the platform.

Kelley demonstrated her “Bookworm Page Turner” by grabbing a rope to lift a weight that had masking tape attached at the bottom. She then let the weight fall on the page.

With the page sticking to the tape, she used the rope to lift the weight to the top of the pulley, where the page came loose and fell to the other side of the open book.

Connie Lin, 10, said that before Kelley could make a complicated device like this she and her classmates studied the six simple devices that are the key to building more complex machines like engines.

“They are the pulley, lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, screw and wedge,” Connie said as she pointed to small examples of the devices she had found around her house and had mounted on a display board as part of a science assignment.

Sitting on desks and tucked in corners were the other completed science projects. Bucy said she had instructed her students to come up with “strange and unusual” inventions.

But even Bucy said she was amazed by the funnel-like contraption Erin Stein had come up with to detect and trap hailstones. “I told Erin it was kind of a crazy invention because it never hails in Huntington Beach.

“But wouldn’t you know, I was proved wrong when it hailed today. . . . When things like this happen, I’m reminded never to underestimate what kids like this are capable of.”