Pioneer in Education for Gifted Plans to Fight to Save Program

Jeanne Delp of Garden Grove is sometimes called “the mother of education for the gifted in California.”

It’s a title that stems from her pioneering work in the late 1950s as a state Department of Education consultant, studying the needs of bright students and ways of helping them achieve to their full potential. Her work resulted in the 1961 passage of legislation setting up the public school programs now referred to as “Gifted and Talented Education (GATE).”

Helping the gifted has been the keystone of Delp’s 39 years in education, and she finds it paradoxical that the state’s GATE programs are threatened with extinction even as she prepares to retire on April 30.

Gov. George Deukmejian, in his proposed budget for 1987-88, calls for ending state money for GATE programs and using those funds to help pay for reducing first-grade class sizes.

Delp said in a recent interview that she is all for reducing class sizes. But she thinks the relatively small amount of money that goes for gifted education--$21 million of a $17-billion state education budget last year--is a great investment for California. To divert that money, she said, is to risk losing some of the talent that the state’s brightest young people can offer.

“It’s always been a myth that these kids will be able to make it on their own because they’re so smart,” she said. “Gifted children have special problems. They need special education. . . .

“We’ve always had problems getting money for gifted education. But this is the first time we’ve faced total cutoff.”

Delp is not, however, ready to give up on GATE funding.

“Well, I won’t stop fighting,” she said. “I’ll be working with the other teachers and parents and supporters of gifted education. We have a powerful statewide organization. It’s called the California Assn. for the Gifted. We’ve taken our battles to Sacramento before.”

Delp, 59, has been with the Garden Grove Unified School District since 1961. In addition to launching gifted education in that district, she held positions as a principal, special education director and director of special projects.

She has no regrets about retiring.

“It’s time, and I look forward to it,” she said.

Bureaucratic Jungles

Delp is a gentle-looking woman, with blue eyes, blond hair and gracious manners. But she will tell you that she’s a fighter and a survivor, and she has needed those skills in the bureaucratic jungles of education.

There was one fight she didn’t take up, she conceded.

“It was in 1944, when I was a student at Stanford University,” she said. “It was my goal to major in journalism, but the dean at that time was a man who didn’t think women belonged in journalism. He discouraged me, and about the same time, my mother, who was a teacher, was urging me to go into education ‘because you can always teach after you get married.’ ”

Delp shook her head as she recalled the episode. “You’ve got to remember that this was 1944.”

After graduation from Stanford in 1948, Delp taught two years in Santa Maria. Then she took a job as a civilian teacher at a U.S. Air Force base in Japan in 1950-51. It was during the Korean War, and she said the job showed her the real face of war “and not the glamorous picture people like to think of.”

Evacuation of Marines

The episode that drove war home to her, she said, was the evacuation of U.S. Marines from the besieged Chosin Reservoir in Korea during a bitter winter battle.

“They were flown into the air base where I taught, and we civilians were all awakened that night and told to come help greet and help these wounded men coming in,” she said. “I’ll never forget the looks on those young men’s faces. They had seen war and death. They’d been surrounded in the freezing cold before they managed to escape.”

It was 1958, while Delp was a consultant in the Yolo County Schools Office in Woodland, Calif., when she first learned that the state Department of Education planned a study on education for the gifted. “It was something that always interested me, primarily because of things I’d learned as a counselor,” she said. “I went to Sacramento, and I told them ‘I’m the person you’re looking for.’ ”

Delp and other consultants hired by the state eventually completed their landmark “Study on Programs for the Gifted.” That study led to California’s first statewide assistance program for bright children.

“Our study determined that there should be $240 funding per child,” Delp said. “But we only got $40 per student in the budget, and we almost didn’t get that. Gifted education has never been funded as it should be.”

Scornful Image

Delp said that among the problems facing gifted students is a scornful image painted in the entertainment media. She noted that movies and television often portray bright students as being ugly, unpopular and socially inept.