Poway Agrees to Offer a Choice in GATE Courses : Education: High achievers will have the option of staying with their peers or mixing with regular classes.

Responding to parents’ demands, Poway’s middle schools this fall will offer gifted and talented students a choice of either separate classes or classes mixed with children of all learning abilities.

Poway Unified School District trustees Monday night voted, 4 to 1, to change the district’s Gifted and Talented Education, or GATE, program so that sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students who test in the top percentiles of academic achievement can enroll in accelerated classes with other children having high abilities.

The decision satisfies long-running concerns of some parents with gifted and talented students who say their children have been frustrated by the district’s practice of placing high achievers in regular classes. At the same time, it maintains the current program’s emphasis on heterogeneous classrooms, which other GATE parents still prefer.

The district’s four middle schools have 687 GATE students, about 10% of the student population at those grade levels.

“I can’t see where choice, as an option, is bad,” trustee Ed Carboneau said. Offering accelerated classes for GATE students, he added, “is a safe, sane, logical--even legal--way to go.”

The board of trustees’ vote, with President L. Ned Kohler dissenting, went against a recommendation from Romeo Camozzi, the district’s GATE coordinator. Camozzi proposed that GATE students be given the opportunity to enroll in honors courses composed of both GATE and non-GATE students, while maintaining their participation in other, regular classes with students of varying abilities.

“Creating tracked, high-ability classes could contribute to reducing the academic learning climate and instruction in non-GATE classes,” Camozzi said in a report to the board. “Additionally, all-GATE-student classes will restrict leadership development opportunities for some GATE students.”

Kohler, in explaining his vote, said he agrees with Camozzi.

Adding the new GATE classes to the existing curriculum in time for the beginning of the next school year in September, Camozzi estimated, will require teacher training, curriculum development and administrative adjustments that could cost the district as much as $35,000.

Camozzi’s recommendation for continued heterogeneous grouping of students is rooted on one side of a longstanding and unresolved debate among educators over whether gifted and talented students are better served in classrooms mixed with children of all learning abilities or in settings surrounded by fellow, high-achieving students.

Other school districts have dealt with the issue by offering parents a choice between the two.

Poway middle schools have been putting groups of GATE students in regular classes. The practice, called “clustering,” is intended to help gifted students develop social skills in a mixed classroom while utilizing their advanced abilities to improve the learning environment of their peers.

Additional challenges are provided to the high achievers through supplemental lessons from teachers. Poway also offers GATE students “pullout” courses, which take them out of their regular classes and allow them to explore particular interests.

But some parents of GATE students complained that the Poway program was haphazardly applied from school to school, that it put unrealistic demands on teachers and that it often left gifted students bored and loaded down with extra work that didn’t deepen or broaden their knowledge or skills.

The same parents have also asked the state Department of Education to review the program, which they claim has failed to meet aspects of the education code that require that GATE students receive a minimum of 200 minutes a week of “qualitatively differentiated instruction.” The state, which has cut back on such reviews because of funding cuts, has yet to respond.

Not all of Poway’s GATE parents have pushed to have their high-achieving students grouped in the same classes, however. In fact, GATE parents who responded to a recent school district survey were evenly divided on whether their children should be in separate or mixed classes.

Monday night, Noreen Walton, mother of two GATE students, was one of several parents who told trustees that she did not want her two sons separated from other students.

“Homogeneous grouping serves only to move students away from the mainstream,” Walton said. “What happens to the other children in the classroom? What happens when the gifted students are siphoned off and removed from the classroom?”

“I hope that my sons will learn that their giftedness is just that, a gift . . . something to be shared with others.”