Some Districts to Trim Funding for Gifted Students : Education: The budgets are already meager. The most sweeping changes are planned for Ventura Unified.

Threatened with state budget cuts last spring, Ventura County school officials have been girding for reductions of up to 25% in their programs for gifted students.

Now state education officials say funding for gifted education will be about the same this year as last.

But some Ventura County school districts still plan to trim their already meager budgets for teaching exceptionally bright children.

In Thousand Oaks, Conejo Unified School District officials said they expect to cut back purchase of classroom materials and possibly eliminate extra training for teachers of gifted children.

Ojai school officials also said they will be buying far fewer instructional materials--such as robotics kits and microscopes--for their Gifted and Talented Education program.

“We’re running a tight ship,” Ojai’s Director of Special Education Marty Babayco said.

But the most sweeping changes are planned in the Ventura Unified School District, which has one of the most costly gifted programs in the county and must cut expenses regardless of state funding.

Ventura’s gifted elementary schoolchildren stay in regular classrooms every day except one morning each week, when they are bused to other campuses for courses in computers, archeology and other challenging subjects.

Although popular with parents, the costs of busing the students and paying three teachers who run the special classes eat up half of the district’s $94,000 GATE budget, said Margaret Gosfield, the district’s gifted program coordinator.

That is too much, she said, because fewer than one-third of the district’s 900 GATE students are elementary age.

So by next fall the program, which has been run unchanged for two decades, will be revamped.

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A less costly option is to place all gifted elementary students in the same classes, segregated from children who have not qualified for the program.

Although some county school districts, such as Oxnard Elementary and Simi Valley Unified, already put their gifted elementary school students into separate classes, Gosfield said such methods have sometimes been criticized as elitist.

Nevertheless, Gosfield said the Ventura district must consider all options because of cost.

“If the funding continues as is, there’s no way we can afford to have these teachers,” Gosfield said. “It’s not a question of wanting to or not wanting to.” The current special weekly courses cover subjects that are not normally taught in regular third- through fifth-grade elementary school classrooms, Gosfield said. “They have done everything from archeology to space and flight and geometry.”

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Ventura’s funding for gifted education has slowly dropped over the past several years from $104,000 to $94,000, with most of the money going to pay the salaries of Gosfield and the three teachers and for busing.

Although some county districts such as Moorpark kick in their own money for gifted education programs, most are like Ventura and pay for them solely with state funds.

Besides being expensive, Gosfield said Ventura’s gifted students may need more extra attention than they get through the one special course per week.

“Gifted children are gifted every day, not just on Tuesday,” Gosfield said.

And some Ventura parents acknowledge that the change may be an improvement.

“Children who are gifted need to spend time with other gifted children,” said Kathy Neprud, leader of a parent group that raises money for gifted education. “They need to be challenged and they need to spend time with their peers. If they don’t have time with children who are thinking at higher levels as they are, they either shut down those parts of themselves or they become troublemakers in the classroom.”

In the Conejo district, administrator Linda Calvin said she also worries that the state will continue to cut GATE funding because of the mistaken assumption that bright children do not need special attention.

The attitude is, Calvin said, “that gifted students have no needs and they’ll make it on their own without any help at all. And that’s a fallacious statement.”

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Conejo receives about $125,000 in state funds for a program serving 1,200 gifted children.

At the elementary schools, small groups of gifted students are clustered together in regular classrooms.

Calvin said she is concerned that if teachers in such classrooms do not get extra training, they will not know how to intellectually challenge these groups of bright students.

“What happens is the teaching, while it may be very good, will tend to move toward the middle or the median of the classroom,” she said.