To: Michael Green
Re: May Monthly Special Services Report
From: Deb Kernen
Date: May 2, 2014
Last summer, the Legislators completely changed the laws around Highly Capable services. The Legislators now expect for highly capable students to access accelerated learning and enhanced instruction through basic education. This means their unique learning needs should be available to them through their basic education classroom. They also mandated that we must identify students K-12, which adds a whole new challenge of identifying such young children. This week, we just finished our first round of the testing/referral process. We had 51 K-3 students referred for Hi C testing. These students were screened using a screening test called theCogAt 7. Students are required to meet 90% or higher to move on to the next phase of the testing process. Out of the 51 students referred, we had 15 qualify to take the CogAt 7 test. This is a 2.5 hour test that assesses students’ abilities in reasoning and problem solving verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal (spatial) symbols. We will be testing these students this coming Saturday. Next year those students that are identified in grades K-3 as gifted, will be provided differentiated instruction within the classroom setting. Once we reconfigure our schools, we will be looking at some possible additional options for Hi C programming for these students.