Are We Losing Our Greatest Minds?

Part 14 of Our Award-Winning Series “Our Children’s Health”

But this pooch wasn’t bought new from the store: Its parts were rescued from the trash and brought to life by students. The LEGOS show that it is 11:30 a.m., since each stack forms a clock that runs on the pull of gravity, and inside these notebooks are molecular formulas, entered in the scratchy handwriting of third graders.

These are a handful of the smartest kids in our area, and here, at the Long Island School for the Gifted (LISG), in Huntington Station, they can realize their full potential. But many other students, also identified as gifted, are often left to fend for themselves by a one-size-fits-all educational system that is not well-equipped—or even required—to deal with their special learning needs.

“No one looks upon gifted kids as having a disadvantage,” says Carol Yilmaz, LISG founder and director. “The saddest thing to me is that the parents who come and see me are describing the same situations that I went through 28 years ago.”

FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS

There is, as of yet, no universally agreed-upon answer to the question: What is giftedness? Generally, kids scoring 130 and above on standard IQ tests are considered gifted, although there is controversy as to whether these tests are biased against certain ethnic and economic groups.

“Gifted in general is having the potential to achieve more than what would generally be expected; academically gifted is to work at an accelerated rate,” says LISG Principal Roberta Tropper. “By traditional standards, these kids are talented. The whole idea of gifted means that the person has a talent for a specific field. There are gifted athletes, gifted musicians.”

The New York State Department of Education considers about 4 percent of children to be gifted, roughly the same amount affected by learning disabilities. With learning-disabled children, it is because of their disability; with gifted children, it is ability that is not addressed. Unfortunately, both categories are frequently kept from reaching their fullest potential. Learning disabilities and disorders such as autism can also mask a child’s giftedness.

While many schools have enrichment programs for gifted kids, LISG is a full-service home for LI’s gifted children. Under state law, public schools are required only to provide programs for kids with potentially handicapping conditions: being academically advanced isn’t considered one of them.

“I have a lot of sympathy for the public school teachers,” says Yilmaz. “I really do, because they have everybody in their classes.”

Because gifted children have higher order thinking skills and abstract thinking abilities, many become bored learning at levels below what they are capable of. This boredom, often mistaken as defiance, lumps gifted children together with kids who have learning disabilities, attention problems or behavioral issues.

“I think people have this misconception that because they’re smart they’re always going to want to learn, when actually they get very discouraged,” says Yilmaz.

CHALLENGING THE STEREOTYPES

“The bumper sticker says it all,” says Tropper, alluding to the sticker that reads ‘My kid beat up your honor student.’ “What other population of children would this be accepted for? You would never say, ‘My kid beat up your handicapped child.’”

Gifted children who feel pressured to fit in sometimes bury their abilities, tone down their vocabularies and deliberately get test answers wrong. Smart kids are no strangers to ridicule from peers, or even from parents, who sometimes write them off as elitist know-it-alls, nerds or the offspring of pushy parents.

“I would never encourage my child to call another child ‘nerd,’ ‘geek’ or anything else like that,” says Eleanor Goldsmith, whose 13-year-old son is learning disabled and part of the Smithtown School District special education system. “Being called names is hurtful to anyone, no matter what is being made fun of.”

It’s easy to forget that these kids are, in fact, just kids, especially when you hear their high-level theoretical discussions or visit a school where they take classes like Advanced Robotics and memorize the periodic tables of chemical elements, from helium to zinc, by singing “Old MacDonald.”

“I don’t know what people come here expecting: shirt, tie, pencils in the pocket protector?” says Tropper.

The truth is that kids that are stereotyped—with any label—feel the pain.

At LISG, the gifted are like other kids: Monday is pizza roll day in the cafeteria, Friday is chicken rings. Eli Manning posters hang on lockers.

“I don’t sit at home and study all the time,” says Jordan Schildhaus, 14. “I’m not a robot or anything; I don’t feel like I am different from anyone else.” She says she wants to play ice hockey for the women’s U.S.A. team, or be an architect, but adds, “I’m not that great at math.”

While Schildhaus is likely being modest, she touches on an important point. Tropper says that Schildhaus is in advanced math and does well, but it is not her passion.

“Not all gifted children are gifted in every single area. They are all different,” explains Tropper.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND?

Each year, students new to a school district must be screened for potential giftedness and potentially handicapping conditions, under state law. But there is no required method for this screening, which often takes place in kindergarten. Many districts tend to use a kindergarten readiness test that asks children to simply bounce a ball or perform tasks that wouldn’t identify them as academically gifted, according to National Association for Gifted Children. If a child is classified as potentially gifted, the law requires that parents and district superintendents be notified, but nothing else.

The federal government doesn’t mandate gifted programs, leaving those decisions to be made at the state and local levels. While many LI schools provide some level of gifted education, many do not.  With no prescribed formula regulating those schools that do, these programs, as a whole, remain unregulated.

The Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, the only federally funded nationwide gifted education initiative, coordinates the research of effective testing methods of gifted children and awards grants to districts focusing on underrepresented populations of such students.

Javits does not require that programs be implemented, and remains at the bottom end of the spectrum, receiving only 2.6 cents out of every $100—compared to the $32 per $100 received for programs for learning-disabled kids during 2007.

A bill to ensure the provisions of educational services for gifted and talented students has been introduced at the national level, calling for gifted programs to be mandated and for all teachers to be educated in meeting gifted students’ needs. The National Research Center on Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT) found that 61 percent of third and fourth grade teachers had no training in teaching highly able students, limiting the challenging educational opportunities for advanced learners. Unfortunately, this legislation has been stalled and remains in the Assembly Education Committee, according to the Advocacy for Gifted and Talented Education in New York State.

Gifted children who are not part of a specialized curriculum may develop social and emotional problems, says Maureen Neihart, psychologist and author of The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know?

“Children who are multi-exceptional are at the greatest risk because their differences in ability are magnified,” says Neihart, adding that “gifted children have difficulty connecting with kids in their class because usually they are not true peers.”

For now, parents rely on schools like LISG, the private nonprofit founded in 1980 by Yilmaz and nine other parents of gifted children seeking a challenging education for their kids. It’s the only one of its kind on LI, with almost 300 students from more than 60 school districts, from pre-K to Grade 9.

At LISG, students complete most of their high school courses by the end of ninth grade, and in high school, they take as many as 15 Advanced Placement (AP) courses along with extracurricular activities and clubs. Students must have an IQ of 130 to enter the school (Mensa International requires a score of 132).

Highly accelerated courses address the special needs of the gifted, where students work from one to three years above grade level in all subjects, through fast-paced classes.

“We’re not saying our kids are better than anyone else,” says Tropper. “They just deserve an appropriate education—that’s what everyone deserves.”

Until that happens, more kids will keep falling behind in an educational system that focuses on teaching students to meet the bare minimum. That system has so far remained complacent in raising our future scientists, mathematicians and politicians to their highest personal potential. Only time will decide who will face the harshest consequences: these kids or us.