In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without specialty staff.
"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."
In an April letter to Waukesha's superintendent, the DPI recommended the district refine its methods for identifying students as gifted and talented and provide professional development for staff on providing special services for such students.
The state audit was performed after a group of district parents filed a complaint last year alleging numerous deficiencies in Waukesha's program for gifted students.
One of those parents, Amy Gilgenbach, said she wishes the audit had focused less on policy corrections and more with what was going on in the program itself. She said the state agency should have looked into what happened to instruction due to the loss in staffing.
"At the elementary level, when you have already overburdened teachers with 28 or more kids in their classes and then expect them to take on added responsibilities without additional training or instruction, obviously you're not creating a good situation for GT students in those classes," she wrote in an e-mail.
"At the middle and high school levels, not having appropriate guidance and course selections and potential college and career paths is a huge pitfall for GT students."
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