CAPE SCHOOLS ACQUIRE GRANT, NEW LOOK AT GIFTED PUPILS

Thanks to some hard work by Betty Chong and Dr. Helen Nevitt, a more diverse group of Cape Girardeau students will participate in gifted programs.

Chong, director of special services for the city's public schools, and Nevitt, an assistant professor at Southeast Missouri State University, thought there was a better way to determine if a student qualified for gifted classes. They found traditional methods excluded some children who didn't test well.

"If you looked at our whole school population, it became evident that we weren't seeing an equal representation of students from less advantaged homes," Nevitt said.

Chong said more gifted students were coming from some elementary schools than others. The students were selected through a screening in second grade or by a teacher recommendation.

The women applied for a $23,500 grant through the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. They submitted research that showed traditional means of detecting gifted students doesn't always work.

Only three public school districts in the state received grants -- Lindbergh in St. Louis, Columbia and Cape Girardeau. The money will pay for Nevitt's expenses as SEARCH director, to hire a project assistant and to train classroom teachers to detect gifted behavior.

On Friday and again today, teachers in grades K-3 attended a seminar conducted by Dr. Bev Shaklee of Ohio's Kent State University.

Shaklee and her staff have been conducting a five-year study with 1,400 Ohio students to detect gifted behavior.

She compares traditional testing to a spotlight, which only illuminates one thing at a time. Her method is more like a floodlight, which shows the whole picture.

"Teachers are prepared to collect pieces of evidence," Shaklee said. "We discarded the traditional definition of `gifted.' We use the term `developmentally advanced.'"

Chong, Nevitt and Shaklee agreed that the new way of detecting special abilities would benefit young children the most. They are harder to test, but it is better to give children advanced training at an early age so they can reach their full potential.