Maryville School District adds gifted program

For the past several years, the Maryville R-II School District has envisioned implementing a gifted program for some of its students.

The school district had been attempting to find different ways of creating that special program — and has finally done so.

“Gifted education has been something that has been prevalent in our state for the last several years,” R-II Assistant Superintendent Steve Klotz said. “Our district has not been a part of that process, but we studied it about seven years ago. We had some parents and administrators that made up a committee and studied it and made some plans.”

After studying the program seven years ago, the committee did some financial planning and determined the district could not afford the program.

However, the district returned to the idea a couple of years ago.

“Through feedback and surveys that we get back from parents, we saw that the gifted program is something that parents want offered,” Klotz said. “We came up with some plans and presented them to the board last spring and a recommendation to start the program. The board gave us the go-ahead and we finalized the plans by doing more research and talking to other schools.”

The need for a gifted program was obvious for Klotz because of the number of other schools in the area offering gifted programs. Maryville district personnel gathered information from other schools regarding how they run their programs.

During the 2014-15 school year, R-II began the process of finding out which students would qualify for the program.

During Tuesday night’s board of education meeting, Klotz presented the numbers to the board and district administrators. In grades one through seven, there are 700 students. The initial screening process determined 105 students who met the requirements to be in the gifted program and of those students, 27 students were found eligible to participate in the program.

However, the 27 students meeting the requirements to participate in the program do not necessarily have to go through it.

Klotz said the program is an opportunity for students, but is not mandatory.

“We meet with the parents and go over the results with them and let them know the students qualified,” Klotz said. “It is an elective service, the parents can choose to have them go through the process or they can tell us ‘Thank you, we are not going to take advantage of the service.’”

The students who qualified for the program will be studying from three different categories depending on individual results. The categories are math, reading and written expression.

With the introduction of the program, a teacher had to be found who would be able to teach the gifted program and Klotz said the school district found that candidate internally.

French teacher Michelle Corson will become the teacher of the gifted program, but will also continue to teach French. Klotz said Corson was chosen because of her love for the students.

“Her experience at the elementary and high school levels played an important role,” Klotz said. “This position requires her to work with a pretty broad range of student age. She has for a number of years had a strong interest in the idea of a program like this. When she was an elementary teacher, one of her strengths was pushing those upper level students and her daughter is getting her masters in gifted education.

“So Corson has that family connection to it as well, she has the passion to do it and her schedule allows flexibility to do it,” he added.

For the next school year, the eighth-grade students eligible for the new curriculum will meet for three hours Tuesday mornings. The seventh-graders will meet for three hours Wednesday mornings. The fifth- and sixth-graders will meet Thursdays and the second-graders through fourth-graders will meet on Fridays.

In the future, the program will be for first- through eighth-graders and participating students will be transported to the high school building.