For students in Palm Beach County schools, the paths through the district’s gifted programs often are as different as black and white.
Most gifted white elementary school students receive an advanced education the whole day in full-time gifted centers. Many were tested before they entered kindergarten by private psychologists, who charge as much as $400 for an assessment of their intelligence.
Families get test results within days and can start their children in a gifted class on the first day of school.
Gifted minority students often travel a different road.
Most attend part-time gifted programs in their neighborhood schools. In part-time programs, students leave their regular classes for about an hour a day of enrichment. They likely took free assessment tests offered by the district. Those test results often take months to process, delaying talented students’ entry into the program.
As Palm Beach County schools try to attract minority students to its gifted programs to fulfill a mandate from the federal government, most of the district’s full-time gifted classes remain overwhelmingly white.
Blacks make up 28 percent of students in district schools, but only 7 percent of students in full-time gifted classes. Twenty-two percent of district students are Hispanic, but only 10 percent of full-time gifted students are.
More than 2,500 white students attend full-time gifted programs, compared to 245 black and 365 Hispanic elementary school students. In the district’s part-time gifted programs, blacks make up 34 percent of the population, Hispanics 23 percent.
“It bothers me because there is not a mix of kids in there,” said Banyan Creek Elementary parent Jayne King, whose multiracial son is in fifth grade at the Delray Beach school’s full-time center. At Banyan Creek Elementary, 37 percent of the total population is black, but only 10 percent of the students in the gifted classes are black.
Citrus Cove Elementary parent Stephanie Stewart agrees. Her three children are among the 22 black children in gifted classes at Citrus Cove, a full-time gifted center with 207 children in Boynton Beach.
“The school district should take a more aggressive position,” Stewart said. “Black representation in the gifted program does not match the proportion in the school. It’s way out of balance.”
District officials say they have successfully recruited minorities over the past few years. While there were 563 blacks and Hispanics in elementary gifted programs across the county in 1999, the number jumped to 1,062 this year.
‘MY MAJOR GOAL’
“I’m doing everything I can to get more minorities in the program,” said Willard White, the school district’s gifted planner. “It’s been my major goal for years.”
Still, blacks and Hispanics are not filling up the full-time centers, where they could get gifted education all day, but are in part-time centers, where the enrichment is more limited.
“All day long, the level of conversation is more advanced and the class moves faster” in the full-time program, parent King said. “There is more contact time with the teacher at your individual level.”
With pressure to perform well on standardized tests, schools have asked the district to find ways to keep their best students in the neighborhood instead of sending them to full-time regional centers, which draw from several schools, said Russell Feldman, the district’s director of exceptional student education. Because of that preference, the district created 12 part-time neighborhood centers in 2000.
ONE TEACHER PER GRADE
Feldman said the district has not created a new full-time center since 2001 because there has not been a need, based on the number of gifted students in a region.
A full-time center requires at least 150 students, who come from several neighboring schools, because at least one teacher is needed for each grade, with about 25 students in each class.
A part-time center requires only about 25 students, with only one gifted teacher at the school. A few students in each grade usually rotate into the teacher’s class each day for about an hour.
The part-time centers, coupled with an aggressive program of identifying gifted minority students, have skyrocketed the number of blacks and Hispanics in the gifted program.
Of 4,552 gifted elementary school students in Palm Beach County this year, about 11 percent are black.
That’s almost double the 6 percent black enrollment of 1994, when the federal government received a complaint that the district discriminated against gifted minority students. Satisfied with the district’s efforts, federal authorities ended their investigation in 2000.
Minorities’ abundance in part-time programs marks only one way that their participation in Palm Beach County’s gifted programs differs from the gifted path taken by many white students. Some say these divergent paths perpetuate the racial divisions that the district has been working to eliminate.
Minorities often take gifted exams given by the school system, a process that typically takes several months, while many white children are tested by private psychologists, who charge high fees and offer results within a few days. About 20 percent of the district’s gifted children are tested privately.
These students must score 130 or higher on an IQ test to qualify for the program. They also need high scores on standardized achievement tests.
Students who are poor or don’t speak English well enter the gifted system by a different series of criteria. School district psychologists rate their performance on non-verbal ability tests. The students also submit report-card grades and a portfolio, including writing samples and FCAT scores.
This tiered system irks many observers, who say it creates one standard for the wealthy and another for the poor.
“It is inappropriate for us to allow people to pay to get evaluations done on the outside,” School Board member Debra Robinson said. “I would like to see us upgrade the curriculum for all kids so there is not such a big desire to get into the gifted program.”
After the federal investigation began, the district began a vast overhaul of the program. A nationally known gifted expert said the needs of many gifted students could be met at part-time centers.
These centers also satisfied complaints from teachers and principals, who said removing their brightest students resulted in lower standardized test scores.
The issue has become especially pressing now that so much, from extra money for improved grades to vouchers for poor grades, hangs on the results of the FCAT, the standardized exams taken by Florida students in grades 3 to 10. Gifted students bring up their schools’ scores by performing well on the exams.
Seven hundred children now get extra enrichment at 19 part-time centers.
Although minority children’s abundance in these centers may have unintentionally stalled their numbers in the full-time centers, district officials say it doesn’t matter which program families choose, as long as they participate.
“It’s hard to determine if one type of program is ‘better’ than another,” Feldman said. “Not every kid needs a full-time program.”
Some children are talented in math but their reading skills are not as advanced, he said, so a pull-out program that develops their area of aptitude might suit them best, Feldman said.
Wanda Sanders’ son Kirby is one of the minorities recruited for the gifted program.
In an effort to grow the part-time program at Plumosa Elementary School in Delray Beach, the school tested many of its students to see if they were gifted. Kirby, a third grader, qualified.
The school said he could stay at Plumosa in its part-time enrichment program or move on to a full-time center at a different school. Sanders chose Plumosa.
“They gave me my options, but I felt the part-time program was good for him,” Sanders said. “He’s comfortable at Plumosa so we wanted him to stay there.”
The school district has not studied whether its full-time centers offer a superior education to part-time centers. But an analysis last year found that FCAT scores were about the same for students in both the part-time and full-time programs, said Jaime Castellano, a gifted specialist for the school district.
FASTER PACE
Gifted expert Steven Pfeiffer said research shows full-time programs usually teach at a faster pace.
“Pull-out programs generally provide more enrichment than acceleration,” said Pfeiffer, an education professor at Florida State University.
“Although you could have an excellent quality program, in terms of quantity, it’s less.”
Experts have long debated whether gifted testing should assess past performance, which would favor middle-class students, or detect future potential, which offers advantages to poor students.
Some say there should be different criteria for children from disadvantaged backgrounds because IQ tests have cultural biases and limit the definition of intelligence.
“It gives a chance to a child who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance,” said Sharon Griffin, who teaches gifted children in the part-time program at Rolling Green Elementary School in Boynton Beach. “They shouldn’t be penalized because they haven’t had advantages.”
Griffin said her classes do emphasize enrichment, but that’s what her students, most of whom are poor, lack.
“A lot of my students need enhanced vocabulary because they are immigrants recently arrived to the United States,” she said.
“But they truly are gifted.”
Lois Solomon can be reached at or 561-243-6536.
Schools with full-time gifted centers Asian Black Hispanic American Indian Mixed White Total
Addison Mizner 6 5 21 1 22 235 290
Banyan Creek 3 22 20 0 13 166 224
Beacon Cove 14 6 19 2 14 248 303
Belle Glade 0 19 12 0 2 1 34
Binks Forest 30 18 51 2 27 326 454
Citrus Cove 11 22 20 0 13 141 207
Del Prado 30 7 26 2 14 293 372
Freedom Shores 15 24 29 2 30 159 259
H. L. Johnson 10 26 29 1 28 181 275
Lighthouse 9 1 7 1 5 150 173
North Grade 6 11 27 0 1 147 102
Palm Beach Gardens 4 20 14 0 6 90 134
Roosevelt 5 43 6 1 4 4 63
South Olive 14 8 54 0 23 131 230
Water’s Edge 29 13 30 4 24 365 465
Total 186 245 365 16 236 2,537 3,585
PART-TIME SCHOOLS Asian Black Hispanic American Indian Mixed White Total
Barton 1 42 14 0 5 3 65
Calusa 0 0 1 1 0 31 33
Crystal Lakes 0 1 2 0 0 26 29
Indian Pines 0 5 6 1 2 10 24
Lake Park 0 3 0 1 0 17 39
Manatee 0 0 11 1 4 42 58
North Palm Beach 0 9 1 0 0 14 24
Pahokee 0 33 11 0 0 2 46
Palm Beach Public 1 0 4 0 0 6 11
Palmetto 0 3 51 0 7 9 70
Panther Run 4 2 5 1 3 19 34
Plumosa 0 12 4 0 2 3 21
Poinciana 1 4 4 0 4 30 43
Rolling Green 0 29 23 0 0 4 56
Sandpiper Shores 0 0 2 0 0 6 8
U.B. Kinsey 1 7 5 0 2 2 17
Verde 1 1 17 0 3 28 50
West Riviera 0 37 0 0 1 0 38
Westward 2 24 0 1 4 3 34
Total 11 239 162 5 38 245 700
Source: Palm Beach County School District
