I Leave for a Week, and Everything Goes to Hell

Forgive me, Internet, for I have sinned. It’s been over a week since my last post, but in my defense, I have a really good excuse:

We spent the week at Walt Disney World, partially for me to attend the Type-A WDW Workshop, and partially to have a vacation with my family. There were some amazing moments, and some amazingly good (and bad) timing to certain events, but we’re home again and settled back into real life.

I wanted to tell more about our trip to Disney, but then something else got in the way that demands attention first. The day after we returned from our trip, I was summoned to a community meeting regarding changes to the gifted education services offered by our school district. Cordy is identified as gifted and receives gifted services, so naturally this concerned me.

Her school offers an ECLIPSE class, which is a self-contained class for 4th and 5th grade gifted students. The class provides enrichment beyond the standard curriculum and encourages more out-of-the-box thinking – the perfect environment for our creative thinker who can’t always explain how she found her answer because it just appeared in her head. We (meaning her parents and the staff of the school) had been planning for her to join this ECLIPSE class for years, and at her IEP meeting earlier this year, we agreed that in April of this year we’d have her start spending a small amount of time in the class to help transition her into it.

That same day, I also received a letter in the mail from the district, telling me that the entire elementary gifted education program was being restructured, condensing all of the highly gifted children into five schools instead of the sixteen neighborhoods where the ECLIPSE classrooms are currently found. It also informed me that Cordy was being reassigned to an entirely different school in order to attend an ECLIPSE class.

Wait…WHAT?

The school district is, in fact, getting rid of ANY gifted education services at her current school, which has nearly a quarter of the student population identified as gifted. They intended to send her to a school where only 4% of the student population is identified as gifted. How is this equitable?

But wait… it gets worse. Beyond giving parents no choice at all as to where their children are to go in the Columbus City Schools district for gifted services, they also gave us only seven (7!) days to respond to the letter. Never in my life would I have considered the school they want to send Cordy to as an appropriate placement for her. I certainly wouldn’t have toured the school. Where she is now is where everyone believes she is best served. Everyone, that is, other than the district administration.

There’s even MORE bad news, though. Should a parent decide they don’t want their child to attend a failing school in order to get gifted services, there’s a line on the form we’re to return where we’re asked to sign to decline services. However, included in that is a statement that says we accept that our child will not receive gifted services if we decline the district’s placement option.

So parents, who had no advance knowledge of these changes and were not given any chance to provide input, are being told that our gifted children will either go to the failing school demanded by the district, or they will have their right to gifted services removed.

I don’t respond well to threats, especially where my children are concerned. I attended the meeting that night to learn more about the reasoning behind these decisions, only to find their reasoning was all based on lies. The Gifted Task Force recommendations that the district claims helped drive the changes have no recommendations for altering ECLIPSE. The state standards that they also referenced have no bearing on the current ECLIPSE classes, either.

Where does all of this leave Cordy? In a lose-lose situation. If she transferred to the failing school for gifted ed, she would suffer emotional trauma at being sent to a strange location, with kids she’s unfamiliar with and a staff she doesn’t know. Her anxiety would skyrocket and negative behaviors would likely increase, making it impossible for her to learn. If she remains at her current school, she’ll have the comforts of “home” but stagnate without gifted services to keep her mind active. Should her mind not be sufficiently challenged, her anxiety takes hold again, she becomes trouble in the classroom, and she shuts down and doesn’t have interest in school. Her team at school agrees with these assessments.

It breaks my heart to know she’s being placed in this situation by a careless administration who are likely pleased with the outcome, considering that her mom fought them and won during the school levy battle. But they’re placing hundreds of other children in a bad situation, too, ripping them away from friends and schools they know so they can be placed in failing schools to boost the building’s test scores.

I’m not sad, though. I’m angry. We’ve put enormous amounts of work into getting Cordy to where she is now, and we’re not about to let a tone-deaf, pigheaded administration undo those efforts. Other parents are angry, too, and we’re organizing to resist these changes. Should the district refuse to postpone these changes until parent input can be given to better shape any update to the gifted education program, we will choose to refuse to allow our children to take the OAAs or any other state standardized tests. Our kids are more than a test score, but if Columbus City Schools will only value them as test scores, we’ll take that away from them.

We have no plans to change Cordy’s school. She will remain at her school, and she will continue to receive gifted education services, despite the district’s claims otherwise. If it involves legal action, we’ll do it. She’s a twice exceptional child, and her special needs restrict her from changing schools for gifted services. She was placed in this school by district staff because of the gifted services and the special needs services available, and the district will honor that commitment to her until she is finished with fifth grade, at which time we may choose to leave this train wreck of a school system.

Sigh…it would be so much easier on the school district if they’d stop picking fights.

Parents of CCS children – find out more on how you can make your voice heard at this site. Parents of CCS gifted students are also encouraged to join this Facebook group.

Disney post coming soon, promise!