Gifted And Talented

KEITH SMITH'S efforts to have Montel Williams, Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah Winfrey write letters on behalf of Anne Arundel County's gifted and talented program is pretty easy to dismiss.Why would County Executive John G. Gary or the school board pay any more attention to these afternoon television personalities than they would to parents who live and vote in the county?Mr. Smith, a former teacher of gifted and talented students, obviously is willing to try anything to revive this program, which was eliminated during this year's education budget slashing.

Die-hard supporters of gifted and talented programs cut out of Anne Arundel County middle schools last summer are turning to Rosie O'Donnell, Oprah Winfrey and Montel Williams, among others, for help in getting the programs refunded.The TV talk show hosts are among 70 people, well known and not so well known, who Keith Smith, a former gifted and talented teacher, hopes will plead his case to the county school board and County Executive John G. Gary .Smith, head of a newly formed group of parents, is organizing a postcard campaign to ask people he believes have a commitment to education to write to Anne Arundel officials demanding that the budget surplus be used to restore gifted and talented programs to the county's 18 middle schools.

Doug Jovan has spent 29 years in the classroom, but when school starts today, his students will find him in the kitchen.He didn't retire and promise his wife he would have dinner on the table every night at 5. He is one of 18 teachers who were abruptly transferred when the school board, in budget-trimming mode in June, eliminated gifted and talented programs for middle school students.Jovan was a science department chairman six years ago when he moved to teaching some of the district's brightest students at Severn River Middle School.

WHAT STARTED as a family trip turned into a cultural exchange for Swansfield Elementary School second-grader Luka Nedzbala.Last year, Luka's family traveled to Slovenia, which is between Austria and Croatia.Luka's mother, Polonca Cesar-Nedzbala, is a native of Slovenia who came to Columbia in 1987.During their trip, the family members visited a school where Cesar-Nedzbala's cousin teaches art."The children had a lot of questions," recalled Cesar-Nedzbala.For his part, Luka was fascinated by Slovenian customs.

Pupils shouldn't be labeled 'gifted,' 'talented'As a parent of a child that the Howard County public schools has labeled as ungifted and having no talent, I must protest.Is the school system so out of date that it has never heard of the idea of "multiple intelligences"?Are the movers and shakers in the system so antiquated that they fail to grasp the idea that most (not just three out of 28) children are good at something and should be commended, rewarded and encouraged to excel? If my child doesn't "ace" a standardized math test or put every comma and capital in a written paragraph, he's ungifted?

HERE'S THE GOOD news on gifted and talented education in Maryland: the State Board of Education is paying more attention to it. The governor added $500,000 in funding this year, for a total of $2.5 million. Comparative data will soon be available for the first time on how various school systems are doing. And a parents' group called MCGATE, Maryland's Coalition for Gifted and Talented Education, has blossomed into an active advocate on this issue.Here's the bad news: Gifted education is terribly politicized.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening proposed yesterday spending $500,000 next year to help the state's schools do a better job of serving gifted students.The initiative, which the governor calls his "Excellence in Education" program, would help train teachers to better identify students who ought to be enrolled in gifted-and-talented programs and encourage school systems to develop more programs for those students.Glendening said he expected the amount devoted to the effort to double, to $1 million, the following year.

A COMPACT DISC of electronic music by student composers was among the attractions last week at Wilde Lake Middle School's enrichment fair, a showcase of creativity that included interactive computer software on world cultures and a plan for a skateboard and in-line skate park in Columbia.The CD "Sounds from the Wilde" included works such as "Crazy Blues in C," by Mark Dubac, "Variation on a Western Theme," by Sarah Risch and Bryanna Herring, and "Trance Jupiter," by Sam Diener.Mike Bevill, Glenn Centers, Gino D'Giovanni, Jason Downs, Wayne Hamlin, Nick Hanewinkle, Jacob Patterson and Michael Washington are the other composers whose work appears on the disc.

"Enrichment Valley School" opened for learning Friday morning inside Bollman Bridge Elementary School, giving students a taste of the one-room schoolhouse of the 1940s.Three dozen fifth-graders in the Jessup school's gifted and talented program spent the day on lessons taken from 1942, working on penmanship, constructing Valentine's Day hearts for soldiers and diagramming sentences."It's been pretty fun, but I prefer '90s-style education to '40s-style education," said 10-year-old Sarah Tolliver who, like all other girls in the class that day, wore a dress in the style of the 1940s.

"DUMB AND DUMBER'' was a box-office hit. ''Gifted and talented'' has been under siege. Only in America, as they say.Public-school programs for so-called gifted and talented students are trying to recover after years of taking a beating.Part of the problem is, understandably, money. Schools face greater pressure to stretch a dollar so hard choices must be made about how to serve all students.The other, more frustrating part is philosophical: Combining kids with like mental abilities, called ''homogeneous grouping,'' over the years got a bad name.