June 26, 2014

Dear St. Francis Families,

For the past year we have been planning for, and developing, a Gifted Program at St. Francis.  The amount of research we have done to build our program has been quite extensive.  We have taken our time so that our finished product may be responsibly formulated.  We have looked at models not only within our county, state, and Diocese, but across the nation as well.  Most recently, we have hired a full-time teacher that will guide our program.  We believe that our program will be an amazing product for our students.
Though the Gifted Program in Mon County is for grades 1-8, ours will be for grades 2-7. Based on our research, experience, and inquires, it is our belief that 1st grade is too young to begin Gifted Education.  Also, since our 8th grade curriculum is so aligned with high school courses, we do not feel the need at this time to include that grade level in our Gifted Program.  In addition to that, there are no Gifted Programs in high school.
Entrance into our Gifted Program will be solely objective. If a student does not meet one of the three criteria then he or she will not be admitted. The three criteria for entrance into our Gifted Program include:
1- Total score on Terra Nova must be in the 90th national percentile.  The total score can be found on your child’s Terra Nova reports.  It has its own line item and it is a combination of Reading, Math, and Language Arts.  We will look at the Terra Nova total score for students in grades 1-6 since that is the subgroup moving into grades 2-7.  A total score of 90+ will be required before a student moves to step 2.
2- Score of 125+ in at least one subsection (broad reading, broad math, or academic knowledge) of the Woodcock Johnson test of achievement.  This will be required before a student moves to step 3.
3- Overall score of 130+ on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (WISC) IQ test.
All testing will be done in house.  The only provision to that will be made for students transferring to our school that are already in a gifted program elsewhere. They will be admitted into ours.  Other than that, parents will not be able to use results/reports from any independent testing.  Once a student passes all portions of our testing and screening process, he or she will be admitted into our Gifted Program. Parents will be updated with their child’s progress along the way.
We have already identified the students that have met the 1st prerequisite of and those families will be receiving further communication within the near future so that we can accelerate the next step of testing.  We will first test the 7th graders, then 6th graders, then 5th graders, and so forth all the way down to 2nd grade. The amount of time it takes to test each student will be time intensive.  Because of that, we are actually going to begin some testing for our upper grade levels at the end of this month.  That way we can have some of our classes ready to begin on the first day of school.  For those that do not get tested in the summer, we will begin testing when school resumes.
There is more information that we have about our Gifted Program, but the purpose of this email is simply to share the bare essentials and requirements of it’s most basic components.  There will be a more thorough description of our Gifted Program before the 2014-15 school year begins.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.  With God’s continued favor and blessing, our school programs continue to progress and become stronger.