To the Madison School Board of Education

Hello. My name is Elizabeth Dohrn and I am a parent of a student at Thoreau Elementary School.  I have an advanced degree in education and currently consult with districts in “best practice” to meet the needs of all students. With that said, I am writing today in support of the continued, and actually increased funding, of the Talented and Gifted programming in Madison Public Schools. State statute requires that schools must ensure that appropriate programming is available which is systematic and continuous and that access to this programming is free to students.  My daughter is a high achieving student and the short road we’ve traveled in Madison Public Schools has been a bumpy one at best. We knew that our daughter was gifted prior to Kindergarten, but were told she could not start early because she was not the right age. She attended a K-1 classroom and successfully completed the 1st grade curriculum during Kindergarten, but even with that, the school was reluctant to accelerate her, so we paid for outside testing to “prove” what we already knew-that she was bright and not being appropriately challenged in the school system. We were able to accelerate her only after we paid $500 for outside testing because the school psychologist did not have the “time” to test her.

Accelerating her was helpful in that she had access to 2nd grade curriculum, but the only “extra” support she received was by the TAG support person providing “encouragement” to the classroom teacher to “differentiate the instruction”. Differentiation is only effective if the teacher is trained and willing and in our case, it wasn’t happening. So, we counted 2nd grade off as a lost year in meeting her needs. This year we have been more fortunate in that her teacher has a good knowledge of high achieving students and our daughter is clustered with other peers who are also high achieving. However, Madison is not fulfilling the mandate that requires systematic and continuous programming. Research supports that students who are high achieving make the best gains when grouped with similar achieving peers and the “extra” that happens in our school is only because parents have been vocal and volunteer to teach extenstion activities or PAY for extension activities (foreign language, strings, afterschool activities).

Five (5.0) FTE were eliminated from the TAG program in 2003-04. The proposal for 04-05 is to cut another 2.0 FTE, providing ONE support person to 7 schools. You do the math, how much support will one person be able to provide to the teachers and students in SEVEN schools? In my daughter’s school alone, there are 11 3rd graders who are high achievers split between three teachers, not to mention the needs of the students in the other grades! Given that programming isn’t happening effectively now, I don’t believe it can happen systematically and continuously with this proposed cut. In addition to the proposed cut in FTE is a proposal to cut an allocation of $1,500 to each school to support TAG programming. If this allocation is taken away, not only will the teachers have minimal access to TAG support, they will also not have access to “time and money” to receive additional training.

As stated in the proposed budget, ‘… there is a larger proportion of our highest achieving students represented in our non-attending/dropout population than any other group.’ I ask that you ponder this situation. If we are truly a school district that wants to be considered “excellent”, why then are our highest achieving students dropping out or being home schooled or private schooled? We are doing a large population of students a great disservice by currently not meeting their academic needs now, and with the proposed cuts, we are making the future less bright for our brightest. In summary, with the proposed cuts, we will once again fail the high achieving students of Madison.

Thank you for your time.