We are writing to ask that you please preserve the TAG budget for 2004-05.  When we moved to Madison in August 2002, our son began second grade at Crestwood Elementary.  We had previously lived in Lincoln, NE (which has a population comparable in size to Madison's), where he had been identified in kindergarten as gifted.  He had received services that included both pull-out programming and daily one-on-one mentoring in his strongest areas during school.  Before arriving in Madison, we had heard many excellent things about its public schools.  We were extremely surprised then to find that the district's TAG staff had been gutted and only nine staff remained to serve a school district of 25,000 students!
 
I began attending the district-wide meetings for TAG parents immediately.  As I began to become familiar with how Madison was handling its TAG kids, I could see that although the district had radically cut its financial support for TAG staff and students, the remaining staff was doing its darndest to make a bad situation good for the kids, with each staff member working hard to serve as a resource person for five to six schools.  We also learned that our family had gotten lucky-- knowing nothing about Madison schools, we had fortuitously decided to rent a place in the Crestwood district, where it turns out that the principal has a background in TAG and strongly supports it.  Not only that, but our son's reading and math teacher turned out to be one of the former TAG teachers whose position had been cut.  This exceptional teacher is highly skilled at differentiating instruction for a wide range of ability levels.  She artfully individualizes the students' instruction to match their academic needs and strengths while continuing to lead the class as a cohesive unit.  As you can imagine, that's quite a feat, and requires training, persistence, and support from administrators and parents.
 
As I said, my attendance at the TAG meetings has shown us how fortunate we are for our son (and next fall, our kindergarten-aged daughter) to be assigned to Crestwood.  Sadly, I am finding that my continuing attendance at these same meetings is also teaching us that TAG kids' needs are not being met at many other Madison schools, in all parts of town and across all grade levels.  The troubling stories I hear come from many different families living in attendance areas throughout the city:  a second-grader who reads Black Beauty in her free time, but at school her teacher insists that she read Frog and Toad along with everyone else because the teacher hasn't learned how to differentiate instruction within her classroom;  fifth-graders who have already completed the sixth- and seventh-grade math curricula, whose parents are being told that they'll have to do it again next year because there's no way to challenge them with eighth-grade work when they're in sixth grade.  Most troubling are the high dropout rates over a 5-year period among students who had been high achievers on fifth-grade math tests, especially among those who are racial minorities or are economically disadvantaged.  To quote from page 42 of the March 11, 2004, MMSD proposed budget cuts, "...there is a larger proportion of our highest achieving students represented in our non-attending/dropout population than any other group."  As I hear repeatedly about the struggles so many families are experiencing as they attempt to simply help their kids to learn something new rather than merely occupy a chair in their classroom, I wonder whether our good luck with landing in Crestwood's district can possibly hold out through our children's middle school and high school years.
 
 At one TAG parents meeting, someone offered this comment:  Instead of "No Child Left Behind," shouldn't it really be "Every Child Moves Ahead"?  The Madison TAG kids and staff are already struggling to continue to move ahead.  If there are further cuts to the Madison TAG budget, the miniscule staff that will remain will be stretched even further.  Each staff member will be responsible for six to seven schools, each expected not only to identify new students who could benefit from TAG services, but also to ensure that previously-identified kids continue to have their needs met, as well as to provide the classroom teachers with the continuing education that helps them to effectively differentiate instruction to best meet the needs created by the range of kids' abilities.  Additionally, for the 2004-05 year, they will need to do this without any funding to support TAG programming.  If the situation continues to deteriorate, those families having the resources to do so will increasingly move their kids out of the district, homeschool, or will be forced to concentrate their efforts on their individual child rather than on how to help MMSD improve the TAG situation district-wide.  The families which, for whatever reasons, can't effectively advocate for their TAG kids will stand a progressively higher chance of watching their students join the ranks of high-achieving dropouts.  I have mentioned our family's good fortune in landing within Crestwood's borders, but in many ways, people make their own luck.  The question for our family and the many other families of TAG students is, can that good luck be created within MMSD, or will we have to find other ways to fulfill our responsibility to be sure our kids receive a challenging education?
 
We know that the budgeting process is a grueling one, and we are sure that every area in which cuts have been proposed has had people writing in its support.  As you do your best to keep budget cuts as far from the classrooms as possible, please remember that 5000 of those kids in the classrooms are TAG students.  Please do what you can to keep every child moving ahead.
 
Thank you for your time and for your commitment to our public schools.
 
Sincerely,
Cathy and Kirk Cryer