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FIVE GIFTED KIDS AND THE PROGRAMS THAT SERVE THEM
By LEE SHERMAN

GIFTED STUDENT PROFILE
Name: Sarah Eby
Parents: Carol, art teacher; and Dennis, engineer
Home: Eagle River, Alaska
Special Interest: Competitive gymnastics
Intended Profession: Veterinarian


"It's Definitely Funner"

ANCHORAGE, Alaska—
Sarah Eby was born in the spring, as the snowpack began to melt and rush headlong down the Chugach mountains rimming Anchorage. By Thanksgiving, Sarah was already taking her first hesitant steps. At 18 months, she knew her ABCs. At two years, she spoke whole sentences. She taught herself to read at four.

Like many gifted children, Sarah learned fast, shooting rapids while other kids were still paddling in the eddies. Some teachers and administrators in Anchorage School District, dissatisfied with their approach to gifted education, recently began asking how they could challenge and engage children like Sarah without removing them from the mainstream. Taking high-ability students out of their regular classroom for enrichment activities several hours a week, as the district had been doing, "was somewhat disruptive to the students," explains Sharon Meacham, Principal of Homestead Elementary School in Eagle River on the northwest edge of Anchorage.

"Kids were floating in and floating out." They missed assignments, and teachers had to "play that game of catching them up," she reports. And sometimes they brandished their braininess. "Kids who were leaving (for pull-out classes) were sometimes quite elitist about their proclivities," Meacham says wryly.

At the same time, the district was looking for ways to beef up learning for all students in the regular classroom. And so began an arduous process of research, planning, and experimenting to create a strategy for serving gifted students while benefiting all students.

One of the specialists the district consulted was Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson at the University of Virginia. A classroom-based model "makes sense on two counts," says Tomlinson, who sits on the board of the National Association for Gifted Children. First, she notes, it "deals with the issues of excellence and equity—issues that all schools struggle with." In providing for excellence, she says, schools should not "reserve special help for certain groups of kids." Instead of offering "something frilly on the side" for advanced learners, schools should "teach more teachers to teach in a high-end way" for all learners.

Second, because gifted students spend the "biggest chunk, the critical mass" of time in the regular classroom, pull-out models don't meet them where they are and give them what they need during the bulk of the school day and year. The classroom-based model is, therefore, more "time efficient" than pull-out approaches, Tomlinson argues.

What emerged after several years of "baby steps," "backing up," and lots of "bumps and grinds," in Meacham's words, was the district's Classroom Delivery Model for Gifted Services. The model, which has stirred intense interest at several national gifted-education conferences where it has been presented, has several key features:

At Homestead Elementary, where the model was piloted, a gifted-education consultant spends two and a half days a week working with gifted students and with classroom teachers to plan units that are "differentiated." Such units offer learning opportunities across a range of learning levels or tiers. For gifted kids, that means more depth, greater complexity, and faster pace. For a unit on the Revolutionary War, in which all the students found period songs, poems, and recipes for a mock wartime newspaper, gifted students wrote original songs. For an assignment on inventions of the 1800s, in which all students had to rate an invention for usefulness and impact on society, as well as make diagrams and blue prints, gifted students were required to compare the invention to a recent invention with a similar impact. And there have been a lot of independent projects. Three girls last year investigated insectivorous ("killer") plants. Another group of sixth-graders studied the social impact of songs of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

But it's not just test-identified gifted students who get to tackle the tougher assignments. A teacher can recommend other highly interested and capable students for gifted services if she wishes. With students clumped by interest, ability, and learning style, the groupings are always in flux.

"It's not always the same kids," says gifted-education consultant Holly Gould. "I have to look at my records to remember who's identified as gifted. Kids are able to blossom at their own level. Just because they aren't certified gifted (reaching the 95th percentile on a battery of ability and achievement tests) doesn't mean they can't participate."

For Sarah Eby, whose gifts include gymnastics (she took a couple of firsts in statewide competition last year), the classroom-delivery model means she can widen and deepen her learning every day. Gould, who describes Sarah as "incredibly creative and articulate with a sense of humor," says: "Sarah has embraced our program and run with it. She's always looking at possibilities for extensions, no matter what the unit."

For an Egyptian unit in fourth grade, for instance, Sarah made a plaster and gauze replica of King Tut's death mask. In sixth grade, she invented a trivia game on the Great Depression. She and some friends performed a modified version of Johnny Meets the Blooms, a play on Bloom's Taxonomy in which Sarah played Johnny's Brain (says Sarah: "We changed some of the parts because we wanted to make it more interesting for the kids watching it").

Sarah has experienced both the old and the new models at Homestead Elementary. She gives the classroom-delivery model (CDM) the nod.

"The pull-out program where we did brain teasers and stuff was fun," she says. "But CDM is definitely funner because I'm learning more about what we're learning in class."

Two strategies have surfaced as Anchorage's most powerful gifted-program components: theme-based curriculum and cluster grouping of gifted students, says Fran Talbott, the district's supervisor of gifted programming. Themes make curriculum more relevant to students, says Talbott, who spearheaded development of the classroom-delivery model. And clustering challenges gifted students "all through the day" instead of a few hours a week in a pull-out approach.

"Until we start treating gifted kids as if they are gifted all the time, and raise the expectation levels for all students," says Talbott, "we are wasting our nation's most precious resources."

GIFTED STUDENT PROFILE
Name: Wengi Shao
Parents: Jiena Miao, homemaker; and Qiman, assistant professor of mathematics
Home: Eugene, Oregon
Birthplace: Hang Zhou, in the providence of Zhejiang, China
First Language: Mandarin
Special Interest: Piano
Intended Profession: Physician


The Odd-Persons Group

Eugene, Oregon—
The principal at Bailey Hill Elementary School would feel quite comfortable handing his job over to Wengi Shao—pianist, aspiring doctor, top math student, third-grader.

"I think I could give Wengi the school to run, and she would do just as well, if not better, than I," says Doug Gallup, with only a hint of humor.

Described by school psychologist Bob Simpson as a "natural leader," Wengi helps Simpson out when students in the talented-and-gifted (TAG) pull-out group drift off-task. "I can call on her, and she'll say, 'If so-and-so were to be moved, this disruptive corner would calm down,'" Simpson reports. "She's socially very, very alert." So alert, in fact, that talking to Wengi is "like talking to an eighth-grader," Simpson says.

Like many gifted kids, Wengi has the poise and presence of an older person. Still, she has the emotional needs of any third-grader. "Wengi is extremely precocious mentally, but very much her own age emotionally," observes piano teacher Patricia Chase, who's teaching Beethoven bagatelles and Bach preludes to Wengi. The trick to working with her, she says, is "finding the happy balance" between the big intellect and the little girl.

Meeting the social and emotional needs of academically and intellectually precocious youngsters is the main mission of the gifted program at Bailey Hill. But as recently as two years ago, the school—which serves one of the Eugene School District's poorest neighborhoods—had no TAG program at all. An earlier TAG program had been scuttled to save money, and nothing had replaced it. Gallup had just taken the principal's post when a parent, new to the neighborhood, asked about services for gifted kids. She learned that there weren't any (only one student was identified as gifted at that point). So she took advantage of the district's open-enrollment policy and moved her child to another school. "Doug and I sat down and said, 'This is not good,'" Simpson recalls. " 'We're losing the real high-caliber students.'

"What I was picking up from both parents and teachers," says Simpson, "was that this was a low socioeconomic school that didn't have TAG students, so we didn't need to really deal with this issue. When I began testing and came up with a list of 28 students, the teachers said, 'How can that be?' They were taken aback because their perception of Bailey Hill was that we didn't have enough (bright) kids for a TAG program."

A student we'll call Marcus was one of the highly capable students the school had overlooked. Marcus was acting up and sloughing off. He was a member of a "mini-gang," Simpson says, whose members pride themselves on doing poorly in school. Thinking Marcus might benefit from remedial help, Simpson brought him in for testing. The boy's reading score, it turned out, was practically off the chart—on the high end. He scored in the 99th percentile.

"Here was a youngster who comes from a very disadvantaged home," says Simpson. "When I shared with him that he was TAG-eligible, he said, 'You mean I'm smart? My mother and my older brother always tell me I'm dumb. They always tell me I can't do anything.'"

To begin turning attitudes around, Simpson put together a couple of once-weekly, one-hour pull-out groups—one for gifted second- and third-graders, and another for fourth- and fifth-graders. The official focus is leadership and social skills training. Mostly, though, it's a chance for the school's quickest kids to bond with their peers in a supportive environment. A key activity is solving hypothetical "what-if" problems. One of these "what-to-do" exercises helps TAG kids fight boredom in class when they finish their work ahead of other students—a problem many gifted students encounter. The TAG students rehearse approaching their teacher and saying, "I'm done with my math assignment, and I'm bored. Is it OK if I work on my reading now?"

"The power of role playing is like teaching a football player a new play," says Simpson. "He may have it in his head, but until he actually runs the play through, he doesn't really have it."

Marcus, the mini-gang member, spent six months in Simpson's group. "For the first time in his life," Simpson says, "he was introduced to kids who are positive, who are on task, who have positive relationships." The boy's outlook and behavior got better for awhile. But he regressed. Finally, he became so disruptive that Simpson reluctantly booted him from the group. Says Simpson: "I wish it could have been more of a success story, but the fact that we shared with him that he is capable will, I hope, always be with him. I'm hoping that someday down the road, he'll remember his six months with us, and he'll compare what it was like to be with those (TAG) kids and with his present friends."

Although Simpson believes singling out gifted kids can boost their self-esteem and spur their aspirations, he works with them to squash superiority. He has one rule for the group: They don't publicly call themselves the TAG group. Last year's students decided on Bob Simpson's Odd-Persons Group for their moniker. When other students ask what they do, they say they work on problem-solving exercises.

Besides meeting weekly in the support group, TAG students at Bailey Hill serve on the student council. And Simpson and Gallup confer with parents and teachers to write an individual TAG plan modifying and embel- lishing regular classroom work for each identified child.

Third-grade Wengi, whose father Qiman Shao teaches statistics and probability at the University of Oregon, studies math with the fourth-graders. "She's very strong in math," says Wengi's dad, who's from Hang Zhou, China. "The teachers are very supportive. Wengi really appreciates her math teacher."

These days, Bailey Hill trumpets its "active and growing" TAG program on its Web site. "In the past," says Simpson, "people have thought of Bailey Hill as blue-collar, and the bright kids go somewhere else. We felt there was a real need to change our image."

GIFTED STUDENT PROFILE
Name: Stephen Brown
Parents: Karen, master's degree in social work; and Blaine, chemical engineer
Home: Idaho Falls, Idaho
Special Interest: Computer programming, rockets, music (especially jazz and rock)
Intended Profession: Computer consultant


SteveSystems Inc.

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho—
Even as a two-year-old, Stephen Brown was focused ("he could stay with something for a long time," says his mom, Karen) and contemplative ("he spent a lot of time observing"). He was fascinated by hinges, joints, machines, "anything that moved." He learned to read at three, "practically out of the clear blue sky"—a feat that "flabbergasted" his folks.

When his dad brought home an old cast-off computer, Stephen glommed on, graduating from games to programming by age nine. "It's pretty easy for me to do stuff on the computer," says the 10-year-old without a whiff of conceit. He talks off-handedly about using a presentation program called Hyperstudio to make a "song machine" called the Boombox 3000, and he offers a spirited defense of the Macintosh over the PC. So nobody was particularly surprised last year when he formed his own computer consulting firm, SteveSystems Inc., complete with business card (he designed his own logo) and Web site ("I've sort of mastered making frames on Web pages," he offers). A debugging specialist, Stephen has had several clients, including one who paid him $25 for his services.

As one of the top-scoring 2 percent of students in Idaho Falls School District, Stephen is bused to another school once a week for a full day of applied problem-solving activities, in-depth research projects, and creativity exercises. Stephen likes doing "advanced stuff" in his pull-out class for able learners. But, in response to reform trends that favor inclusion, the district has embarked on a large-scale program to train teachers to better serve gifted students like Stephen all day, every day, in their regular classroom.

The strategy being taught is "curriculum compacting." The basic idea is to exempt quick learners from drill and practice (aka "drill and kill") when they have already mastered the material. Kids can "test out" of a math unit by scoring high on a pretest or a test given early in the unit. For reading, teachers offer alternatives to advanced students. If the class is reading Mrs. Frisbie and the Rats of Nimh by Robert O'Brien, for instance, quick learners might be assigned to read a more advanced novel, such as Z for Zachariah, by the same author. Or they might read My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craigh George with the rest of the class, but take it at a faster pace. They would then be free to choose tasks from a menu of activities that call for higher-level thinking skills as defined by Benjamin Bloom in his classic taxonomy. Says Linda Hawley, a gifted-education specialist for the district: "We're finding that drill and practice is what really drags these kids down—and not just the gifted kids but a lot of the higher achievers, too. They catch on so fast, they don't need to sit there and go over and over and over it."

So far, all third- and fourth-grade teachers have been trained in compacting. For the fourth-grade teachers, Hawley and her colleagues in gifted education have created advanced or replacement activities for every chapter in the district's fourth-grade curriculum series. "We were hoping," says Hawley, "that if we prepared most of the materials, teachers wouldn't say, 'Oh, I don't have enough time to do this.'"

Reactions from teachers so far have been mixed—the norm for reform. "The teachers who use it, love it," Hawley says. "The teachers who don't want to use it just don't use it."

But compacting has been codified in the district's strategic plan. And Hawley is hopeful that parent support will help institutionalize the strategy. "As these kids move up through the ranks, it will become an expectation by their parents: 'I want my child compacted.' I think it will eventually be used more and more."

Even as the district moves toward more classroom-based services for gifted students, the pull-out component remains intact, largely because of parental demand. When the district tried to pare down the pull-out classes a few years ago, the parents protested, arguing that they had high-needs children, too, Hawley recalls.

"The pull-out program makes a huge difference for these kids socially," she says. "It builds their self-esteem because they really feel valued. It's often difficult for them in the regular classroom—even if they have compacting and this, that, and the other—because the other kids don't share their sense of humor, don't share their intellect, so they don't have an opportunity to really be appreciated for those things."

The social support is one of the best parts of pull-out, says Stephen Brown's mom. "Stephen's had a little bit of a problem socially because kids perceive him as different," Karen Brown says. "He speaks in an adult manner; sometimes he sounds like a miniature adult. He's very serious about things." These traits, plus his single-minded devotion to computers and his lack of interest in sports, blend best in a group of other gifted kids, she says. And she cites another advantage: Realizing there are other kids as capable as himself keeps his ego in check.

The district's fifth- and sixth-grade teachers will be trained in compacting this year. Meanwhile, the district's secondary curriculum is being rewritten to better meet the needs of the highly capable students, says Hawley. "In the state of Idaho, we're losing a lot of our top kids in secondary school," she reports. "There is a huge dropout rate in that group of kids. We're losing students who are among the cream of the crop."

GIFTED STUDENT PROFILE
Name: Dana Francis
Parents: Chris, degree in biology; and Dan, political science and law degrees; owners of Secret Wishes Enterprises, a publishing company
Home: Great Falls, Montana
Special Interest: Robotics, earth sciences, astronomy, art
Intended Profession: Art teacher


"Emotionally, She's Nine"

GREAT FALLS, Montana—
When Dana Francis was a baby, her dad was introduced to the writings of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Dan Francis, the son of a psychiatrist, was skeptical about Piaget's assertion that children couldn't learn certain things before certain ages. So he and Dana's mom, Chris, started playing learning games with Dana. At 16 months, Dana knew her alphabet. At two years, she was beginning to read. At four, she could do simple fractions in her head. She started kindergarten galloping through books at a fifth- or sixth-grade level. By second grade, her math skills had zoomed several years ahead of her peers.

Dana skipped third grade. But her parents rejected the school's suggestion that she skip yet another grade. "Emotionally, that's all she could handle," says Chris Francis. "Emotionally, she's nine years old."

Dana has had a rough time finding a comfortable niche in school, her mom reports. Because she often gets bored and antsy, Dana sometimes talks out of turn.

One teacher, Chris says, "seemed to have the attitude that Dana didn't need extra things, that she needed to do what the class did. It was very frustrating working with her. I don't think she understood that the reason Dana was acting up was because she was so bored."

The school tried pulling the nine-year-old out to work on math with gifted fifth-graders. She balked. She was ill at ease with kids who were much bigger and older than she. Now she works one-on-one with the math lab teacher. Pull-out has its place, Chris believes. But keeping Dana with her age-mates as much as possible is the most desirable option. Says Chris: "I do believe that gifted kids should also be with regular kids (in addition to gifted-only groups), because once they get out of school, they're not always just going to be with gifted people. They need to fit into society."

Although the Great Falls School District has served gifted kids in a pull-out program for nearly 25 years, it recently has taken strides toward making the daily classroom environment more challenging (and less vexing) for students like Dana. At the same time, the district has widened its net, casting more broadly not only for students who have academic and intellectual gifts, but also for those who show artistic, creative, and leadership promise.

Although the changes originated at the central office, each school has had the latitude to shape the new strategies to fit local needs. Each building puts together a team (usually an administrator, a teacher, a gifted-education specialist, and a parent), which then designs a building-level plan for attaining four district goals:

"Even though Great Falls is a large city (by Montana standards), their program is a good one for even small districts to look at because it has been personalized at the building level," says Michael Hall of the Montana Office of Public Instruction. "It's a good example of a site-based program."

Flexible pacing—letting students speed up their learning to avoid getting bogged down in boredom—is central to Great Falls' new approach. To support teachers' efforts to bring flexible pacing (as well as other strategies such as cluster grouping, tiered assignments, scoring rubrics, and curriculum compacting) to their classrooms, the district has been offering inservice workshops for several years. "When you have a top-end kid who's maybe beyond even the teacher, your goal is to open doors for that student," says Julie Korb, a district gifted-education specialist. "We have the obligation to provide opportunities for that child to grow, just like any other student. If that's above and beyond (the basic curriculum), then that's what we need to work for with that student."

To find kids with a wider range of gifts, the district has added more instruments to its ID toolbox. Now, in addition to the usual standardized intelligence and achievement tests, the district uses such tools as parent interviews, teacher recommendations, and behavior observations. But Great Falls is still working on ways to find more gifted minorities. Translators are sometimes used for interviews with Asian parents. Another strategy is to take a Native American specialist along on interviews with Indian parents "to help with cultural understanding," says Korb.

"We aren't finding as many gifted kids in schools with the highest Native American populations," admits Korb. "We're getting a lot more gifted kids out of schools with a lot more 'parent grooming'—parents with more degrees, higher literacy rates, etcetera."

Native American enrollment in the district is about 1,000 of nearly 13,000 students—8 percent. But only about 20 Native American students have been identified as gifted—just 2 percent of the 1,000 gifted students. In an effort to correct the imbalance, the district's gifted staff is asking Native American resource people in the district for ideas and insights into finding promising Indian students, Korb says.

Other district goals include meeting the social and emotional needs of gifted students, and working cooperatively with the parents of advanced learners. To help meet both goals, Great Falls offers twice-yearly discussion classes for parents built around the book Guiding the Gifted Child by James Webb, Elizabeth Meckstroth, and Stephanie Tolan. The classes—led by teachers and parents trained by the district—address the emotional side of giftedness by delving into such topics as motivation, depression, peer relationships, discipline, communication, and stress management.

Observes Chris Francis: "Even in the teaching community, some people don't understand that being gifted doesn't just mean that you do everything perfectly. It means that your temperament in many ways is very different."

Dana Francis' mom puts out the newsletter for another parent group, Support Association for Gifted Education (SAGE), which Korb characterizes as "active advocates" for gifted kids. The group puts on the yearly citywide science fair. SAGE is a place "where parents of gifted children can go and ask other parents of gifted children, 'What did you do when your child did this?'" Chris Francis says. "I also think it gives the community a way to understand that gifted kids are not such weirdos."

It was through SAGE that the Francises found a math-science mentor at the local university to tutor Dana on robotics after she and a friend worked on a robot for the science fair—a project that involves physics and electronics. Chris wanted a mentor for Dana, someone who was neither parent ("she's at an age where her parents are not cool") nor teacher ("someone who's not giving her a grade").

"I think it's good for her to experience other people's opinions, other people's viewpoints, and their style of teaching," says Chris. "She really needs other people she can talk to who have her specific interests."

GIFTED STUDENT PROFILE
Name: Matthew Sherls
Custodial Parent: Georgette Carter-Sherls, paraeducator
Home: Tacoma, Washington
Special Interest: Volcanos, whales, art, basketball
Intended Profession: Architect


"My Brain Told Me"

TACOMA, Washington—
There's always been "something about Matthew" that makes him a standout, his mother reports. Even when he was still in a stroller, his unusual remarks and astute observations took people by surprise.

"He would say things out of the blue, and his grandfather would say, 'Now Matt, where did you get that from?'" recounts Georgette Carter-Sherls. "He'd say, 'My brain told me that.'"

His mother describes him as extremely intuitive ("sometimes you almost think he can read your mind") and humble ("he will forget to show you a straight-A report card"), with a ravenous appetite for books ("we live at that library").

His teachers describe him as "very, very bright." "He doesn't say a lot but you can always tell he's thinking," says Leslie Sarno of the Tacoma School District, where Matthew has scored among the top 1 percent of students on tests of intelligence and achievement.

When he was two, he got a leg-up on school: His older sister Jamilia (also gifted) came home each day from kindergarten and led Matthew through the curriculum. "They would both climb into the big chair in the living room," says Carter-Sherls, "and she would teach him every single thing she had learned that day." And (this is the really amazing part, she says) the toddler was "really interested" in these sibling study sessions, preferring lessons on phonics over toys and TV.

When Matthew, along with all district second-graders, was screened for the gifted program, his soaring test scores qualified him for Highly Capable Student Programs. He could have chosen the self-contained program, where he would spend all day in a special class for the brightest 1 percent of students. But the all- gifted class offended his humility and democratic sensibilities, his mother says. In short, he wanted to hang with the regular kids. So Matthew opted for weekly pull-out.

"From Day One, Matthew never liked to be singled out," says Georgette. "He's always been the type of person who wants to bring everybody up with him. He doesn't like to see failure in any of his classmates."

The district's desire to find and serve more gifted minorities was the main thrust behind Project NET (Nurturing Exceptional Talent). Launched several years ago, the project has two goals:

To find underserved kids in a district with nearly 40 percent minority enrollment, Project NET gives students a chance to show their thinking skills in action. Because standardized tests often fail to detect giftedness among diverse cultural groups, Project NET puts gifted-education specialists into elementary classrooms in schools where minority kids are clustered. The specialists give all the students a series of hands-on problems or puzzles to ponder, while the classroom teacher observes, looking for kids who shine.

One brain teaser for third-graders "taps tons of reasoning skills," says Steve Gill, a district gifted-education specialist. Here's how it works: The teacher stacks up three dice. He tells the students that if he knows the number on the top side of the top die, he can calculate the sum of all the hidden sides. "They're just mystified by this," Gill says. After wowing them a few times, he gives each of them a set of dice, along with a structured plan for attacking the problem. Very few students figure it out the first time. But the second time the problem is presented, "the light bulbs go on for a couple of kids," says Gill. "Five of 30 usually get it to some degree. You can tell which ones are really sharp when you switch the number of dice and they still get it right because they've figured out how it works."

After a sequence of three or four half-hour lessons, the specialist and the teacher decide which students to recommend for follow-up testing. Scores on group aptitude and achievement tests are only one piece of the total assessment picture for Project NET kids. Also considered are gifted behaviors, classroom work, and anecdotal information from teachers and parents.

The project has had the desired effect: About 35 percent of the gifted kids Project NET has turned up are minority. In contrast, the district's routine second-grade screening with standardized tests typically pulls in only about half the number of minorities, proportionally, says Jody Hess, district resource teacher. Another project plus: All kids learn and grow from tackling the problem-solving tasks.

Although Project NET is being cut back for budgetary reasons, some of the in-class problem-solving lessons will be saved. And the project's other piece—boosting teachers' awareness of telltale signs of giftedness in children who are often overlooked—will continue, according to Hess. Some of the nontraditional evidence teachers are taught to look for include:

Besides hoping to lasso ethnic and racial minorities, the district is looking for gifts among kids with behavioral, learning, or other disabilities.

"I still have people who tell me it's impossible for kids with disabilities to be gifted," says Hess. She reminds these skeptics about such notables as Helen Keller, FDR, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Academy Award-winning actress Marlee Matlin.

Once in a while, Steve Gill turns up a gifted child who is "behaviorally disabled" and who has "torn the hell out of a dozen classrooms."

"Maybe the reason this kid has been such a hellion to deal with is that he's never received the education he needs," says Gill. Once such a student gets into the gifted program, the disruptive behavior often settles down, he says.

"A lot of us have stereotypes of what you're like when you're gifted," Hess observes. "There are all kinds of gifted people in the world, and they aren't just the ones who are well behaved or well dressed. We're trying to change the mind-set about who can be gifted."

Striking down stereotypes is a particular interest of gifted student Matthew Sherls. For a class project, he researched the life of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom he describes as "a civil rights leader kind of like Martin Luther King."

"I admire him," the fifth-grader said, "because when he was growing up, his friends weren't prejudiced about him and he wasn't prejudiced about them, either. The people who were prejudiced about him, he just ignored."

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