A roadmap for St. Johns Gifted: We need your perspective
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How can this website best add value to gifted education in St. Johns County?
We would like to develop a roadmap to guide the development of this website. We’ve begun by collecting information and resources, and we’ll continue to add to this library, as well as attempt to aggregate the Events calendars of interest to the gifted-student community. Other potential directions for this site include:
Gifted Program Promotion/Outreach
One of the key challenges to increasing the number of full-time gifted classes is class sizes. Principals have minimum thresholds required to justify full-time classes, and some grades do not have a sufficient number of gifted children identified. In some cases, parents are unaware that full-time gifted education is an option available to their children in SJCSD. In other cases, they have been convinced by teachers and administrators that the child’s needs can be met at their home school. This site can promote the benefits of existing gifted education opportunities in SJCSD, increase awareness of the program, and improve utilization of the program by students.
Cross-District Parental Communications
Issues that may be challenging parents at one school may already have a solution elsewhere. It may become necessary to advocate politically to ensure gifted education receives a fair share of the district’s resources. A small number of schools have discussion groups available through Yahoo! Groups, but only one school publishes the RSS feed to allow us to showcase post titles and links. If other schools will publish a feed, we can have some visibility through this site across all schools and begin monitoring and coordinating our collective efforts. If desired, a forum system can be added to this site very easily but as was stated on the About page, we don’t want to replace existing, effective communication tools.
Host Student Blogs
It is possible to add multi-user capabilities to this website to allow students to have their own blogs, styled as they wish. There are technical challenges, but this is not insurmountable. More important, defining best-practices for child-safety online and procedures to ensure those practices are followed would be a key factor in determining the feasibility of the project.
Fundraising
We are experienced at developing and monetizing websites through sponsored links. Because it takes time for a website to achieve rankings in search engines, this is not something that would happen in the short term. However, the possibility does exist, and we would funnel all of the funds generated from these sponsorships to enhancing gifted education in St. Johns County.
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