A meeting was held at Cunningham Creek Elementary, previously scheduled by the CCE PACE PASS group, to address rumors and concerns about upcoming changes to PACE in St. Johns County School District. Administrators from CCE and Ms. Martha Mickler, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Learning were in attendance. Following are key points from the meeting:

Those who are not members of the CCE PACE PASS message board may not be aware of the most recent issue associated with gifted education in St. Johns County.

The principals of the elementary schools have apparently made the decision that PACE will no longer be supported as a cluster program, and will instead move back to each neighborhood school. What is not clear at this point is why this decision has been made (desire to retain high-achieving students for FCAT/NCLB statistics?), and if the decision is final and binding. There are a number of issues associated with this decision:

Lynn O’Connor, Gifted and Secondary Science Program Specialist with St. Johns County School District, was kind enough to respond to our request for an interview. The questions are taken from direct inquiries we’ve received through this website, as well as traffic from search engines. Additionally, these were the same questions we asked when we first moved to the area and were researching gifted education options in St. Johns County.

The NAGC conference took place last week in Minneapolis, and the reports are starting to trickle in. For those of you that would like to learn more about what is happening at a national level, and want to follow some of the latest research into giftedness, we’ll provide links to these reports as we get them.

A list of information related to gifted services in the state of Florida, including public and private gifted schools. Also information about laws and funding for the state of Florida. Compiled by the Davidson Institute.

Gifted students interested in a challenging academic summer program should consider attending the THINK Summer Institute on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. This intense three-week residential summer program offers 60 exceptionally gifted 13- to 16-year-old students the opportunity to earn up to seven transferable college credits. You can find more information and an application at the Davidson Institute Think Institute webpage.

Thank you for visiting St. Johns Gifted. Please read our About page to understand the purpose of the site. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Support Group for parents/advocates of Special Needs students in Elementary, Middle and High Schools.  Included are ESE, Gifted and Twice Exceptional […]

If you are not a member of the CCE PACE PASS Yahoo Group, you may have missed the message that the minutes from the St. Johns County Gifted Advisory Committee meeting, held October 19, 2007, were uploaded to their “File” directory. If you do not have access to this group, we’ve made it available on our Downloads page.

It’s been about a month since we launched St. Johns Gifted and we wanted to share some statistics with you: