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!First Coast news just ran a story about the potential for the district to end out-of-zone busing. The link below […]

There has been considerable e-mail traffic since last week’s post about gifted funding in Florida. The point of the article and report referenced was regarding the lack of tracking regarding gifted funding. Neither the article, the report, nor our post made any assertions regarding funding for gifted programs being allocated elsewhere. The key point was […]

Brandee Eburn with the Cunningham Creek PACE PASS sent this article about the lack of transparency in gifted expenditures by school districts.
The editorial reports that auditors found widespread issues with school districts accounting for the funds received from the state for each gifted student. The state provides an additional $2,298 per gifted student, in addition […]

“A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.”
- Daniel Webster
Dr. Joyner, Superintendent of St. Johns County School District, was quoted in an article in the Orlando Sentinel regarding efforts to ease the class size amendment. The article reports that lawmakers are preparing to push for changes to […]

As promised in yesterday’s post about potential changes to PACE in St. Johns County, we’ll provide an analysis of our efforts to communicate and promote gifted education in St. Johns County.
First, you will notice a pretty big change in the website - we decided to do an overhaul to bring to the home page the […]

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:

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.

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.

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.