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 […]

Taking a tour of the various web pages for gifted services in St. Johns County, and I’m struck by how several have improved. Here’s a quick review:
Cunningham Creek’s PACE website is really looking great! There are links to the teacher’s pages as well as the forms parents need to get their children into CCE’s full-time […]

“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 […]

In case it was missed, there is a brochure for PACE put together by Janet Noack. The brochure will be sent home in the Tuesday folders for students at Cunningham Creek Elementary. While created for CCE, the process will be the same for all PACE-eligible students in the district so if you’d like a succinct […]

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:

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.