RE-1 Valley’s gifted and talented program is growing

District has 75 students identified as gifted right now

RE-1 Valley School District’s Gifted and Talented Program is making great strides. During a regular meeting on Monday, the school board heard an update on the program from coordinator Aubrey Ross.

Ross told the board that when she took over the position at the beginning of the school year there were challenges and at times she felt like she was “drinking out of a fire hose” but she was fortunate to have support from all the administrators, teachers and most importantly the students.

Part of her job includes completing state reporting, developing a budget and attending Colorado Department of Education meetings for gifted program directors, which have provided her with a lot of her new information. But this year she has also worked collaboratively with teachers to help them understand what giftedness truly is, the process and procedure the state of Colorado uses to identify gifted students what happens after that identification is made.

“Just from the few months of this school year I’m pretty excited to see the positive trajectory that the program is going to go,” Ross said.

At the beginning of the year, RE-1 had 56 students identified as gifted and as of Monday, there are 75, with hopefully four more that will be added in the next month. Ross has been able to identify more students because she has implemented sixth graders taking the COGAT assessment, a cognitive ability test that the district uses in the second grade to help identify gifted students.

“It’s good practice to also do in sixth grade to catch those kids who are new to the district or who maybe just matured over the year. From that, I was able to gain four new identifications from the sixth grade class. Teachers were really on board to give that test, they were really supportive and the information is really vital for the teachers, for parents, and for our students themselves,” Ross explained.

She shared that being in her position full-time has also given

her the opportunity to do more one-on-one testing with students.

“We see that they’re right there, they need just one more piece of the puzzle and I’m able to go to the school during the day, sit down with them for an hour, give them a one-onone test environment and find a qualifying piece of evidence or a we’re almost there we just need to do a couple more things to help program for those kids,” Ross said.

Because of her going into the schools, she has been able to provide really specific programming opportunities and enrichment opportunities, “which isn’t just affecting the identified gifted students, it’s also benefiting those kids that are really high achievers,” Ross said.

“I’ll pull them out in small groups, we work on either math or language arts, we do logic activities, executive functioning skills at the middle school/ high school level, just kind of give them more rigorous academics that sometimes they lack in a classroom of 20 some kids,” she explained.

At Ayres Elementary, students have started doing the PETS (Primary Education Thinking Skills) program, a systematized enrichment and diagnostic thinking skills program, which offers “fantastic” lessons.

“It really helps the kids to think critically, be creative. They do puzzles and we do thinking skills and they get to do creative things that they normally don’t get to do in the course of the day. Getting to build that solid foundation of rigorous and critical thinking is really important. I think teachers at Ayres and K-3 at Caliche Elementary are seeing the impact with being able to tie in the characters that come along with the program to kind of dive deeper with those kids,” Ross said.

Older students aren’t left out. In November, Ross took a group of 7-12th grade students to Yuma for Northeast Colorado BOCES’S Ultimate Summit. BOCES offers the summits twice a year to give students exposure to a career field. November’s event focused on agriculture and technology and allowed students to see drones and visit Agri-inject.

Previous summits have taken students to local hospitals and justice centers.

“My hope next year is to do more summits with those high school kids, to really help them figure out where they want to go, what they want to do because they are capable of so much,” Ross said.

She also has six teams preparing for Battle of the Books, a voluntary reading incentive program to encourage students to read good books and have fun while competing with peers. That is a significant increase over last year when only two RE-1 teams participated.

“They are passionate to read, they want to read, they want to go complete and they want to be a part of this team, so that’s really exciting,” Ross said.

Looking toward the future, in the next couple of years she hopes to build up the programming opportunities for middle and high school students.

“Those have kind of been my tricky areas to get in with the kids, just because they’re teenagers, so I really want to build up some summits with them, some executive functioning skills, what do they need from me, how can I support them?” Ross said.

Another area she is passionate about is teacher training. She wants to make sure teachers know how to meet the needs of the high-level students within their classroom of 20 or more students “because it is hard. Being able to support them so that they’re able to appropriately meet the needs of all those high- level kids and gifted kids, so the gifted kids can have the best education here at RE-1 is important,” Ross said.

She also plans to continue to meet with teachers through the MTSS (Multi-tiered System of Supports), to make sure that the district is meet- ing the needs, whether ac- ademic or behavioral, of high-level students.

Plus, she plans to make a push in the next couple of years to get parents in- volved by offering parent nights and book studies that will allow them to connect, talk amongst themselves and build a community so that they have support.

“Big things to come, big things have happened, it’s going well,” Ross said.