Gerald W. Aungst

I’m not a happy camper right about now. I just got back from a gifted IEP “meet­ing” for one of my chil­dren, and I can’t believe that in a dis­trict known for its out­stand­ing aca­d­e­mics we were sub­jected to a group pre­sen­ta­tion about our “indi­vid­u­al­ized” plans.

As a gifted sup­port teacher, I read about things like this every day. But until now it has always been in a school dis­trict far, far away. In the dis­trict where I teach, gifted ser­vices have been strong for many years. Still, my col­leagues and I have advo­cated for fur­ther improv­ing the way we serve our gifted stu­dents, and to the credit of my admin­is­tra­tion and our teach­ers, things have got­ten steadily bet­ter year after year.

Tonight, the gifted teacher at my child’s school stood before us and read aloud the goals he had for our chil­dren for this year. The cur­ricu­lum was actu­ally quite impres­sive, and I’m sat­is­fied that it is going to chal­lenge my child in many areas, giv­ing him expe­ri­ences he wouldn’t oth­er­wise have. But noth­ing in the plan men­tions (let alone addresses) any of his unique qual­i­ties, abil­i­ties, or needs. I’m not even going to get into the fact that the con­tents of the GIEP are sup­posed to be confidential.…

I couldn’t help laugh­ing at the irony of this state­ment that came at the end: “Now if you will all turn to the last page of your packet, please check the box that indi­cates your approval of the indi­vid­u­al­ized plan I just went over with you and then sign at the bot­tom.” He then pro­ceeded to col­lect all the pack­ets from the assem­bled masses.

Our form is not yet signed.