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This week, the second installment of a series appears in this newspaper detailing results of a Virginia Department of Education survey of our public school system — the most extensive research by an outside, presumably unbiased team of trained professionals conducted on Rappahannock County Schools. One fact stands out like a stick in the mud.
Students who are labeled as being either gifted or talented are not getting the education they are capable of handling.
As a result, the rest of the county school system — in fact, the remainder of the county itself — is stuck with the short end of that stick.
It is the perception of a vast majority of teachers and parents who were polled that the county’s public school system is failing miserably wThen it comes to providing instruction to the gifted and talented — that group of students who demonstrate an extraordinary ability in one or more fields not necessarily offered in basic courses, whether it be in the physical arts, the sciences, languages, music.
Consistently, that shortcoming is identified in a survey of all groups:
— Incredibly, 22 of the 26 elementary school teachers who responded identified the shortcoming, as did:
— More than one-quarter of the elementary school parents, one of the highest negative responses parents offered, and
— Nearly half of those parents of high school students who responded, as did:
—Fourteen of the 16 secondary school teachers who answered that question.
While the reaction from parents appears to be balanced, it should be pointed out that such high percentages of parents voicing negative opinion is inconsistent with the other areas of the survey. Parents were clearly
94.4%