Melissa Bailey Photo
Seven teachers must reapply for their jobs, and students will no longer take the bus across town for their bridge-building contests and other advanced classes, according to a new plan to “raise the bar” on the school district’s Talented and Gifted program (TAG).
The school system announced those changes last week in a letter home to parents, sparking mixed reactions.
The changes affect the 420 students in grades 4 to 8 who participate in TAG. Those kids currently leave their home schools one day a week and take the bus to one of three places for advanced lessons: Fair Haven School, the Rose Center at Yale, and the West Rock Family Center.
At the three sites, students meet TAG teachers like Ryan Clough, who led a lesson on bridge-building at Fair Haven School Wednesday with 7th-graders (pictured above) from Worthington Hooker and John C. Daniels schools. Clough’s students made truss bridges out of wood and glue, then tested their strength by seeing how many text books they could hold.
Hooker student Di Lu’s bridge won the contest, holding up a record-setting 261 pounds.
Joe Lampo tallies the weight.
Starting next year, kids like Di will no longer hop on the bus for TAG. They’ll stay right where they are, announced Supervisor of Guidance and TAG Dolores Garcia-Blocker in a June 4 letter to parents. The program plans to return to its past practice of keeping kids at their home schools.
Garcia-Blocker said the new plan aims to stop kids from losing instructional time.
“One major bone of contention” with TAG, she said, is “the fact that kids are spending a lot of time on the bus.”
Sara Thakur, 13, of Hooker School, prepares to test her bridge.
Kids at Worthington Hooker School, for example, board a bus at 9:30 a.m. at Hooker, get to Fair Haven School 10 to 15 minutes later, stay until 1:15, then take the bus back to Hooker.
When kids go to TAG, they are “losing a full day of instruction” at their home schools, Garcia-Blocker said. That’s 20 percent of a kid’s school year, she calculated.
This year, five teachers with TAG kids full-time, and two teachers work with them on a part-time basis. Instead of having the teachers stay in one place, the school system plans send out into the schools to meet the kids.
The result will be more TAG time, Garcia-Blocker said: Currently, TAG kids receive an average of two hours and 40 minutes of TAG instruction for 25 days, totaling 67 hours per year. In the new model, kids will get two hours of TAG classes once a week for 36 days, totaling 72 hours per year. That’s because the TAG classes will start right in September and end in June, instead of running on a truncated schedule, she said.
Garcia-Blocker said the plan aims to provide “more consistent TAG services throughout the year.”
Each book weighs 3 pounds.
The overhaul will change the nature of teachers’ jobs, Garcia-Blocker announced.
Garcia-Blocker took over TAG two years ago when she left a principal job to join the district’s central office. She said when she took a look at TAG instruction in the past year, she discovered it was not aligned with the standards of the National Association of Gifted Children, as will be required by the Common Core State Standards, a national effort towards common standards for the classroom.
“Right now it’s not aligned to any standards,” she said.
She said the program needs to align with Common Core, which lays out specific competencies kids need to show based on their subject and grade level. For example, 7th-grade math students must “recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities.” Garcia-Blocker said TAG needs to provide “differentiated tasks” to address the new standards, and create interdisciplinary projects through which kids can show they are mastering several standards at once.
“We are raising the bar in terms of expectations” for TAG, she said.
Sara’s bridge withstands 159 pounds before the textbooks topples. The bridge survives intact.
The new expectations mean teachers’ roles will change, she said. All seven TAG teachers are being forced to reapply for their jobs.
“Any of the current teachers who want to be reconsidered for this position will submit in writing to me their desire to be a part of the applicant pool,” Garcia-Blocker said.
Teacher Clough hangs Sara’s bridge in the hall of fame.
The teachers won’t become unemployed. They’ll be guaranteed work somewhere in the district, Garcia-Blocker said. But because of the “new role” of the TAG teacher, they’ll face higher standards.
To get hired for the TAG program, teachers will have to rate as “strong” or “exemplary,” a four or five on a five-point scale, on the district’s new teacher evaluations.
“It’s going to take a unique kind of teacher to work with variety of schools” and principals in the new TAG job, Garcia-Blocker said.
Garcia-Blocker said the TAG program will also be taking a fresh look at its mission, philosophy, and the way kids are selected. Currently, the school system uses district reading tests, and the Connecticut Mastery Tests, to identify the top 10 to 15 percent of students. From there, the TAG office sends out a “teacher perception scale” asking teachers to rate kids. Kids then take a Torrence Test of Creativity.
Di Lu, 14, of Hooker, cheers on her bridge.
Based on all those measures, the TAG office selects a group of 3rd graders to begin TAG in 4th grade. Once kids joins TAG, they stay enrolled in the program. Other students may also join in higher grades, up to 8th grade.
Garcia-Blocker said the school system needs to make sure the program is inclusive.
Two schools — Brennan-Rogers and Micro Society — don’t have any TAG students, Garcia-Blocker said. That doesn’t make sense, she said: It’s “really impossible that in a school of 300 to 400 kids, there’s not a single TAG student there.”
Garcia-Blocker said the size of the TAG program will remain the same for next year.
Superintendent Reggie Mayo said the district would save $50,000 to $60,000 in transportation costs by not busing TAG kids to other schools.
Garcia-Blocker said some parents have welcomed the change and the end to busing. Meanwhile, she fielded forceful emails from two families with kids at Nathan Hale School expressing concern over the new plan.
Kevin Buterbaugh, father of a 4th-grader, said he was “stunned” to hear about the changes afoot. “I have been quite pleased with what I have seen” in the TAG program, he said. His son “has been exposed to a large variety of materials — the music of Thelonious Monk, the art works of Edward Hopper and Roy Lichtenstein, and major supreme court decisions” that even adults are not familiar with.
He expressed concern that the TAG program would suffer if it is moved to individual schools.
Di’s bridge holds a record-setting 261 pounds.
First, he said, he’s concerned about resources. His son currently hops on a bus to Yale’s Rose Center, where he has access to “two high-quality instructors,” plenty of computers and a library. He questioned whether schools — some of which have barely functional computer labs—would be able to provide the same level of resources for kids.
“Computers are in short supply in most schools,” Buterbaugh wrote. “TAG teachers will not have access, most likely, and thus neither will TAG students.”
Buterbaugh also questioned whether schools would have adequate space to accommodate TAG kids. “Where will the students go? A hallway? A cafeteria?”
Instead of improving the program, the new plan “is likely to lead to more inequities in the system and gifted children being marginalized and forgotten,” he argued.
Garcia-Blocker replied that when she notified principals about restructuring TAG, “I got a very positive response. The first thing I asked them is, if you have any concerns about your ability to find space within your building, please notify me.”
“Not a single person has said they can’t find space,” Garcia-Blocker said. At Edgewood School, which she described as the city’s most crowded school, the principal found an unused room that she is “going to clean out and give to TAG.”
As for computer access, Garcia-Blocker said, “Those are issues we are looking at as a district — which schools have more abundant resources than others.” She said the computer “is part of high-quality instruction, but everything isn’t tied to a kid sitting in front of a computer.”
Clough survives the crashing textbooks. The bridge does not.
All TAG students will have access to the same high-quality instruction, she said.
“I am very, very, very conscious of equity and inequity,” she said. “I sit on the district equity leadership team. … If there’s anything I’m not going to tolerate it is inequity, especially in any program that I oversee.”
Buterbaugh said he’s concerned the program would be diluted at a school like Nathan Hale, because there are not enough TAG kids in a given grade to fill up a full class.
“Nathan Hale, where my son attends, has no more than 9 students in 4th Grade TAG,” he wrote. “Thus, my son is likely to see his TAG class combined with other grades.”
Garcia-Blocker said the program will look different at different schools, depending on how many TAG kids there are. Some schools may have mixed-aged groups; others may not. In some places, TAG teachers will work directly with kids, she said; in others, they may serve as a “coach” to help teachers “enrich” their classes to serve TAG kids.
Buterbaugh said he values the “astounding” diversity of the kids in TAG, and the chance for TAG kids to learn from each other. He said he fears that will be lost under the new plan, when kids are kept at their schools.
“I recognize there are kids who would like to have some face-to-face time with kids from other buildings,” Garcia-Blocker later replied. She said TAG would “build in opportunities for that to happen,” though “what that looks like I can’t tell you right now.”
The materials for the trusses were donated by Hull’s.
Buterbaugh was skeptical of the reasons Garcia-Blocker gave for changing the program. “I see no evidence that the current program does not fit the Common Core. Nor do I see any evidence that the current program could not be easily tweaked if needed to fit the Common Core. The reform seems much more like a way to cut costs and nothing more.”
He and several other TAG parents said they were miffed that the school system changed TAG without consulting them.
“I find it very troubling that the reform was never discussed with parents in the program,” Buterbaugh wrote.
“We were under a really tight timeline because of the end of the school year approaching, and the need to notify teachers of a change in assignment,” Garcia-Blocker responded. Parents were not consulted ahead of time about the changes, but they will be consulted moving forward through a new parent council, she pledged.
As a Nathan Hale TAG parent, I applaud the district's decision to move the program in-house. It will save on transportation costs--and risks. One day this winter, the fifth grade TAG bus broke down on I-91, and our children had to walk along the shoulder to another bus (with the assistance of a State Trooper).
Our fifth grade spends about 30 minutes each way travelling to its current TAG site. As a result, those students have missed out on several school activities as well as instructional time. This includes being assigned to group projects that they were not able to see through to completion because of the TAG schedule. Such situations have shortchanged the TAG students and the students with whom they were working.
While Buterbaugh's concerns are valid, I have faith that the program will flourish under the new model. And maybe it will include more field trips in lieu of weekly off-site classes. The Thelonious Monk trip, for example, is the kind of thing the students should have more of (all students, really, but that's a different discussion), regardless of where they receive TAG instruction.
By far the biggest drawback to the proposal is the lack of interaction that our students will have with students from other schools. That is something the students have greatly enjoyed. Maybe the program can include a monthly TAG meet/off-site event for each grade? Just a thought.