About 4,800 students met the criteria for gifted in 2008-09. That’s 2.9 percent of the state’s enrollment in grades one through eight, the grades where gifted instruction is offered.

That percentage has dropped steadily during the past six years.

In 2002-03, 5,680 students, or 3.3 percent — almost 900 more students — were counted as gifted.

The decline has leaders in gifted education concerned and a little stumped.

“Either teachers aren’t referring students, or the students aren’t succeeding at the tests,” said Vickie Monacky, coordinator of gifted programs in the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of Special Education.

But the state doesn’t collect numbers from the counties on how many students are referred for testing, she said.

There are no state-level data that would show what’s behind the decline.

The Importance of Gifted Education

Each West Virginia county maintains a gifted education program by law.

Students are referred for testing, usually by a teacher or a parent, as early as first grade, Monacky explained.

They are classified as gifted if they achieve prescribed levels on tests of intellectual ability and demonstrate a certain level of academic ability.

Gifted students receive some number of hours of enhanced instruction each week through the eighth grade. Teachers would say only that the number of hours depends on the individualized education plans developed by teachers, administrators and parents. But some agreed that three hours is a typical amount in some counties.

Gifted education not something “fun” or “extra” for good students, said Pam Hill, who has been teaching gifted students for 31 years and who, with a fellow gifted teacher, serves about 100 middle school students in Putnam County.

“This is something to meet their needs just as any type of special program is to meet the needs of students,” Hill said. “It is something that is really a part of what a gifted student needs to fully realize their potential.”

Identifying gifted kids and teaching to their level prevents their being bored and possibly making trouble in class, withdrawing their attention from school or even dropping out, said 14-year Jackson County gifted teacher Patricia Miller.

If children with high intellectual ability aren’t challenged, they’re practicing underachievement, Monacky said. They don’t develop the study skills that other children have to develop to keep up, and that puts them at risk later in their academic careers.

Referral System May Fall Short

Some teachers feel the referral system is not working.

“Not no, but hell no,” said 24-year gifted teacher Linda Saxton, when asked whether identification is going well in Mercer County. Just 0.8 percent of students in grades one through eight are identified there as gifted.

“This past year, I had three children in a school where 20 years ago I had 26 or 27,” she said.

Kanawha County gifted teacher Linda Sweeney, who became involved with the gifted program at its beginnings in 1976, sees several reasons why students may not be referred.

Classroom teachers used to get more instruction on how to identify gifted students and refer them for testing, she said.

“I have noted the lack of continual training for regular classroom teachers on the identification and needs of gifted students” since the mid-1990s, she said.

“The attitude seems to be, ‘Oh, everyone knows that.’ But we have new teachers entering the system all the time, and they don’t know.”

In Kanawha County, she said, “we have no written description or Web site devoted to gifted education. There is no ongoing staff development concerning gifted students for administrators or regular education teachers.”

Of the students who actually are referred, she said, some simply don’t qualify as gifted, and teachers may become frustrated and stop referring.

And Sweeney also feels that, once gifted students are identified, the several hours a week of enhanced instruction they get does not offer them everything they need — and that, she speculated, could contribute to low numbers as well.

“Could another reason numbers are slipping be because parents / teachers / administrators / students do not see a need or value to the limited services or the manner in which they are delivered?” she wondered.

Screening Instead of Referral?

New criteria were established in March 2007 that should have lowered the bar a little, allowing more students into the gifted program, according to Monacky.

Yet the numbers continue to drop.

She believes the problem lies in the numbers of referrals rather than in students’ ability to test.

“I think, just anecdotally, from what people tell me that it’s more that they’re not getting referred,” she said.

She said she is researching the latest literature on gifted students with the aim of finding a tool that would allow for general screening of all students rather than waiting for referral.

A new screening process would have to be developed and then be approved by the West Virginia Board of Education, she said, and then promoted through staff development across the state.

She said she hopes that such a process could be in place in the schools by the fall of 2010.

The failure to identify gifted students and teach to their level is a loss for the state and nation, as well as for those students, Monacky said.

“Of course we lose those talents that they might have had and the contributions they might have made,” she said.

And the benefits of finding and challenging gifted students are great, Miller said.

“These kids are diamonds,” she said. “If we support them, we’re really growing some roses for West Virginia.”