Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Gifted students in poor educational environments

I really don't want to get pulled into the OPs discussion because, well, none of us really know anyone else's situation or circumstances, especially online. I'm very happy that this forum is here to help answer questions (including my own!).

I just wanted to point out that the Portland Public School district has a policy where 1/3 of all parent donations are pooled into an "equity fund" run by a foundation that distributed the money to schools that don't raise as much.
http://allhandsraised.org/ppsfoundation/

The PTA at our old school did this.

What you are describing is a situation where mentoring/volunteering/charity may fill some need, but this is far from optimal. Basically if a mentor/volunteer is doing something like this then there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Someone should be employed to do a job like this.

More generally, the existence of a mentor/volunteer/charity should (sometimes) set off alarm bells that something has gone wrong, and that there is a need in society that could be served in a much more efficient way.

So basically, you reacted appropriately, as based on all of the following assumptions:

1) Mixed-class communities are not a thing.
2) Poor children only live in places of extreme danger.
3) It's not possible to meet poor parents of gifted children through ordinary, everyday activities, like going to work, or the library, or taking your child to soccer practice.
4) One-on-one interactions are only possible face-to-face.

And the problem is, none of these assumptions are true.

My family is comfortably in the second quintile in household income, so we could be accurately described as upper middle-class (as opposed to those bringing in >$150k and describing themselves as such, sorry, but top 10% is not a middle of anything), and we live in a stereotypical suburban community that you'd normally associate with that... it's safe, quiet, there's a golf course just down the road, we have our own park, people cut their grass, etc. And if I wanted to actively mentor a parent of a gifted child in an underprivileged family through face-to-face contact, I could travel all the way across the street.

I do volunteer my time to work with a child (not tested but I'm more certain that he is gifted than I'm about DD) but it's a big responsibility and I only feel comfortable doing so because of my professional and personal background.

My DD is a full-time project and I'm already exhausted trying to balance everything so to be honest, I wouldn't be volunteering my time if I thought DD was getting nothing out of it but she loves having educational "playdates" with this boy and I enjoy spending time with him too. I was worried at first that DD's precocious reading and writing abilities would make him self-conscious but amazingly and fortunately, it's working out really well. We exchange an hour of tutoring with an hour of "baby sitting." This is probably one of the better things I've done for DD this year. His parents are not poor, by the way, and their ability to pay or not pay wasn't a consideration for me.

I think people are often willing to help if they thought they could help but it's not always clear if you might be causing more harm than good. You know how the saying goes. And with education and children, as I mentioned before, it is a big responsibility. You can't push back the clock and hit a reset button.

I live in a reasonably sized city and we do have an organization that runs gifted programs on weekends for both kids. The programs aren't cheap but they do waive or reduce the fees for some kids each session.

For the parents they run free parent discussion nights (great group therapy and networking opportunities) and free info nights that talk about all of the local school board's gifted programs. The association also has representatives that sit on each school board's Special Education Advisory Committee. The committees are made up of school board employees, school trustees and representatives from various groups with a stake in special education (gifted, autism, deaf, visual impaired, Down's, brain injury, LD, etc). My school board has a parent group that organizes speakers (free and includes free babysitting) and gifted education has been a topic in the past.

This isn't gifted specific but our school has a sister school and a percentage of all fundraising goes to them. We also do specific fundraising activities such as buying fruit for their lunch program, a Christmas gift buying program, snowsuit donations, etc..

I'm sure there is more that can be done (for a start all of the above are all in english so that likely excludes some...) but it is a start.

The internet does make it easier for kids who have internet access, self drive and time. Many poor children don't though and can't get to the library. They may also be responsible for younger siblings and most of the housework (this is not limited to poor kids). They may also be in an environment where study is considered laziness. I have met adults who don't read because when they were kids every time they sat down to read they were handed a cloth and told 'if you have time to read you have time to clean...'. Mentoring these kids parents is probably not going to change. I have wondered about a gifted version of Big brothers and Sisters though.

This is very true, the situations are very different (foot in both worlds here, too). still, a lot of what I do in the disabilities world I do online, too, but it's not like in the "gifted community" which I agree with PPs exists, if at all, almost entirely online, due to critical mass but also a bigger need for anonymity. Many kids with my child's disability use wheelchairs. What's to hide? I freely share his diagnoses with anyone. I have not shared DS8 s test result with close family even.

Also, quite apart from the problem how you'd even identify beneficiaries for a program like this (after all, with most disabilities you will not face denial that the disability even exists or is a problem and not an upper middle class fictional construct - thanks clementine beauvais!) the idea here is not that you would mentor a family simply because you have travelled this road before them, but because you are telling them, in essence, "your kid is much smarter than you, and because of your background/race/SES, unlike me, you don't have a clue what to do about it."
Remember, you are proposing to mentor *parents*, not the kids. In parenting. As I have found, in my few mild mannered attempts, hardly a touchier subject.

In my experience, some of the poorest environments for gifted children are those in which intelligent, high SES parents chronically neglect their children for self-serving reasons.

I'm reminded of my former SVP's children. Both parents had PhDs, and both of their children had either failed a grade or were poised to do so, despite being gifted, I believe as a result of parental failure to be present.

Here's another double PhD couple, a former consulting partner where I worked whose wife was a genetic counsellor. (Really, all of the partners were some flavour of this trend.) When he learned I was pregnant with DS, he made an effort to sell his version of family balance which, in a nutshell, involved his being physically in the same room as his son on evenings and weekends while keeping his eyes scrupulously glued to his laptop 24/7.

We live in a high SES area, and I am constantly surprised at the disconnect I see between parental knowledge of best practices (and buzz words) and the lack of parent-child relationship in which those best practices take root. What advocacy would look like with this target is a big question mark for me. Effectively the advice is, "put down your device and get involved with your child." Most of the iParents I see won't. For many gifted children, parental ego and insecurity are the greatest stumbling block to accessing appropriate care and education. The parents would have to extract their heads from their lower halves to begin to care about someone other than themselves, including their children. Harsh but true.