Got a gifted kid? Keep them out of any Advanced Learning Programs,
if you love them.
Now before you jump me for any of the issues facing the educational programs for gifted kids, including the issue of moving the ALPs program from Stratford Academy to Chapel School in Stratford, CT, hear me out.
I was a gifted kid. I had my IQ tested in the third grade and the results showed I was smart. But being smart no more defined me, than saying I was white or a boy. That was all just part of a larger picture of who I was and unfortunately, my teachers only saw me as a smart white kid
So that meant I had to be taken out of my mainstream class of predominant black children and sent to the second floor with a class of kids who were entirely white. Oh sure they added a black kid eventually to make it seem less racist, but ultimately we were the “cream of the crop”.
That was a phrase my African American Social Studies teacher loved to heap on us when we were being normal kids and screwing around- “you are the cream of the crop” she would say disapprovingly, “why can’t you just act like it?” , What I never heard in those words was that we were the “white” cream and she resented us for that.
In fact, all four of our teachers resented us, despite the bump they got in their paychecks for agreeing to teach a class of “gifted kids” for the next three years. Can you imagine what hell that was teaching the same 30 kids for three long school years?
Mr. Bracci, Mr. Kasper, Mrs. Davidson and Mrs. Williams were the four teachers selected to teach this new fangled educational program for gifted children called “The Advanced Learning Program” or ALPs. It was conceived by someone in the 1970’s and took until 1984 to turn into a full day program for the elite smart white kids of Stratford, Connecticut and I was one of them.
The four teachers hated us by the end of sixth grade, but in the early days of Fourth Grade, they must have had such hope. They got a group of kids selected from the town who were tested and found to have higher than average IQs and sequestered them as a group for three long years.
What they didn’t test us for, and no one quite figured out was perhaps the reason why ALPs screwed us up so royally.
Of the thirty or so kids I went to school with, most if not all, had some sort of emotional or mental breakdown by the time they got to college, if they ever made it to college. Many have had relationship issues, eating disorders, substance abuse issues and if they are like me, a lifetime of therapy trying to get over the massive damage those four teachers did to our young minds.
You see, while I was tested for intelligence, I was never tested for learning disabilities. No one in the class could possibly have a learning disability as such special white kids. They just assumed we were all so damn gifted.
I wasn’t gifted. Turns out I had severe ADHD and a pile of childhood trauma that nobody ever looked at, despite overwhelming evidence that something was going on in my head and at home. They just labeled me as “lazy” and berated me for being stupid.
Had they, (the four teachers and the Stratford Board of Education) bothered to use the training they supposedly had as educators, or the three long years they had with me to actually look at my behavior or learning patterns, they could have intervened early in my childhood to detect and treat my ADHD. Instead they hated me, my class and their jobs so much, that they just passed me along into junior high school. Then it was onto, high school, college and a masters degree and then life as an adult, where despite my succes, I spent that entire time thinking I was just lazy and stupid.
Had they not been so hell bent and determined to put all the elite white kids in their own little world and keep us out of the general population, I might have been diagnosed and taught to live with my “disability”. Instead I had to wait until I was 45 years old and newly married to get proper treatment.
The School system failed me in a galactic way and the fact that they segregated me and my classmates from the rest of the world and put us into a pool of “advanced” white kids set us all up not just for failure at education, but failure at life.
If you are a doctor your pledge is do no harm, but if you're a teacher you can screw your students thoroughly and no one cares. My teachers not only abused me for being disabled, they also fucked me up royally for life.
The Advanced Learning Program was nothing more than an academic version of white privilege and it stomped on so many young lives in it’s political aspirations. The teachers were monsters and the outcomes were tragic. ALPs was a great idea gone really wrong and I can only hope that my classmates have gotten the help they needed in recovering from the trauma of going through elementary school as a smart kid.
Yep, I was an ALPs kid around 1976/77, for 5th grade in the basement at Birdseye & 6th grade bussed to Second Hill Lane with Ms. Millicent (Penny) Jaekle as our teacher both years. We met one day a week the whole school year. We had at least 2 POC in our class each year. I never thought about being a group of white kids, tbh. I'm still friends with many of my ALPs classmates. I never did understand why I got to be in that class (minus the IQ test) because I never felt like I was all that smart. I hated the year-long project we had to do and they never proved anything. I liked logic problems and other class assignments but I never understood the point of the program. Thanks for sharing your story and reminding me of my years in the program.
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