Friendly Hills Middle School Builds a Gifted and Talented Program, One Brick at a Time

Since they’ve already successfully built a city, helping to build a gifted and talented program shouldn’t be that much harder for four Friendly Hills Middle School eighth-graders.

Emily Essen, Brandon Krisko, Colleen Sullivan and Sarah Yotter took home an award for Engineering Excellence at the 2011 Future City Competition held last month. The Engineering Excellence award was given by the Minnesota Federation of Engineering, Science and Technology Societies.

The students are members of the gifted and talented class at Friendly Hills, a new program this year led by teacher Doug Petty.

“I have explored topics in the program I otherwise wouldn’t have explored,” said Krisko. “It’s broadened our horizons. It’s more creative.”

Petty viewed the competition as an ideal way to help the gifted and talented program get up-and-running at Friendly Hills.

“The students worked really hard to understand a world they were basically making up,” said Petty. “They were making sure that the statistics they were developing made sense, and were developing technologies that could reasonably exist in the future. They received recognition for having done that work effectively.”

The Future City Competition is organized by the National Engineers Week Foundation and asks sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students to create their visions of the city of tomorrow. Students use the computer simulation game SimCity to make a computer design of a city at least 150 years in the future. Then they make a model of their city, write a research essay, write a narrative, and give an oral presentation of their city’s key elements at the competition.

“It helps us expand our horizons,” said Colleen Sullivan of the gifted and talented program and projects like the Future City Competition. “It gets us thinking outside the box."

“I feel this was valuable because it is an experience that challenged a group of students that are not used to being challenged,” said Petty. “The experience crossed content areas and utilized and stretched each students’ skills.”

Naming their city Skye Valley, the students included green power, including wind turbines, solar power, and electric cars. These students also got to work with two city of  Mendota Heights planners, who helped the students tweak their future city.

“We looked at their model and offered some advice,” said John Mazzitello, public works director and city engineer for Mendota Heights. “The mayor was not popular and there were some environmental problems."

“We tried to focus on the nuts and bolts of local government,” added Jake Sedlacek, assistant to the city administrator. “And we were very pleased with the results. They clearly listened and took off on their own.”

About two percent of the students at Friendly Hills are in the gifted and talented program, and meet twice a week.

“It’s currently what they call a pull-out program, so the students miss one class to take this class," said Petty. “The concept is that we deal with content areas. Right now it’s very project-based, with the goal to touch across content areas, and to get the students to put together larger concepts, larger ideas to come up with the final product."

“It’s challenging,” said Essen. “I’m taking advanced math. Here there’s a shift to learning about the real world.”

 Friendly Hills is the only school in the district to offer this type of program at present.

Students qualified for the program in a variety of ways, but mostly by test scores.

“We looked at test scores,” Petty said. “And primarily a test score that looked at student ability, not student performance. It was a test they were given either in second or fourth grade. I’ve heard it compared to, and I don’t know if it’s a very solid comparison, a group-oriented IQ test. So we’re testing students’ ability to deal with and grapple with large concepts.”

National education standards say that about 2 to 3 percent of school population should fall into a group called "gifted" students.

The program started with a group of students that roughly reflected that ratio. The school is now working on a teacher recommendation path, a parent recommendation path, and a student self-nomination path into the program. "There are also criteria in place to admit strong students who have moved into the district, have other qualifying factors or didn’t take the qualifying tests," said Petty. "The goal is to make it more inclusive than exclusive.”

District 197 is currently exploring a variety of options to serve its gifted and talented students, said Charles Duarte, the gifted and talented coordinator.

“The current state of the program is, we’re building and we’re getting momentum,” Duarte said. “And one of my goals as coordinator for the district is to build some longevity in the position, to add some more stability to the program and to get a better grasp from the community as to what they’re calling for.”

“It’s been a time of rebuilding and restructuring so that we can be sure we’re moving ahead in a direction,” Duarte added. “We have Doug (Petty) in his role, we have an enrichment specialist over at Garlough Elementary. And then I service all buildings K-12 in a variety of projects for students, coaching of teachers and supporting teachers."