Saratoga News

GATE looks forward to 10th year of challenging students

By Michelle Alaimo

The Gifted and Talented Program (GATE) program in Saratoga Union School District is celebrating 10 years of challenging students to excel in topics that interest them.

Terri Raynaud, the district's GATE coordinator, said the K-8 program was one of the first in the state to look at different ways of viewing intelligence.

"We said that truly everyone is gifted and talented in some way," Raynaud said.

That idea, conceived 11 years ago by parents, administrators, teachers and students in a task force, has grown ever since.

At the time the program was conceived, students who showed an excelled interest in a certain topic were taken out of class and put in a special class to help make the topic more challenging, Raynaud said. Those who showed an interest or natural talent in a subject such as science would sometimes get bored during regular class lessons.

But GATE incorporates challenging lessons into all teachers' lessons, and all teachers are taught to be GATE teachers.

At first, only math lessons for fourth through sixth grades added strategies that other districts might just use in gifted programs, Raynaud said. Then in the following years, more subjects--including language arts, social studies and science--were added throughout the district's grade levels.

The result is that "students are more excited about learning and knowing some new things," Argonaut School principal Sue Brooks said.

As a school administrator, Brooks said she has seen firsthand how GATE challenges her students and helps her teachers.

"GATE helps us to expand our curriculum and meet individual needs," Brooks said.

She added that lessons are always being updated and that teachers have GATE in-service meetings twice a year.

And for students who need even more challenges, Brooks said GATE sponsors a community mentoring program in which volunteers from the community come to school and give extra lessons to students interested in learning even more about subjects. Brooks said about 30 students are in the program, which is for students who have "high interest or high ability and need more challenge in that area than the average child needs."

GATE has been able to sponsor community mentoring and add other grade levels over the years on a limited budget and with the help of grants. Raynaud said the budget now averages close to $19,000 from the state, with the SUSD kicking in another $11,000. The program is also in its last year of receiving a Goals 2000 $20,000 grant from the federal government. The grant allowed the program to extend into kindergarten and first grade, Raynaud said. She added that the GATE advisory committee is now faced with the task of how to come up with more money once the $20,000 grant runs out.

In the meantime, GATE is holding a year-long celebration for the 10th anniversary, including a new GATE logo contest for students. In all, 30 students entered the contest earlier this year, and three Foothill fourth-graders--Henry Barmeier, Andrea Desmond and Brittany Straw--won the contest. Their entries were combined to create the new logo that will be used throughout the year on GATE documents, such as a back-to-school letter that will go out to parents at the end of the month.

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