"Class Work" By John Hildebrand

Appeared in Newsday, Tuesday, January 13, 1998

At 18 months of age, they often startle their parents by reading road signs from the family car. By 24 months, they may be correcting their playschool teachers, or instructing classmates in the differences between a triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Whatever their stage of life, precocious children are likely to be looking for an extra challenge. So it’s not surprising, as those children prepare for kindergarten, that parents should start worrying about what lies ahead.

“We called the school district and asked for the curriculum, and they want to teach her colors and counting to 10,” says Ellen Galicia of Bethpage, whose oldest child, Stevie Kate will be eligible for kindergarten next fall. Stevie Kate, now 4, has been coloring and counting for the past three years. Bethpage school officials insist they’ll find more stimulating activities for the youngster, once they’ve evaluated her talents in kindergarten. Still, the mother wonders if her daughter wouldn’t be better off skipping a grade.

“I’m afraid she’ll be bored to death,” Galicia says. “She bounces off the walls here, if she’s bored. To tell you the truth, with three children, I can’t afford private tuition. Nobody wants to do anything for these children. I guess it’s not politically correct.”

School administrators insist there’s another side to the issue — that kindergarten can, in fact, help children learn to be patient with others and less hyperactive. Still, Galicia’s concerns are common among parents of intellectually gifted children and they are rooted in reality.

It’s a fact of Long Island life. Unless families can afford a specialized private school or weekend programs, few formal services are available on the island for super-bright youngsters in the earliest grades.

To be sure, most public schools offer “gifted and talented” classes two or three times a week. But pupils usually don’t enter those until third or fourth grade. Until then, precocious children are pretty much dependent on whatever teachers or librarians can arrange informally — an extra book report here, a special science project there. That’s not always enough. Joseph Renzulli, a nationally known expert on the subject, sees rising frustration among bright, middle-class youngsters who spend more and more time in preschool, only to repeat lessons leaned there in later grades.

“Kindergartens need to take a serious look at the kinds of kids they’re getting,” says Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

“When my second daughter was in kindergarten, they were learning a letter a week, and she had done that when she was 3 years old, she was just bored to tears, and her kindergarten teacher had a reputation for being really good”

One of the few places on Long Island where the precocious can get a head start is the South Shore Center for Gifted Preschool Children, situated in West Islip. Opened in 1984, the private center offers 3-and 4-year-olds a daily schedule of arts and crafts, computer work, French, math, music, reading and science experiments. While much of the instruction is delivered in game form, the content is unmistakably advanced.

‘Does anybody remember what we call this shape?’ asks a teacher, Ellen Gioia, whose pupils are forming geometric figures from colored wooden strips. “A trapezoid.” replies a 4-year-old boy in denim overalls.

Parents who send children to South Shore often worry that a similarly rich curriculum won’t be available in kindergarten. Recently, 10 of those parents including Ellen Galicia sent a letter to Newsday, urging more public support for the education of gifted youngsters. The parents live in various communities in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, but share the same concerns.

‘‘It’s frustrating,’’ says another of the parents, Jill Willinger of Dix Hills. She’s leaning toward enrolling her 4-year-old, Max, in public school next fall. But she says many issues remain to be settled, including the question of whether Max will be allowed to move up a grade.

“It’s January, and you have to make a decision soon;” the mother says. School administrators insert a note of caution,

“I’m not sure I’d agree, without seeing a child, that skip ping a grade is appropriate,” says Michael Mostow, the Bethpage superintendent. “If a child isn’t prepared socially, then kindergarten is something that’s worth doing.” Starr dine, a Herricks administrator with long experience in education for the gifted, was asked what options were available for parents of precocious children, since the Island’s public schools provide few formal services for such youngsters.

“Really, let ‘em move to Manhattan and send their kids to Hunter,” an exasperated Gibe said. The reference was to Hunter College’s free Campus School. It gets hundreds of applications each year from parents of gifted children for a few dozen kindergarten sloth. You don’t have to be precocious to calculate those odds.