More than a hundred kids from underserved city neighborhoods landed sought-after offers to join gifted classes Wednesday as the city launched a new program to include poor and minority areas in the coveted programs.
For the last five years, education officials had passed over four districts in the Bronx and central Brooklyn for gifted classes because too few kids from those areas qualified on the city’s aptitude test to fill even a single gifted kindergarten class of about 18 students.
Many families, thinking there was no such option, simply had their children skip the test altogether, officials say.
But this year the city has created an experimental program for the districts, which include the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill and Brownsville.
The aptitude test used in other districts has been scrapped, replaced in those communities by new gifted programs for third graders. By the time students are in third grade, teachers will have had time to assess the students on a variety of new measures, including attendance and academic performance, officials say.
A whopping 221 eligible families applied for the gifted seats — with 112 accepted — under the new program, which begins in September.
City Schools boss Carmen Fariña said the new effort is in keeping with the city’s ongoing steps to diversify the public schools.
“We thank parent and community leaders for their partnership and support in making these new classes a reality,” Fariña said. “We’ll continue to work with communities across the city to increase equity and excellence across all our elementary schools.”
Nearly 90% of the new gifted seats went to black and Hispanic kids and almost 85% of selected students come from financially needy families.
That’s in contrast, education officials have said, to the city’s gifted programs as a whole, which tend to draw students from more affluent backgrounds, and who are more likely to be white or Asian, compared to rest of the public school system.
Meanwhile, students from elsewhere in the city were admitted on the basis of the traditional aptitude tests.
Overall, more city kids applied to gifted programs in the public schools in 2016 compared to last year, but fewer kids were accepted.
Including the new programs, 8,441 students applied to gifted programs for the school year that begins in September, compared to 7,242 applications in 2015.
But just 4,504 students received offers for seats in 2016, down from 4,792 students last year.
Officials attribute the drop-off not to poorer performances on the test but to a change in the “enrollment process.”
