Six months ago, Washington Elementary parents ripped into the Santa Barbara Unified School District for attempting to terminate the school’s self-contained, gifted-student magnet classes and replace them with an integrated model — mixing the gifted kids into regular classrooms. Although the overwhelming backlash forced the district to keep the magnet-class model, the district presented additional research on the integrated model Tuesday night in what seemed like a push to expand it in other schools.
The GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) classes at Washington contain about 118 students in the 3rd to 6th grades. The other 190 GATE students throughout the district are integrated into non-GATE classrooms in groups of five to seven and are taught by a certified GATE teacher. A lottery is used to assign GATE-identified students to either magnet or integrated, or cluster, classrooms.
“We parents come before the board again, twice in six months, asking you not to allow Dr. Ramirez and the administration to dismantle the GATE magnet classrooms,” said Laurie Dahl, mother of a 3rd grader in GATE at Washington. “Earlier this year the board demanded that Dr. Ramirez return with research if he intended to propose eliminating the program. He has not returned with conclusive research, rather he has returned with an experimental study, an opportunity for Santa Barbara GATE students to be guinea pigs.”