So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

   It seems to me that we see more and more of these students all the time. Students who are hurting, who need help, who have challenges of all sorts. Or maybe we are just more aware of it than we used to be.

   In my small school we have limited resources for our special needs department. It's always a challenge to allocate time and resources. We see all of those students who so desperately need help and try to figure out how best to spend the resources God has given us. Inevitably it's the gifted students who don't get the resources. We say, "The don't need it, the classroom teacher can enrich their program." And those of us in the classroom strive as best we can to deliver, sometimes we even do it well.

   This is where I had my brainstorm. If we could offer a service to families of gifted children they would probably jump at it. What's more our experience with the Arrowsmith program told us that if we offered a worthwhile program parents would be willing to pay extra.

   So I took everything I had been learning about online education and packaged it up in a program for students who needed an extra challenge. I centred it around authentic projects that were as diverse as I could dream up.

   Then I started sharing my idea.

   You know what surprised me? They didn't think I was crazy! What's more they signed on and helped make it real! You can visit this site to read all about the things we did.

   We ran the program for a year and it worked remarkably well! Not perfectly, and we learned an awful lot, but in the end it was a great experience for the students and for me. Feel free to check out these parent testimonials to hear their point of view.

   So why aren't you doing this now?

Well, that's a story for another day.

So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part I
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part II
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part III
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV