Education: Was the Kid Too Smart to Learn?

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Schoolboard vs. gifted child

From the day he entered first grade, blue-eyed Tommy Irwin was called a "behavior problem"-a disobedient pupil who did shoddy work. But after his third-grade teacher told the Irwins that their son had a "learning disability," they hired an educational psychologist who tested Tommy. The conclusion: Tommy was not too slow but too quick for the classroom routine. His IQ was a very elevated 169. "He was frustrated and bored to tears," observes his father, Attorney Ronald Irwin. Now the Irwins are suing Illinois' McHenry County School District for damages of $1 million, seeking a legal precedent that would compel increased education spending for the gifted.

Not every dreary or rambunctious pupil is a genius, by any means. About 3% of the nation's students are thought to be gifted, measured either by intelligence tests or a special flair for subjects such as mathematics or foreign languages. Special programs for gifted students receive only token funding compared with programs for the handicapped and disadvantaged. Illinois, for example, spends $740 per child to educate its 220,000 handicapped, but only $40 per child for its approximately 70,000 gifted students. The disparity is largely due to the notion that the gifted will flourish on their own. But increasingly that view is being challenged by cases like that of Tommy Irwin.

At home, Tommy's gifts seemed evident enough. He did not begin talking until age two, but then he spoke in com plete sentences. He was soon memorizing advanced charts of human anatomy, and could whip his grandfather at chess at age four. But at school Tommy produced conflicting est results (once scoring low in mathematical ability, later achieving a very high score). Teachers frequently complained about his short attention span, and sent him to stand out in the hall to keep him from distracting the other children. Because of his undisciplined be havior, he was at first denied admittance to the school's twelve-week program for gifted children; later, he was admitted. "But it was mostly arts and crafts with a few field trips run by a volunteer," says his father. "There was not a trained teacher for the gifted." Said Daniel DeRoche, Tommy's principal at the Edgebrook Elementary School: "He is the kind of child a teacher dreams of having once in a lifetime. But now that we have him, we don't know what to do with him." The Irwins received permission to enroll Tommy, now a fifth-grader, in a Spanish class at McHenry High School, but even that permission was soon revoked after the board of education expressed concern about "establishing a precedent."

The rejection was what led the Irwins to file suit. "It's sad that it had to come to this," says Ronald Irwin, "but years were going by and nothing was happening. For Tommy, it is already late." Indeed the Irwins soon received a supporting phone call from a teacher, herself the mother of a gifted child, who warned, "There is serious danger that such children can be permanently damaged by the time they are eight."