I stand before you today to speak for the special educational needs of highly gifted children in the Denver Public Schools.

I am one of several parents and teachers who applied to DPS on October 1, for a charter to open the Apollo School for highly gifted students to meet intellectual, academic and emotional needs that DPS failed to meet. Those of us who formed the Apollo founding Committee all have other lives, and If DPS had been meeting our children's needs at all adequately, we would never have undertaken the arduous task of starting a charter school.

Unfortunately, this was not the case.

As DPS School Board member Sue Edwards said at the Board's December 6, 1999 work session, in which the Apollo application was considered, and I quote:

"This is a classic case of a charter application arising out of a group of very frustrated parents. And frustrated with cause. You talk about the stars lining up well and making miraculous things happen, well the stars can also line up to make things start bad, head bad, and continue to go bad and get to worse. Whatever. These are a group of frustrated parents whose children were identified for the HGP, assigned to a site, and the site went to you know where in a hand basket. They are looking, this is their recourse. They are tired of banging their heads within the system."

Indeed, we are tired.

In SY 1996-97, DPS proved unready, unwilling and unable to maintain an established GT Middle School program at Horace Mann in the face of a principal's hostility to it. In SY 1998- 99, DPS proved unready, unwilling and unable to maintain an established and superbly staffed HGT Elementary School program at Columbine in the face of a principal's hostility to it. Today, the well-established HGT Middle School program at Place is disintegrating because of a principal's hostility to it. This sort of thing will always be possible as long as DPS's highly gifted program is administered as a school within a school without specified standards and without being directly controlled by people whose SOLE concern in the education of highly gifted kids. Just this year alone, 210 of the 760 students already enrolled in DPS's HG/T program declined to continue. Last year, 170 students were lost.

Highly gifted education in Denver is dying, and that is why we proposed the Apollo charter to DPS.

In our November 10, 1999 answers to 15 questions posed to us by the DSIAC Subcommittee on Charter School, we gave the following reasons why this charter would be in the best interests of the pupils, school district and community:

12. What is unique/innovative about the proposed program?

a. Our program will educate highly gifted children, offering the proven "self-contained" model on a district-wide basis, rather than in just one quadrant of the city.

b. Our program will educate highly gifted children, offering the proven "self-contained" model from grades 1-12.

c. Our program is designed, and will continue to be designed, entirely by teachers and educators with real world experience in gifted education.

d. Our program is designed, and will continue to be designed, with a high level of parental input which is actively sought.

e. Apollo will group its students by ability and subject mastery, rather than by age or "grade level." This is certainly innovative and, to the best of our knowledge, it is unique within DPS.

f. The administration of our program will be entirely in the hands of people whose sole concern is gifted education.

g. In addition to regular instruction by certified teachers, Apollo will provide subject matter enrichment using highly qualified and experienced people with extensive "real world" knowledge who are not certified to teach in DPS. Indeed, most of these people will be able to provided our students with valuable knowledge precisely because they are highly successful at what they do and/or have valuable life experiences obtained outside the formal educational environment.

h. Apollo will actively seek to form working relationships with Denver-area institutions of higher learning so that students may enroll in college-level course for college credit when it is indicated and desired by the student and/or the student’s parents.

i. Apollo will offer a strong and consistent foreign language program throughout its planned 12-year curriculum.

j. Apollo expects that a substantial percentage, of its student population will come from highly gifted Denver-area students who are not currently enrolled in DPS (i.e., from kids who are now being home schooled or attending various Denver-area private and parochial schools). The addition of this unusually high number of highly gifted students from outside DPS’s current enrollment will help to increase District revenues and test scores.

k. Apollo’s five design elements (meting individual needs, multi-aged learning groups, individualized performance assessments, no ceilings, and thematic learning thorough integrated units) are innovative, and all of them have been proven successful in other programs. No single design element is unique to Apollo, but the combination of all five design elements into a single, comprehensive, integrated program for gifted students is definitely unique.

l. When our program is implemented, we confidently expect Apollo to become a national model for gifted education. If our assumptions are correct, this will put Denver and Colorado in the forefront of gifted education for years to come, attracting increased national attention and revenues.

On December 9, 1999, the DPS Board of Education decided to deny the Apollo charter application, giving its grounds for that denial in Resolution #2661. In our answer to that resolution, which I assume you've all read, we address those grounds point by point and demonstrate that they are either not factual or are not valid grounds to deny a charter.

Today, we are here to ask you to find that DPS's denial of the Apollo charter application, as expressed in DPS Board of Education Resolution #2661, is "contrary to the best interests of the pupils, school district or community."

I will be happy to answer any questions you may have, and would like to reserve the remainder of our allotted 30 minutes for rebuttals and clarifications.

Thank you.