New Gifted Law in IL

New Gifted Law in IL:

Thank you to everyone that submitted witness slips for IL SB3164. The bill went into law in August and  is a nice win for the gifted of IL. Your voice does make a difference.

What is SB3164?
This bill provides that the term "diagnostic and screening purposes" includes to determine eligibility for advanced academic programs, as defined in the Gifted and Talented Children and Children Eligible for Accelerated Placement Article of the Code. This bill reverses the damage to the gifted community from the fallout of the Too Young To Test Bill adopted in 2022, which eliminated certain state funded testing for children in grades K-2 and makes it still possible to test those children for gifted and talented programming in the aftermath of the Too Young To Test Bill. 

CPS Accelerated Placement+Illinois GIFTED/AP REPORTING

State Advocacy and Gifted Legislature Info:

A big win for Illinois Gifted families! The GIFTED/AP REPORTING bill that we’ve invited you to support via witness slips passed both Illinois Senate and House and now sits with the Governor. You can follow the bill here.

CPS Advocacy ad Gifted Policy Info:

If you think that your chance to advocate for gifted children is on now on hiatus, think again. A very important window to enter public comment on the CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS ACCELERATED PLACEMENT ACT closes tomorrow, Monday, May 22nd. There is no progressive policy happening, if anything, it’s a regression.

• This is the link for the current rule:

• This is the link for the amended rule:

• This is the link for public comment, open until some time on Monday, 22 of May.  

• This is the link to our previous coverage and analysis of this policy:

Since we did the analysis and work up, CPS dropped single and whole grade acceleration for grades 3 and 7. We missed the memo on that one.  Now, only grades 4-6 are included, though students still can get early K and early 1st entry;  

The disappointments in this policy are:

• IAR is required and is not objective, alternatives are not included.

• No whole grade or single subject acceleration outside of grades 4-6

• Still no multiple year skips

• No local norms

• No appeals and a limited application window 

• Nothing for kids new to CPS from outside the district, or those wanting to switch schools.

• There is an interesting note about PSAT and SAT and elementary students, which makes no sense since CPS doesn’t administer those and it is hard to find those for elementary students that are not attending gifted private schools.

If you wish to leave public comment about the changes OR, alternatively, lack of changes or considerations, you only have until Monday, May 22nd, 2023. Sign up for our newsletter to not miss out on future notices.

Help Pass Gifted Law in Illinois Now!

To help, you must do this and forward this to others by Tuesday, February 22, 2022, by 2PM

UPVOTE GIFTED BILL in IL by Tuesday at 2PM by filling out a witness slip. It takes 1 minute.

Click on the Learn More button below for how to fill out a witness slip. It takes about 1 minute. You can also learn everything about the bill by scrolling down or clicking Learn More. This is not MAGE content, the credit goes to IAGC. Go IAGC! Please share!

“All students, including gifted and advanced learners, deserve access to an appropriate education to meet their academic and social-emotional needs. Lack of access to gifted and advanced programming disproportionately impacts low-income students and students from culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse backgrounds.”

COVID Variants update

Here is the British variant updated visualization in Illinois. We continue to be the only ones that we know of that are publishing this for now.

COVID Variants Spread in Illinois and what this means

We are at it again. March 5 is a milestone day in IL, with the arrival of P1 Brazil COVID-19 variant. This means that all 3 variants are now here in the state, and one, the British variant, B.1.1.7 is spreading quickly. However, the data is lacking completely on what’s really happening, what it means for the reopening phases, and what it means for the current and next school year.

Fun fact, we were the first ones to publish the IL doubling rates in March one year ago https://www.mage.education/news/2020/3/19/coronavirus-stem-part2. Before any paper. Why are we having a moment of deja vu? Look, we are the first ones to publish a B.1.1.7 graph, below. We shouldn’t be, but we are. And it’s terrifying.

When COVID-19 arrived in Illinois, we had little to test for it and identify it, and there were single cases for 1.5 months, eerily, until March 7. After that, in 2 weeks, the doubling rate became almost every 2 days. Currently, the doubling rate of B.1.1.7 in Illinois is every 2 weeks, but it’s only been detected for 1.5 months AT ALL. So, it’s spreading FASTER, or our data view is poor. Or both.

Here’s a petition to get the state to share more data on the variant spread. http://chng.it/5mDzmJvhtr. Please sign and share. This petition covers vaccination efficacy on local variants, variance RT rates, updating phased reopening with variant and vaccine efficacy metrics, and reinfection data tracking.

Useful links:

• Variant tracker: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/health/coronavirus-variant-tracker.html - not much data here, or anywhere else yet, but it’s helpful to highlight that in South Africa, the AstraZeneca’s vaccine is not used because it’s not considered effective against their dominant variant.

• Covid Variants and significance: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00564-4

• CDC variant data: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/transmission/variant-cases.html

• Illinois variant page: http://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/variants

COVID-19 Certification

As we have moved into Phase III reopening in Illinois, we have updated our wellness policy to include COVID-19 guidelines. Our facility has been emptied, the floors have been refinished, and it has been repainted and professionally deep-cleaned. We are changing all of our furniture prior to our anticipated in-person reopening in July for Camps to create a setting that will be in compliance with all the government standards and still allow our students to safely collaborate. We have completed the COVID-19 certification for the City of Chicago and we look forward to seeing everyone in July.

Coronavirus STEM: Part 4

We have been sharing some math activities around coronavirus. Some fresh problems:

Problem 1. It takes, on average, 4.5 days to develop symptoms of coronavirus from the time the person is infected and the person may already be contagious before showing symptoms. It takes about 14 days to recover from the time you show symptoms. The person continues to be contagious for up to 2 weeks after all symptoms are gone. How long is a person with coronavirus contagious from the time they are exposed to the virus, and should practice social distancing?

Problem 2. The federal government has limited every federal site to 250 tests per day in Illinois. We have 3 Federal sites. How many tests is the federal government making available in Illinois daily at this time?

Problem 3. Using the current doubling rate, use the graph below to estimate the number of cases in one week.

Problem 4. Using the communicability rate of 2.2 infections for every infected person, how many people will the currently ill people will infect? Compare that to the answer from problem 2 and discuss the similarity or difference.

Coronavirus STEM: Part 3

Here are some fresh Coronavirus STEM problems for you, in order of difficulty.

Problem 1. 4-digit subtraction word problem. You can increase the difficulty of this and choose to make this more of a science/language arts project by a. having the students find the data online themselves or reading the article without having the data component pointed out to them.

In the latest article from Crains, the following data is available. “As of today, 63 percent of the 2,589 intensive care unit beds in hospitals across Illinois were occupied, as were 59 percent of medical/surgical beds and 32 percent of ventilators, which are used to help patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms breathe, according to data from the state’s Department of Public Health. The state has slightly increased its capacity of beds and ventilators since March 16, when 73 percent of the 2,578 ICU beds and 40 percent of the 2,144 ventilators were in use.“

Use the previous Crains article for this data.

By how how many units did the state increase ICU and Ventilator Capacity in Illinois in the last week?

Problem 2. Multiplication/percentage problem: Same as above for data, but with a % increase.

Problem 3. For students with more skills, same as above, but use our previously posted data under this category to update the chart to see how many days it will be before the state will run out of these two resources given any available rate for ICU and ventilator use.

Problem 4. Building on problem 3, by how much will we be short of scarce resources by March 30 and April 6? You can find rates of ICU, Ventilator and Hospital Bed use in our previous post article links. Now, compare this data to the latest Governor update, and write a sentence about your findings.

Problem 5. Using the data on the City of Chicago Web site, compare the rate of hospitalization for coronavirus to the rate of hospitalization globally. What do you notice about the rate of hospitalization in Chicago, vs. in China, or the world, etc? Why do you think the numbers are same/different? Use the previously posted articles and sources if needed, and here’s another good source of data. Use the hospitalization rate in Chicago (pls note that more people will be hospitalized for coronavirus but not counted in the hospitalization number because only some of those people are tested, so these are not accurate as we are not testing everyone that should be) to estimate the real number of Coronavirus infections in Chicago. If you make the assumption that the numbers of under or over-estimation of cases evidenced by your answer are mirrored in the rest of the state, calculate a more realistic number of cases of coronavirus infections statewide, using the Illinois Coronavirus State Dept of Public Health data.

Coronavirus STEM: Part 2.

If you are following along, our students have been doing some basic collecting and modeling of Illinois Coronavirus stats. We recently created a petition for shelter-in-place a part of our study of civics, and of course, we claimed “victory” as the shelter-in-place was achieved.

If you read our previous article here with some Coronavirus Math problems, here is a sample current graph. The data was collected from the Illinois Department of Public Health which relies primarily on the Federal Coronavirus Test and has just recently started to report some private test facility data, with a lack of clarity as to the completeness of that integration.

Some possible facts:

We should run out of ICU beds on 3/30 at latest, unless capacity has been expanded in the last week.

We should run out of ventilators on 4/3 at the latest, unless new ones have been purchased by IL hospitals.

Take the shelter in place to heart, people. Even if you don’t get coronavirus with complications or pass it to someone who is vulnerable, if you have some serious injury, there may not be space for you for whatever else that may befall you, like normal flu complications.

As the number of cases increases, the number of available supplies such as ICU beds and ventilators runs out, and then the death toll starts rising more rapidly.

Coronavirus Math+Civics+Science+ English+SEL all in one!

Moving class online for the outbreak does not remove the need to discuss the outbreak. Students really want to understand the purpose of social distancing. Students are worried. Students want to know how long before things return to normal, are they going to catch the virus, and is anyone they know going to die. Some students are too sensitive to talk about their strong feelings in the classroom, yet others need the classroom as a safe space to explore their strong emotions.

Our students are very interested in the progression of the outbreak, and they want to feel like they can do something about it. And they can! They are launching a petition to help stop the spread of Coronavirus. They have been asking all sorts of questions and have been doing some very cool math based on current events and articles. We want to share some of these with you and we wanted to share your students’ cool Coronavirus math with us. It is terrifying, and it is terrible, but talking about their emotions while processing the complex information about the virus in a cross-disciplinary approach is powerful, and provides a creative and appropriate outlet. They are reading the news anyway, and they are already concerned, and this gives. them the outlet to manage these concerns and information.

The data and information coming in about the pandemic is rich in opportunity for a multidisciplinary study. Here are some examples:

Problem #1. Calculate infection or death doubling rate in your state and graph it. Our state is Illinois. Our state has now reported 16 days worth of data here. The way the data is reported, is that you can’t see it. You can mine it from the press releases the state publishes daily, but mostly you have to copy it daily. This is something that even the younger students can do at 3PM Central Time for the day, or the next morning here in Illinois and could easily be done with regular math students in 5th grade and up completely, and the graphing can be done with even the younger students, if you are following US Common Core.

Problem #2, building on Problem 1. How many days before the infection rate in your state reaches 1 million at the current doubling speed?

Problem #3, building on Problem 1. Using the articles in citation below, and the doubling rate from Problem 1 (feel free to use your state/country data instead):

• How many days before we run out of beds in ICU, assuming that patients using the beds have not died and have not gotten better (are continuing to use the beds).

• How many days before we run out of ventilators, assuming that patients using the ventilators have not died and have not gotten better (are continuing to use the ventilators).

• In 30 days, what magnitude fewer will there be available equipment vs. need?

• Civics bonus: what can/should be done about this?

Citations:

1. Guan WJ, Ni ZY, Hu Y, Liang WH, Ou CQ, He JX, et al. Clinical characteristics of coronavirus disease 2019 in China. N Engl J Med. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032.

2. Coronavirus threatens health system capacity, STEPHANIE GOLDBERG, Crains Chicago Business, March 17, 2020

Please, send us links to your math problems and solutions below. We will update this shortly with our graphs and answers.

Gifted Legal Rights

Recently, a Gifted Legal Rights Workshop was presented by Matt Cohen, top gifted and 2e attorney in Illinois. MAGE was honored to host and co-sponsor this free Parent Education Workshop, a part of our Free Parent Education Series, with the Chicago Gifted Community Center, CGCC. Mr. Cohen went through relevant case law and discussed the recent Accelerated Placement Act. He also described guidance papers that help clarify gifted legal rights that the federal government issued to State Departments of Education with regard to gifted and 2e students. A collection of those guidance papers can be found here. Included is a key idea: it is illegal and is a denial of FAPE, it is against IDEA to deny evaluation for special ed services to students based on their high performance on test scores, good grades, etc.

Some popular questions we had, followed by answers:

-does the accelerated placement act apply to private school: no

-do special ed laws/IEP/504 apply to private schools? Again, no - unless you can prove that they receive Federal funds for anything. State funds do not count, unless you can tie them back to Federal funds directly.

-if my child will be distraught without academic acceleration/enrichment, can I use SPED laws to do anything about it? No. SPED laws are reactive, after there has already been impact on the child. They do not kick in proactively. 

In order to further your child’s rights in school, we recommend the following to stay proactive:

• join our mailing list (for free), join IAGC ($50 to help the association be well resourced to continue to educate and advocate on gifted needs and rights), and CGCC ($25). That way you will not miss important local gifted ed news and useful information, or opportunities to have your voice be heard - if you scroll through our blog you will see plenty of past opportunities and some current ones to be engaged with the local governments to make change. 

• Stay active and involved and assure that your school or district (even if your child is not enrolled in the public school there) has an accelerated placement policy, is reporting data around serving gifted to the state via the school report card. 

The other way, which is reactive, is show evidence of negative impact on the child/necessity, for the child’s emotional and social well being. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to receive an appropriate and equitable education for gifted kids in Illinois because we only talk about appropriate and equitable in the special ed law. In Illinois there is a tie to meeting the minimum grade standards, making modifications to help a child make those minimum standards. It is not possible in our state law to claim that what is appropriate for a child is acceleration of any flavor just based on IQ or achievement scores. In other words, if a child doesn’t learn anything new if they are above grade, no law is broken unless this creates emotional and social consequences for the child with the burden of proof on the family.

In the state accelerated placement law, there is very little to protect gifted children. This needs to be put in. One simple way of doing this could be a small change to the AP act. We are going to be working on this little change next. You won’t want to miss that one - sign up for our newsletter to be the change too.

If you missed the workshop, that went deep into legal and case history, there is another useful workshop ahead for you: during the Chicago Gifted Resource Fair, Illinois Association for Gifted Children (IAGC) will present about accelerated placement. We don’t know the next time we will repeat this workshop, most likely it will be 1-2 years.

Illinois State Gifted Ed News

Yesterday, the Illinois Department of Education held their budget meeting at the James Thompson Center in Chicago, and today, their board meeting. At the board meeting, we asked for the following things:

• Restore pre-2003 levels of gifted ed funding in the state.

• Dedicate full-time designated staff member at ISBE to oversee gifted education and challenges such as getting the student info report cards actually submitted and the data published, and compliance with the state Accelerated Placement Act, as well as to support professional development.

• The Illinois report card law has been in effect for a few years but the data is not coming in and not being made available. This data is very important as it will highlight the educational options for gifted and talented students in Illinois. Send a guidance reminder to districts about compliance with the new report card requirements as to gifted and talented students in March.

• Fund professional development for teachers working with gifted students as there is none right now, and ask for gifted and talented funding. At a minimum, fund training in differentiation to benefit all students.

YOU can still participate in gifted advocacy in 2 ways on these issues right now:

• attend and present your expierience with gifted education at 12/18/2019 ISBE board of Ed meeting in Springfield .

Submit public comments here toward the state budget hearing, using the points below. When you click the above link, you will want to select the circled option. You can then include whatever total you wish, from the points below.

• $120K Full Time dedicated position at the state level to oversee gifted education including IL Report Card, Dual Enrollment, and Accelerated Placement Act Implementation.

• There are approximately 40,000 gifted students in Illinois schools using population statistics. If we assume that they are in a classroom of 30 students, they will require 1,300 teachers. It would be nice if 10% of those teachers could receive resources from IAGC, the Illinois Gifted Children's Association, for $50.00 per teacher. $65,000 would cover those professional service vouchers which existed prior to the state removing the funding in 2003.

• Gifted and Talented students in the state do not get adequate support or opportunities for learning. Schools use budget concerns as the number one reason to not adequately support the gifted and talented students. But, like all students they deserve equitable learning. We think that this can be achieved with $32,000,000.

• Fund the allowance provisioned by the new state law for the report card to give schools $13 per served gifted student, up to at least $1,000.000.

• Total here is $33,185,000.

For your information, the School Report Card to collect data about gifted children in schools is here.

Don't forget, IAGC has several scholarships for both teachers and students - a great opportunity if you need help to afford a MAGE class.  Applications are due end of the month!

In other state news, mark your calendar for January 15th if you seek to receive Empower Illinois credits toward private school.

Free Illinois State Accelerated Placement WEBINAR MONDAY!

Illinois Association for Gifted Children (IAGC) is hosting an Illinois State Board of Education Webinar on Accelerated Placement at. Registration is now open.

3PM on Monday, August 12 - FREE

Click the button below to register, or click here to read the IAGC web site about this. This is a repost as a curtesy to our readers.