Education

Aiming High Program Matures, shows results

By Phillip E. Honstein

Aiming High gives top students the challenges that will keep them interested in school. "One of the things I appreciate about Ferndale schools is that when they say they want to help all children learn and provide the best possible environment, they include highly capable students in that," said Aiming High instructor Gail Smedley.

When Smedley began teaching in the Aiming High program, she taught two periods in the seventh grade, one period in the eighth grade, and three periods of general reading classes. Additional staff has been added since then, schedules have changed, and the Aiming High program has produced numerous student successes.

Today the program operates at three levels. Jill Robertson teaches a "pull-out program," spending one day a week at each grade level: third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Students test in to her classes, and attend regardless of location of residence within the district.

Skyline Elementary instructor Greg Hart teaches what is called a "magnate program," with a split class of fifth and sixth grade students who are with him "all day, every day, all year," said Smedley.

Smedley teaches at Vista Middle School. She has her seventh-grade studentsfor a three-hour block, corresponding to the seventh grade three-hour Integrated Studies core. Eighth grade students have a two-hour block.

Aiming High focuses on humanities: language arts and social studies, and fulfills the language arts, reading, and social studies Integrated Studies requirement.

For seventh grade students are quickly taught to learn college level material.

In Reading, for example, students study literature, irony, author's purpose, tone, style, point of view, setting, plot, theme, and character. For literature, they study Ulysses.

In language arts, students learn writing techniques such as brainstorming, "creative webbing" (which creates a graphic web of ideas), place and character, and so on. Grammar is learned through analysis of their own writing, and spelling through the each student's creation of and individual spelling textbooks based the student's most common errors.

Students study figurative language such as simile, metaphor, hyperbole and cliché. Future problem solving and language flexibility is part of the lessons, as well. Students also study storytelling and humor.

Social studies includes peer relationships, self concepts and decision making, as well as archaelogy, ancient Middle East, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Students explore "ideas and values inherited from the ancient worlds," and seek to answer questions such as, "Must there always be leaders and followers?"

In the eighth grade, students study essays and poetry, they debate, and they participate in writers' workshops where they read and respond to each other's writing.

The children's story unit pairs an eighth grade student with a second grade student. The older students interview the younger students and create stories that "highlight the second grader's interests, hobbies, likes, and dislikes." The stories are then read to the second graders.

Students test in to the Aiming High program, a process that begins starts with a nomination that is turned into the child's school. The nomination may be submitted by any community member, whether a parent, a teacher and a parent, another student, or even the nominee.

The nomination results in tests (designed to determine the student's cognitive and creative abilities), an in-depth evaluation by an instructor, and a review by a multidisciplinary selection team.

This has been a successful year for Ferndale Aiming High students. Aimee Eggink and Danny Draper both placed highly in writing competitions, Eggink continuing to compete nationally in the Future Problem Solving competition and Draper placing first in his congressional district in the RespecTeen letter writing contest.

Furthermore, sixteen Aiming High students advanced to the state history day competition, with Beth Pepper advancing to nationals.

Smedley says the program is "much better" now than when it first started. "A program is not successful because of one person," said Smedley. "It is a lot of people putting a lot of energy in. That is the case here."

For example, Aiming High "got so much better when Greg (Hart) came on board, he just added so much to it, so much energy. The kids come into my program so much better prepared having been in his program."

Smedley said that the success of Aiming High owes a lot to district support. "They understand that highly capable students have special needs and they provide for them." She cited Dr. Jim Gibson as a strong advocate for the program.

Smedley has a Masters in Education, a Bachelor's of Arts in counseling and Anthropology. She has lived in a wide range of cultures, including the Hopi Indians of Arizona, as well as having lived in Mexico and Guatemala. She also worked as a counselor and dance instructor in London.

Smedley called getting hired in Ferndale as "the luckiest draw in the world. It's a fabulous district.

"In general, I think that the Ferndale School District really goes beyond what most public school districts do for all their kids," she said.

Published June 1999 in the Record Journal Newspaper.