Bedford-Stuyvesant City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr. is putting out the call to parents in his district to sign up their kids to take the upcoming Gifted & Talented test to ramp up pressure on the de Blasio Administration to put a program in District 16.
“Right now I’m going to be partnering with CEC (Community Education Council) 16 and meeting with them with the bold, audacious goal of getting between 250-500 parents to sign up for the test by the Nov. 9 deadline,” said Cornegy.
Cornegy’s call to get parents to sign their kids up for the test is his latest effort to get a Gifted and Talented program in District 16, which encompasses schools in the eastern part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and a section of northern Crown Heights, is currently without a gifted-and-talented program.
Currently, there are no Gifted & Talented programs in the 30 traditional public schools within District 16, which had an enrollment of 7,812 mostly African-American and Latino students in the 2013-2014 school year, according to the state’s Department of Education. By contrast, District 20, which is in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, and mostly made of white and Asian students, has nine programs.
Cornegy has been lobbying the Department of Education ever since he first took office in 2014 to institute a gifted and talented program in his district to no avail.
“Every student — no matter what zip code they live in — deserves a fair shot at gifted-and-talented programs, and we have worked to increase the number of test-takers in areas like District 16 by sending postcards to families and providing hard copies to G&T directors at pre-K programs,” DOE spokesman Harry Hartfield told reporters.
According to DOE data only 16 students entering kindergarten this year qualified for a district-wide program, and 20 qualified in 2014, according to DOE data.
These numbers were not high enough to open a G&T program in the area, officials said.
But Cornegy said if the DOE sent postcards to families in his district, he has yet to meet any families that have received one.
“I never received a postcard and I have six children,” said Cornegy. “And in an informal survey of friends and peers with children, I haven’t found anybody that said they received a post card”
Cornegy said the lack of a gifted and talented program not only borders on being a civil rights issue in the city, which already has one of the most racially segregated school districts in the county, but also creates a brain drain from gifted and talented students from the community are bussed to other neighborhoods to attend the program.
“This is the classic definition of a brain drain when you take the best and brightest and buss them to another neighborhood,” said Cornegy, noting that as the students become socialized into another neighborhood they often never come back to their own neighborhood after they reach adulthood.
Cornegy said his effort to get parents to sign up their children for the test is to remove every barrier the DOE is putting up to put the program in District 16.
There are three levels of gifted and talented kids – those whose parents and kids are already actively engaged, those whose parents recognize special talents in their children but don’t know where to go to nurture it, and the third kind is the ones you don’t know – the Einstein sitting in the middle of the Marcy projects, said Cornegy.
Cornegy said his goal is to just get a sheer volume of parents to sign up their kids for the tests to show the DOE that a gifted and talented program is both wanted and needed in the district.
“If we put those three demographics together we will have more than enough for at least one gifted and talented program,” he said.
