Virginia Beach parents could breathe a sigh of relief last month when school leaders clarified Old Donation School was not closing.
Virginia Beach City Public Schools is instead considering what gifted education should look like in the next five years, possibly including a new satellite program and changes to admissions at Old Donation School, which serves gifted students in elementary and middle grades.
The Office of Gifted Programs will use feedback gathered from the school board and community committees to refine the draft plan into a more concise proposal the school board will vote on in September.
It will be implemented in the coming school year, Crystal Wilkerson, director of K-12 and gifted programs, told the school board at a July retreat.
How gifted students are identified, admitted to Old Donation School and receive programs were some areas parents and other stakeholders had a lot of comments about, Wilkerson said.
Identifying gifted students
Right now, all first-grade students in the division are screened for academic aptitude. That screening involves a battery of tests, a performance task that looks at a student’s math and reasoning skills, report cards and teacher comments. Older students are also interviewed.
Students who do well on these assessments are designated as gifted, per the division’s standards.
“No single criteria is used to determine a student’s identification as gifted,” Wilkerson said.
A student has to be considered gifted to apply for Old Donation. A committee made up of different professionals within the school division assesses each student’s application and each member of the three-person committee rates the applicant out of 5. A student ends up with a rating consisting of three scores. Most students admitted to the school received a 5-5-5 rating.
Old Donation's enrollment has averaged a little more than 1,300 students since 2021 — about 130 in each grade 2 through 5, and about double that in grades 6 through 8, according to data from the Virginia Department of Education. About 20% of all students in Virginia Beach were identified as gifted last year, and 7,226 of them were in grades 2 through 8, according to data presented at the July school board retreat.
Old Donation has enough seats to serve only a small subset of that population.
Diversity at Old Donation School
Some have questioned if Old Donation's current admissions process results in a student body representative of the entire district.
“You need to consider civil rights requirements for programs,” Dornswalo Wilkins-McCorey, a gifted programs coordinator, told school board members at the retreat. “When you open a school such as Old Donation School, you need to make sure that the populations are representative and the demographics are proportionate.”
White and Asian students make up 59% and 10% percent of the gifted student population respectively while only being 45% and 6% of the entire student population. That overrepresentation is further exaggerated at Old Donation, where white and Asian students make up almost 80% of the student body collectively.
Hispanic and Black students, on the other hand, are underrepresented, both in overall gifted designation and enrollment at Old Donation. About 22% of Virginia Beach students are Black, but they represent 5% of students enrolled at the school. Hispanic students are 13% of the total population and 6% of the Old Donation population.
About one-fifth of students at the school are considered economically disadvantaged, while almost half of the students in the city meet that designation.
Some home schools — the elementary and middle schools students attended before transferring to Old Donation — send more students than others. Other home schools, and areas of the city, are not represented at Old Donation at all.
Changing Old Donation School’s admission process
School board members provided feedback at July’s meeting on changes to the admission process that could help address the disparities.
Applications to Old Donation are currently voluntary, meaning students and their families interested in the school start the application themselves.
One proposal was to reserve a certain number of seats and automatically admit the highest-rated students from each home school. That way, each home school would have guaranteed representation, if those students choose to attend.
“Well, that’s about as fair as it gets, isn’t it?” school board chair Kim Melnyk said in a small group at July’s meeting. She said reserving a certain number of seats for students from each elementary would make Old Donation a true “community school.”
“Some of the parents are much more aware and really focused on getting their children into a gifted school,” said school board vice chair Jennifer Franklin. “At maybe a Title I school, those parents don’t necessarily even know about ODS, or haven’t had kids that have gone to ODS — which is why I personally support bringing one child in from every single elementary school.”
Title I schools receiving federal funding have higher numbers of students from low-income families. Fourteen elementary schools in Virginia Beach are Title I.
Changes for other gifted students
Wilkerson pointed out to the school board about 57% of division spending on gifted programs goes to the 11% of gifted students that attend Old Donation.
School board members were asked to consider the costs and benefits of opening a satellite school that would serve other gifted students in grades 2 through 5. Staff suggested four classrooms at an elementary school that would provide a homogenous learning environment.
Younger gifted students who don’t go to Old Donation get some advanced or accelerated instruction in clusters at their home school. Every school has a dedicated gifted resources teacher.
Middle school students also have the option of applying to Plaza Middle School, which has an International Baccalaureate Middle Years program.
Tonya Rivers, a parent of two Old Donation students who opposed loosening the school’s admissions standards, wanted to see more options for gifted students in Virginia Beach.
“If more students are being identified as gifted, wouldn’t it make sense to expand the program and not reduce it?” Rivers said at a June school board meeting. “As of right now we have the ODS full-time model and the gifted cluster model. That's it. Those elementary students that may need more than cluster but not full-time are not getting their needs met.”
For high school students, gifted programs include honors, Advanced Placement and dual enrollment classes; Academy programs; Governor’s School for the Arts; and the International Baccalaureate program.
Virginia Beach City Public Schools are a member of the Hampton Roads Educational Telecommunications Association, which holds WHRO’s broadcast license.
