Academically/Intellectually Gifted Program

Mission

The Cumberland County School system is committed to the academic success of all students. Its mission states that all schools will be safe and caring and that student achievement will continually increase with no differences among subgroups.

In keeping with the mission of Cumberland County Schools, the Board of Education adopts the following North Carolina definition of giftedness:

Academically or intellectually gifted students perform or show the potential to perform at substantially high levels of accomplishment when compared with others or their age, experience, or environment; academically or intellectually gifted students exhibit high performance capability in intellectual areas, specific academic fields, or in both intellectual areas and specific academic fields. Academically or intellectually gifted students require differentiated services beyond those ordinarily provided by the regular education program. Outstanding abilities are present in students from all cultural groups, across all economic strata and in all areas of human endeavor.

Cumberland County Schools is dedicated to providing gifted and potentially gifted students the opportunity to become independent learners and decision makers who recognize their potential and responsibilities in a changing global society. The school system is committed to providing a rigorous and innovative instructional program that fosters the highest level of excellence and recognizes the right of each student to receive intellectual challenge appropriate for his/her capabilities.

The school system believes that within the general population of students, there exists a group of students who have some or all of the following characteristics:

• Form a diverse group and therefore, must be identified using a variety of gifted performance indicators.
• Have the potential to learn at a faster rate in their areas of giftedness and share the ability to think with more complexity and abstraction than other children of their same age, experience, and environment, and, therefore, require differentiated curriculum and instruction.
• Have different learning and social needs and require that part of the educational experiences be spent with others who are similar to them in order to establish cognitive relationships and to facilitate their academic and social growth.
• Require teachers who are professionally prepared to differentiate by expanding and extending the goals and objectives of the NC Standard Course of Study.

The Cumberland County School system believes that gifted learners have special intellectual, social, and emotional needs that require an enriched educational environment designed to develop superior thinking skills with curriculum that offers greater complexity, more depth, and a faster pace. Our school system is dedicated to providing differentiated instructional services for students from a variety of social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. These services are designed to foster self-directed, life-long learning by encouraging exploration, inquiry, in-depth study, and reflective thinking.