Twice Exceptional Students May Be Overlooked

One school district is making a difference by assisting minority populations in the identification of students with learning disabilities but who are also gifted. Twice-exceptional students, as they have been called, are statistically an overlooked population. Despite the lack of California standards to identify gifted students, the school district Sacramento United has implemented testing for gifted and twice-exceptional students and has also broadened the allowances to access gifted programs. They hope to continue identifying and serving low-income and high achieving students in the face of budget cutbacks.

Sacramento Schools Struggle To Include Neurodiverse Gifted Students

A collective fear of some experts on twice-exceptionality is that these talented students wind up bored in classrooms geared to their disability rather than their academic gifts.

Key Takeaways:

1
Nationwide, children with disabilities have been underrepresented in programs for exceptional students, however, this has changed recently.
2
The growth in disabled children qualifying for gifted programs has been attributed to two factors: 1. Moving away from solely using teacher referrals to include tests 2. A focus on minority students.
3
There has been a backlash among teachers to the prioritizing of tests in identifying gifted and talented students.