There are multiple ways to initiate the gifted identification process, including nominations / referrals, universal screens, MTSS dialogue, and observed performance.

Nominations / Referrals

Students, parents / guardians, school staff, peers, and community members may nominate a student for gifted evaluation by reaching out to the school’s gifted education specialist or the district gifted education coordinator Christina Sutter (970-686-8029). Students can be identified as gifted in the following areas:

• General Intellectual Ability
• Specific Academic Aptitude
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Mathematics
  • Science
  • Social Studies
  • World Languages
• Creative or Productive Thinking
• Leadership Ability
• Specific Talent Aptitude
  • Visual Arts
  • Performing Arts
  • Musical
  • Dance
  • Psychomotor Abilities

Universal Screeners

Weld RE-4 promotes equal access to gifted education through the use of a universal screen. All second grade students complete a cognitive assessment to measure their developed reasoning abilities.

Qualification

Following Colorado Department of Education guidelines, multiple evidences are required to qualify a student as gifted, including both qualitative and quantitative evidence. Additional testing or data collection is often necessary to measure achievement, performance, cognition, aptitude, and/or behavioral characteristics.

Identifying students in the primary years is challenging due to the diverse span of student development and limited longitudinal data. Thus, emphasis is placed on differentiating for the student’s strengths to ensure continued growth and achievement, with or without a formal identification. When there is some evidence of giftedness, but insufficient evidence to identify a student in a given area, the student may be designated as a talent pool student. As student strengths are nurtured, collection of the body of evidence continues.

Talent Pool

The talent pool is a group of students who demonstrate advanced potential but do not yet qualify as gifted. Intelligence and ability are flexible, so it is important to provide advanced students with opportunities to hone their skills and develop to their full potential. Students who display characteristics of giftedness may be included in the talent pool to provide them with rigorous and enriching instruction that may lead to gifted identification in the future. Talent pool students are checked at regular intervals to determine whether continued talent pool status, gifted identification, or exiting the pool is appropriate.