I sat in on the Town meeting yesterday and listened as many opposed with my thoughts.  As you can clearly see this revision would upset many students, parents, teachers, and future gifted learners.  You must maitain oversight of the funding for the counties as many do not place the same value on learning as you do.  We are in serious need of 5 yr. plans to promote the growth of our learners as well as our programs and the mandate for this needs to be handed down by the Dept. of Education.  I heard many in favor of verbage being changed from "and" to "or" which is imparitive because our gifted learners are gifted on so many different levels that it would omit many with just the small word "and" being left in the document.  I am not certain that you are aware of the limits in gifted offerings that our children receive in such a rural communtity, we need more (like School of Arts mentioned at the meeting) and if you hand over the authority to determine how the funds are used to the school boards... I have seen that even less will be offered.  I heard proposals to let revisions be made by a group of dedicated parents, teachers, gifted advisory teams, school board members and DOE members in an effort to attain better revisions to the existing document which I feel should be considered before changing what is already in place.  I feel that what is in place currently is only a baseline for the gifted programs in our commonwealth and it can be taken successfully to the next level for growth to happen.  We do not want to cut our roots!

Thank you for your time and dedication to our learning community, Teresa Petty