Frustrated parents of Enota Multiple Intelligences Academy students are objecting to changes to the school's gifted program.
Gainesville City Schools called a board meeting Tuesday to discuss solutions to an issue the school has grappled with since the start of the school year.
The meeting drew dozens of parents, relatives and district staff.
"Decisions were made and we were told they would be great and wonderful. We don't think they were great and wonderful," Enota parent Dale Perry said Tuesday.
Parents say the conflict is partly related to a reduction in staff to the program.
This year there is one full-time position and two part-time positions, whereas last year there were two full-time and one-part time positions.
The program serves 112 students.
"These students will be less competitive as time goes on," Perry said last week of the reductions.
"Several parents have talked about moving their child to another school, but the problem needs to be solved at Enota. By and large, Enota is a good school."
Superintendent Merrianne Dyer said Enota was not singled out for the cuts; gifted programs across the district were downsized this year.
One factor was that state funding for school programs was reduced by about $1.3 million, Dyer said.
"One-hundred percent of gifted funding doesn't go directly to teachers or materials, a portion of the funds goes to everything that touches that gifted student during the day," she said, adding that this includes technology and administrative costs. Funding is also used for Advanced Placement courses at the high school and honors classes at the middle school.
"So for this year, with the cuts we had, we decreased everywhere," she said.
Fair Street International Baccalaureate World School, Gainesville Exploration Academy and New Holland Core Knowledge Academy each saw a slight reduction in their allotment for gifted teachers, Dyer said.
Gainesville High School lost one Advanced Placement course and Gainesville Middle School cut its allotment of teachers providing instruction for honors courses by about 1.3.
"Classes are a little larger than before," Dyer said.
Enota parents also voiced concern about how the system is resolving the issue.
At a board meeting this month, board chairman David Syfan said that in the last few years, the system has moved away from top-down management to school-level management.
"Before we impose from the top down, we want to give school officials the chance to fix it to your satisfaction," he told parents.
The school board recommended Enota officials send out a survey to find out which instructional model parents preferred. In last year's resource model, students were removed from their regular classrooms for instruction with a gifted teacher for a few hours each week. In the new model, gifted teachers collaborate with the classroom teachers.
The results showed 35 parents of gifted students preferred the resource model, and 17 preferred the collaborative model for grades third through fifth.
However, parent Deidre Leckie said she felt the survey was too vague.
"It has been completely disregarded in the end. The end result does not reflect anything the parents requested with the survey," Leckie said.
Perry said he found the process frustrating. He said it wasn't clear to parents which district entity was making the decisions about the gifted program, and that information was conflicting.
"We have been trying to find out what's going on in this thing. Every time we have a meeting we get different explanations," he said.
He also made it clear the group of parents was not unhappy with Enota teachers. They were only concerned that the issue had not been resolved.
Dyer apologized to parents for the communication problems Tuesday, and laid out new options for gifted service, such as blending the resource and collaborative models.
A leadership team at Enota is asking for feedback from parents by Sept. 27, before making a final decision.
"Hopefully we can have some tweaks to these options between now and Sept. 27, to have a solution you can live with," Syfan said.