Acceleration
The Parkway School District serves a broad continuum of learners, and believes in providing high level core curriculum and classroom instruction through challenging, creative and enriched learning experiences for all students. By defined intent, its mission is: “to ensure all students are capable, confident and curious learners who understand and respond to the challenges of an ever-changing world.” Research and accompanying national guidelines provides Parkway an additional framework to confidently move forward through a carefully stated and planned process to make appropriate acceleration decisions for our students in a consistent and uniform fashion; thus ensuring the mission is fulfilled for those students whose needs may be different than the general population. Therefore, upon occasion, in order to customize the educational experience for some students, it becomes necessary to accelerate the process. The ensuing policy was developed to provide a consistent set of procedures to follow for making decisions relative to acceleration.
Many high-ability students possess “unique academic, cognitive and social needs” (Guidelines). The clear reality is that this group is one of the most underserved groups in the nation. Acceleration is an “empirically validated educational intervention for high ability students (Colangelo, Assouline, and Gross, 2004). The research “consistently demonstrates the academic benefits to some students and allows the conclusion that most students are not negatively affected in the social-emotional domains (Guidelines). “Accelerated students feel academically challenged and socially accepted, and they do not fall prey to the boredom that plagues many highly capable students who are forced to follow the curriculum for their age-peers” (A Nation Deceived).