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Denver commoncurriculum now offers its gifted-and-talented program at three schools - Baker, Place and Smiley - so students get special instruction near home. But Barbara Neyrinck, head of gifted-and-talented programs for Denver Public Schools, said the programs need to be consolidated to make them stronger, more of a priority and more appealing School administrators proposed creating an expanded special education program for high school students Wednesday in response to the rising costs of out-of-district commoncurriculum placements. The goal is to keep special education students in the district, Superintendent Randy Bell said. The program, proposed during the School Board’s business meeting, would target high school students and involve both Hudson and Litchfield. The biggest area of the special education budget is out-of-district costs, said Leslie Derbyshire, special services director. In addition to tuition costs, In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the U.S. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts -- each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schoolsCertainly state governments have taken steps over the years to assert greater control over these matters in K-12 schooling, and even the federal government has made tiny and tentative moves in this direction. But all these efforts commoncurriculum have been undertaken in the face of enormous resistance by local communities, which have vigorously fought to preserve the autonomy of their schools. maintain the system hampered the district''s effort to offer other resources. It''s not that CDLN was terrible, but the new system allowed the district to spread its money further. People can now put books on hold via the Web site and can search the library''s database. It also offers Electric Library that lets students research topics through sources such as newspapers, magazines and books. The students really like it, and the new features," said Bismarck High library media specialist Charlotte Hill. very user friendly." One of the new options that has made life easier for students is called the book bag, Hill said. Students can a topic search and then drop each book title that they want into their book bag on the computer screen. Theym,can then make a printout of the titles in a bibliography format and collect their books. They weren''t able to make a printout before," Hill said. They had to
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