Ms. Meredith Casper Nomination Letter for 2018 GT Award

In 2013, when Ms. Casper became the director of the Division of Accelerated and Enriched instruction, she was the fourth director in eight years; the office had seen considerable turnover in both leadership and staffing.

Previous directors had been unable or unwilling to withstand increasing hostility to the needs of gifted students from within the school system.

Ms. Casper has been a breath of fresh air in terms of her goals for programs supporting gifted students; her resolve in advocating for their needs; and her willingness to take risks and speak truthfully to people who disagree with her. Under her leadership, gifted magnet programs have seen an increase in capacity for the first time in years, and equally if not more importantly, curriculum for advanced and accelerated students has been introduced to local school programs for the first time in over a decade.

In the many years we have been interacting with AEI, its budget and staff have been cut in response to budgetary pressures, hostility to the office mission, and lackluster leadership. Ms. Casper has revitalized AEI’s role in curriculum development, maximized the resources she inherited through creative and strategic deployment, and successfully advocated for new resources. As but two examples:
(1) When the new math curriculum was rolled out, she pushed for the deployment of central office math teachers to support the implementation of compacted/accelerated math curriculum in elementary schools that did not have enough advanced students to make up an entire classroom.

In multiple schools, when principals implemented the math curriculum in a one-size-fits-all style hurting both gifted and other students, Ms. Casper worked courageously with the community as well as the center office leadership to successfully overturn the ill implementations.

(2) In response to a consultant report critical of the demographic enrollment in magnet programs, she successfully advocated for expansion of the magnet curriculum into additional schools, creating capacity for inclusion of more students, rather than merely adjusting the admission criteria for already-oversubscribed programs.

At the time Ms. Casper became the AEI director, parents had become discouraged from interacting with AEI when advocating for the needs of gifted students. Individual parents had been discouraged by anemic support for their children’s needs, and stakeholder group representatives had been put off by indifferent and/or misleading responses to their concerns and input.

Now, AEI once again has a robust and active community feedback group providing stakeholder input to AEI’s activities. Ms. Casper has facilitated interaction between parents/stakeholder representatives and other offices within MCPS, and has made herself fully and regularly available for consultation for both individual students’ needs and larger countywide concerns. This in turn has supported the growth of parent advocacy for the needs of gifted students in many of MCPS’s 202 schools.

Perhaps most importantly, she is a trusted partner to parent and community advocates who have come to trust that even if the answer isn’t what we would like to hear, she will tell us the truth.