GIFTED RAP : Conference Brings Together 600 of Area’s Brightest Youngsters

Twelve-year-old Jerry Landers wants to own his own National Football League team when he grows up, so attending a workshop that teaches how to create and manage a business sounded like a great opportunity to him.

“I don’t just like to play the game,” said Landers, a pupil at Harry C. Fulton Middle School in Fountain Valley. “It is much more to the game than what the players do on the field, and that’s the part I am interested in.”

Jerry was just one of more than 600 youths invited Friday to participate in Kidscon West, a three-day conference with workshops and exhibits especially designed for gifted and talented children.

The conference is being held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim through Sunday.

Youngsters who attended the conference were either in gifted classes in their schools or were recommended as academically talented by their teachers.

“Gifted children require a certain amount of nurturing and attention for their various interests,” said Jacqui Jeffery, coordinator of the conference. “This is to give students and parents alike ideas on how to work with the curiosity and thinking of these children.”

Along with advice on entrepreneurship, children in grades four through nine were also offered workshops on the language of computers, U.S. consumer safety, treasure finding and Wall Street, to name a few. The workshops were taught by professionals from each field.

Registration was $60 per child with an extra $25 fee for parents interested in attending the conference.

Jeffery said she developed her interest in gifted children after teaching for more than 20 years in a Santa Barbara school district.

“I’ve always felt there was not enough encouragement given to these children, and there were certainly no programs in my teaching district aimed for this type of child,” Landers said. “Research proves that without encouragement, a gifted child stops asking questions.”

In 1984, she applied for--and received--a state grant that allowed her to sponsor her first mini-conference with nine workshops in the Santa Barbara area. This year’s first statewide effort includes more than 80 workshops for children and parents.

“As a parent, I am inclined to feel that not enough is being done to reach to the gifted child,” said Glenn Wallace, whose 12-year-old son is in a gifted program in Agoura. “Something that deals with the boredom and lack of challenge these kids must feel in a classroom filled with many other kids who really don’t want to learn.”

Drew Wilson, a former teacher and creator of the video “Mr.Edison’s Invention Factory,” a one-man show that encourages students to develop their own inventions, feels that more attention on the gifted child is imperative to the nation’s progress.

“In Japan, children, particularly gifted ones, have been encouraged to take their ideas a step further for years,” Wilson said. “But in America, only now are we focusing on shaping the kids’ minds in this way, and we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Kidscon will travel to Orlando, Fla., in January and to Washington in 1991.

There also are plans for the program to expand to include all elementary grades and high school students.

“We want these kids to realize that there are horizons beyond the classrooms and that they are capable of reaching them,” Jeffery said.