
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, December 6, 1994                   TAG: 9412060110
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BURKE                                LENGTH: Medium

COLUMN ON 'GIFTED' IRKS PARENTS

They are the gifted and the talented, straight-A kids with their own elevated curricula at Lake Braddock Secondary School. But their parents say the students are another victimized minority.

A column in the Nov. 18 edition of the school's newspaper, Bear Facts, lampooned the upper-crust students as crybabies with no social life and ``the maturity of a chimp.''

Parents of the Fairfax County prodigies say school officials wouldn't dare let student journalists take such a poke at any other group.

``Take out GT [gifted and talented] and put in some other group,'' said Bernard Cotton, president of the Fairfax Association for the Gifted. ``Would you have been happy letting that article get published? The Fairfax County public schools shouldn't have let that happen.''

Cotton said he has complained to several school officials and asked for a retraction.

What they will get is an apology in the Dec. 22 edition of the newspaper for use of the word ``chimp,'' said Patrick McCarthy, a journalism teacher at Lake Braddock and adviser to the newspaper.

The uproar resulted from a column by Lake Braddock senior Andres Owen. In his commentary, Owen wrote ``... there is a dirty little secret about GT students that no one talks about: they, by and large, lack the maturity that should be present in a high school student.''

``And so we have a girl who cries when she receives a 94 on a history test,'' wrote Owen, himself a student in the gifted and talented program. ``Why is she crying? Because she missed one problem. Sure, a 94 is an A, but it's not a perfect A. The GT student who receives top grades typically possesses the maturity of a chimp and can be heard proudly proclaiming that their whole life is school.''

``He's sorry about that word,'' McCarthy said of Owen's likening the academic stars to chimps. But the commentary as a whole was meant to be a joke and is a personal article, not reflective of the newspaper's opinion, he said.

``He thought the comparison to a chimp was an obvious hyperbole,'' McCarthy said.

Asked if the newspaper would have taken a similar poke at the ``learning disabled'' or a racial or ethnic minority, McCarthy replied, ``Probably not.''

by CNB