Dear Friends,

Welcome to the website of the annual New York State Advocacy for Gifted and Talented Education 2009 Conference. We invite you to join us for this year’s Conference which will be held on October 23rd and 24th, 2009 at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, NY.

This year’s AGATE Conference has as its theme A World of Promise: Gifted Students as Global Citizens. During this conference, we hope to open a lively and useful dialogue on this topic. It is well-known through research that many gifted children express a heightened connection and sensitivity to social issues, and feel a responsibility to address these issues with passion. However, many of them are frustrated at the lack of accessibility to resources that can help develop their innate leadership potentiality and direct it toward constructive pathways. Through the speakers, workshops, symposia, discussions, displays and other activities planned for the Conference, we hope to provide participants with input, ideas, and inspiration to plan a variety of learning experiences that will benefit the gifted student and allow them to take positive action within the global arena.

This heightened global awareness and involvement has significant implications for gifted students. Now, more than ever, it is essential to ensure that gifted students, our future leaders, understand world concerns and begin to see themselves as viable problem-solvers to these issues. This must be our starting point: to educate the gifted to understand that they are world citizens whose informational perspectives must be broadened to include cultures across the globe.

At the close of the Conference, it is hoped that how the best creative, social, and intellectual talents of the gifted can be harnessed to make the globe a thriving, stimulating, and safe place will begin to be realized. The world of promise that gifted students represent to implement this will demand of them no less.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. Piro, PhD

Chair, 2009 AGATE Conference

Dear Friends,

The AGATE 2009 Conference will celebrate gifted education in New York State with looking towards the future and how gifted students will fit into the worldwide community! We welcome you to attend to learn, network and celebrate bright children as we explore the importance of the making them citizens and future leaders of this world community!

Dr. Joseph Piro and his conference committee are working diligently to develop a diverse series of opportunities for administrators and board members interested in adding or improving their school’s gifted programs, for teachers to network and see what’s up with new research and for approaches to teaching our bright children, for counselors looking for ways to be more effective with bright children, and for parents and grandparents who are looking for educational choices for our brightest students to use their potentials to become global citizens who will successfully lead us into the future.

This is the second conference to be presented on Long Island for AGATE with Dr. Piro as the Chairperson and CWPost as the host. We look forward to meeting and encouraging and exciting teachers and parents of gifted students from all over the state, but intentionally move our conferences throughout the state to give teachers and parents from each region of the state easier access to our conferences on a rotating basis. We hope to see faces from all over the state as well as many new faces from NYC and Long Island!

Along with the annual AGATE conferences, AGATE exists to advocate for more opportunities for gifted students across NYS. It is for the gifted children of the state that we keep ourselves learning and working towards statewide requirements for appropriate educational opportunities in each school across the state for each student. It is time for all schools across New York State to acknowledge that there are special educational needs for students who function at an intellectual level that is advanced beyond their age peers..

We welcome you to attend the conference and then go back home and share the knowledge! We need to stay focused to keep expanding Gifted Education until appropriate educational opportunities are made available at every school for every gifted child throughout New York State!

Sincerely,

Audrey Kay Dowling

President of AGATE