The Parent Association for Gifted Education, Inc. (PAGE) operates on a fiscal year, which ends on June 30 of each year. We have just wrapped up the 2007-2008 school year. From various standpoints, this past year has been very successful, filled with many, many accomplishments. There were some surprises including some volunteer losses, but the year was effused with an overall sense of ongoing pride and growing strength. We continue to believe that the intellectually gifted community in the Cincinnati area is well served by PAGE and the Super Saturday Program.

The operative word here is community. By definition, the intellectually gifted in our society are a very small minority of the general population. This tends to leave some gifted individuals feeling isolated and lonely. PAGE's role is to create a communal environment for our constituencies - our students, parents, teachers, and many selfless volunteers. Each constituency is intellectually gifted, of course, and we cannot think of a better place to celebrate this gifted community than on a campus of the University of Cincinnati.

Highlights

On the second Saturday of each school term - fall, winter and spring - we held a Teacher Appreciation Luncheon, sponsored externally by LaRosa's Pizza. Internally, our diverse volunteer base provided a smorgasbord of ethnic delights that made our teacher celebrations delicious and loads of fun. Dishes ranged from vegetarian chili to Indian,Chinese and Spanish cuisine. Our teachers sensed our love for them as they hastily dined between morning and afternoon class times. Students interacted as they gobbled down pizza. We paused to give recognition to each of our beloved teachers, several of whom have taught for the Super Saturday Program for many, many years. Names that come quickly to mind include Alal Elayyadi, Dr. Ken Brown, Vic Ivers, Joanne Heckinger, and Walt Schaefer. Our community has been greatly enhanced by our teachers who share their gifts and passions in educating our gifted children.

During winter term this year, an ad hoc committee of volunteers and parents met week after week during class time to brainstorm a Mission and Vision Statement that captures the essence of our community. To boil down twenty six years of development into a brief statement was difficult. Notwithstanding, the following result says it well.

Mission: Feeding the educational passions of intellectually gifted children and their parents, helping them achieve their full potential.

Enrollments this year reached eight hundred ninety three, a recent record. This enrollment was up some 30% over the 2006-2007 school year and made our financial numbers bright. Shellie Weiskittel did a great job with brochure distribution relying increasingly on the internet to get our message out to gifted coordinators throughout the Cincinnati area in a timely manner. Jennifer Clark and Leslie Papali recruited teachers for wonderfully diverse class offerings and Laura Cleavinger composed her usual beautiful brochure. Increased enrollments made Angie Pang's job as Registrar more intense, but Angie handled this in stride. Our many new parents were greeted by robust offerings week after week in the Parent Room as Jamie Overbey provided a great line up of speakers. Campus Operations were handled deftly, as usual, by Korin Mattei. Julia Almaguer, Logistics Coordinator, supervised the timeline with finesse.

Rashmi Menon was appointed PAGE's Treasurer this year. She came up to speed quickly and found new ways to increase our interest income on reserve cash, thereby improving our financial results markedly. Kelly Kuhn effectively handled Administrative Services, but stepped down from her other long held volunteer positions after many years of faithful service. Tom Willis, webmaster, continued to develop our online services as we migrate increasingly to the web. His development of the Teacher Recruiting software is proceeding very nicely and has improved these operations tremendously. Also, thanks to his efforts in a related area, our President is now able to communicate directly with our parents by email. This establishes a much needed communications link within our community.

Our President, Nicole Reblando did a masterful job of keeping everything on track. Nicole has five children of her own and yet makes time to run operations. She recently announced that she has a sixth child - a daughter - in the oven and will need to step down this fall. We congratulate her for insuring that the Super Saturday Program has a future generation of intellectually gifted children. We know that Nicole will be with us in one way or another for many more years to come.

It takes about sixteen volunteers to run PAGE and the Super Saturday Program. We serve roughly three hundred families. When you realize how much time each volunteer devotes to PAGE, and that their volunteer time is completely unpaid, you begin to see just how important this gifted community is to our Super Saturday Program families. All of this is really quite remarkable.

Plans for 2008-2009 are well underway and are proceeding nicely. For example, recruiting for the fall term, which starts in October 2008, commenced in earnest back in May. For this coming school year we are welcoming several new volunteers and looking forward to their continued growth and success. Also, Jennifer Clark, VP-Communications, will lead us toward landing our first financial grant, which will provide funding to develop online registration. This will strengthen operations dramatically and move forward our vision to prepare the program for "going national". The Super Saturday Program was invented locally some twenty six years ago by Joanne Gershin, the mother of two gifted children, and we believe that every community in America would benefit greatly from its own Super Saturday Program. Bringing intellectually gifted individuals - students, parents, teachers and volunteers - together in community is mutually beneficial for all involved and greatly encourages society's best minds to become all that they are meant to be.