Shooting for the Stars

Little Kelly Jean McCormick, the adopted daughter of Tacoma (Wash.) Psychologists Archie and Alma McCormick, was only 3 1/2 when she came sobbing to her mother with an unusual complaint. Her closest friends, all aged five to seven, were learning to read and write, and bright (IQ 147) Kelly Jean wanted to go to school. "I'm so ignorant," cried she. "I can't stand it." The McCormicks decided that they would indeed send Kelly Jean to school--but not to any ordinary one. Their adopted son Jimmy, who also had an IQ of 147, had been so bored in public school that he had flubbed his studies, made constant mischief, was in danger of becoming a painfully shy neurotic until his parents placed him in a stiff private school geared to the superior student.

Last May the McCormicks invited 20 parents of precocious children to a meeting, suggested that they band together to start a school of their own for pupils with IQs of 135 or over. They picked the name Adastra, which Alma McCormick loosely translates as "the sky's the limit." They leased a two-story house on Division Street, persuaded fathers to donate equipment and mothers to help with the secretarial work, finally opened last fall with 13 children aged 3 1/2 to nine. By last week the McCormicks had enough children on their waiting list to assure them of an enrollment next term of 35, which is all Adastra can hold in its present quarters.

Spanish at Four. The whole idea of the school is not to give the children a completely different education from the kind they would receive elsewhere, but to keep them constantly challenged. "A kindergarten child with an IQ of 135," says Alma, "is about 6 1/2 years old. You can't keep a child like that interested in finger painting all year." Each pupil proceeds at his own pace, whether doing work normal for his age or work one or two years in advance. But the McCormicks have added some special features. All children take, judo and ballet lessons to develop muscular control. They have visited the College of Puget Sound to hear a lecture on satellites, each Tuesday afternoon play host to a foreign student from the college who tells them about his country. At four, the children begin conversational Spanish, at six French, at eight German.

In their busy classrooms, filled with youngsters poring over books and maps or making models of the solar system, even the McCormicks have been surprised by the eagerness they see. One little boy of five, who had attended a regular kindergarten, entered Adastra suffering from nightmares, constant stomach upsets and a nasty rash. Now, no longer bored, he reads, is rapidly learning Spanish, and his symptoms are gone. A girl of four kept vanishing from Adastra's kindergarten to join the first grade, would be brought back screaming: "They have books in kindergarten but just with pictures. They don't do numbers. I want to be in first grade." After a two-week trial, the McCormicks let her have her way. As for the parents, they are equally enthusiastic. Says Alma: "The only complaints we've had were good-natured ones from the parents of a couple of four-year-olds who've been reading under the covers by flashlight when they were supposed to be asleep."

Junior Sabbatical. While giving the children their heads, the McCormicks do not want to let them get so far out of line that they will enter junior high school more than two years ahead of time. For nine-year-olds who complete the sixth grade, the McCormicks plan a year of independent work--a sort of junior sabbatical during which a pupil will read, go on field trips, gather collections, while still doing some sixth-grade work so as not to lose the habit of classroom discipline. The McCormicks also encourage their charges to play with children their own ages when not in school.

Beyond that, Adastra has little patience with the current fetish for adjustment. Says Alma: "We talk to parents who want their child to be just a normal, average, well-adjusted youngster. But the gifted child is not average, and anything you do in the direction of controlling his education as one handicaps a horse race goes in the opposite direction from good adjustment. There is little room for conceit here--the child must work to capacity to keep up with his classmates. But he is also free to learn without incurring the odium of being a 'brain.' "

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