It’s easy for gifted students to get overlooked in a typical classroom. They get straight A’s, but they rarely ask for help because the content is easy for them. For a teacher juggling the needs of 20 kids, it’s easy to let the ones who don’t seem to be struggling slip through the cracks. But this can lead to boredom, disengagement, and mischief—and it can prevent gifted kids from living up to their potential.
Elizabeth Blaetz had these kids in mind when she founded Vanguard Gifted Academy, a small private school just west of Chicago, nine years ago. She’d been teaching at a school for gifted students that was shutting down, and she decided the time was right to build something new. Some of the families from the shuttered school came with her. Others found their way there over time. The mission Elizabeth started with—to guide gifted children toward a life of discovery, empowerment, and innovation—is still the backbone of everything the school does.
Last year, Elizabeth retired, and Amy Trujillo was hired to lead the school. Amy’s background spans English language arts, English as a second language, math and science, gifted education, and students with disabilities. “My thing has always been the outliers,” she explains, “making sure the outliers have what they need in education.”
Vanguard is small by design, typically serving 10–15 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Students are divided by age into two bands, and each group rotates through a three-year curriculum based on the core knowledge curriculum (which is not the same as Common Core).
Mornings focus on reading and math in small, differentiated groups. Afternoons shift to STREAM (science, technology, research, engineering, arts, and math), where learning gets more hands-on. “The kids have built little clay horses, have made igloos, have made teepees. They’ve done robotics,” Amy says. Every quarter ends with a showcase where students present what they’ve learned to the community.
A lot of the kids are what educators call “twice exceptional,” which means gifted but also navigating things like autism or sensory processing differences. “We have some kids who are gifted and some kids who are high achieving,” she explains. “The high-achieving student is the one who can sit still, listen to the teacher, do their homework, and wants to do well. And then we have my kids, who are like, ‘Why? Why would I do that?’”
That distinction matters, since a big part of the school’s approach is meeting kids where they are, not forcing them into a mold that doesn’t fit. For example, Amy says, “If we have a kid that’s really competitive and wanting to go to Harvard, maybe another school is the best fit for them because they can sit still and they can compete and they can deal with all the anxiety and stress.”
The school focuses on executive functioning skills—meeting deadlines, working in groups, and managing their own learning. While they want to avoid forcing kids into a mold that doesn’t fit, they do want to help them learn to function in the real world. As Amy puts it, “Eventually, you will be in a setting where you need to stay in one area. So before you leave here, we need you to learn to stay in a little square.”
Vanguard Gifted Academy operates out of a converted bank, with old offices repurposed into small classrooms, a library, a language arts room, and a larger science room that doubles as the lunch and snack space. There’s a nature area and creek out back that the kids visit when the Chicago weather cooperates.
The school is funded entirely through tuition, grants, and donations; there are no school-choice policies to help offset costs. Most families receive some form of discount or financial aid, though no one gets more than half off. Enrollment is the ongoing challenge. “Once they’re here, they stay,” Amy says. “But it’s really, really difficult to get kids into the school, to find them, to get them here.”