SMITHFIELD -- To the applause of parents, the Johnston County Board of Education last week backed away from an overhaul of the Academically and Intellectually Gifted plan.

Parents had complained that the plan lacked a “service-delivery model,” or plan to provide services to “all, many, few and some” gifted students. Also, they claimed proposed changes would water down AIG education in Johnston, in part by not allowing teachers to teach above grade level.

“The philosophy behind the program needs to be more clearly defined,” said AIG parent Lori Key. “If, as the administration has told me, teachers can transition across grade level, then this would need to be clearly spelled out in the revised AIG plan, and the curriculum revisions the AIG teachers were forced to do last year should be discarded.”

Parent Jack Hoile said he and his wife would likely move their two AIG children to another school district, a charter school or a private school if “AIG education were watered down to the point of irrelevance.”

Hoile thought the changes were being hidden from parents on purpose. “Both my wife and I are products of North Carolina public schools, from elementary through college, and we don’t feel any of these options should be necessary,” Hoile said. “As such, I encourage each member of this board to fully understand what it is you are being asked to support. Because I doubt you want to support anything that could drive the highest achieving students out of Johnston County public schools.”

Keith Beamon, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction, addressed the parents’ concerns at the school board meeting last week. First, he said the AIG plan was being updated to reduce the amount of testing needed to see if students qualified for the program. The current plan allows for testing students up to five times, but students are normally tested only twice.

Sections of the plan that called for differentiated instruction for all students were taken out. “First, addressing the entire population is not required in the AIG plan,” Beamon said. “It was done only to reinforce the need for differentiation of all students. Second, the presence of the sections addressing the regular education student was confusing to parents and teachers reviewing the plan.”

Robin Sinton, an AIG parent, said no services should be deleted from the plan. “If you continue to delete, what you end up with is nothing, so there is zero,” she said. “There is nothing you will be able to measure by. Where you take something out, I’d like to see you add something in so I know what services are being provided for my child.”

Beamon said the services that had been deleted from the plan were still available to all AIG students. “There is an entire chapter in the plan entitled ‘Nurturing’ ... that has as its entire focus providing services to students who have not quite reached AIG status but who need additional help to do so,” he said.

The parents said Dr. E.J. Grubbins, associate director of the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented, said Johnston’s revised plan was “badly written and rife with numerous contradictions.” Key, the AIG parent, said the entire 99-page document was sent to Grubbins but that parents wanted her to look at 20 pages in particular.

Beamon argued that Grubbins did not receive the entire plan. He said Grubbins told the school system that she got only 20 pages to review. In an e-mail to the school system, Grubbins stated: “You noted that you will use the curriculum developed by Joyce Van Tassel-Baska. The materials are well-researched and field-tested with students around the country as part of a series of federal grants received by the College of William and Mary.”

Instead of acting on the revised plan, the school board decided to let the parents and school administrators hash out their differences. The board will likely take the matter up again at its Sept. 9 meeting.