our philosophy
Manitou's contemporary Exceptional Scholars programming initiatives are intended to foster intellectual curiosity, the acquisition of knowledge, confidence, creativity and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, innovation, and personal and civic responsibility.
ExSP affirms that outstanding potentials among students, which may lead to expertise and outstanding accomplishments, create the need for experiences and services both within and extending beyond the regular school program.
ExSP affirms that outstanding potentials among students, which may lead to expertise and outstanding accomplishments, create the need for experiences and services both within and extending beyond the regular school program.
our mission
The Manitou ExSP-GT mission is to recognize, challenge, and support gifts, talents, and sustained interests in our students.
To achieve our mission, Manitou ExSP-GT providers will:
- Recognize - We acknowledge and embrace giftedness and realize the diverse ways giftedness is exhibited.
- Challenge - We seek to expand and enhance learning opportunities for students in grades 6-12 who demonstrate high ability, creative thinking, and giftedness in academic and talent areas. We help these students develop the skills for lifelong learning.
- Support - We make deliberate, positive, dynamic, flexible, inclusive, and ongoing efforts to identify students' unique characteristics, to facilitate a wide variety of challenging learning experiences to develop those traits, and to advocate for challenging curriculum. We offer resources to families so they might better understand their gifted children.
To achieve our mission, Manitou ExSP-GT providers will:
- Serve as a catalyst for identifying and implementing the best practices for teaching high-achieving, creative-thinking, and gifted students
- Advance public knowledge and understanding of the need to enable and nurture society’s most able students
- Support the needs of exceptional students by supporting teachers, communicating with parents, and identifying and soliciting the participation of mentors for these students
- Create partnerships with individuals, foundations, non-profit organizations, businesses, and universities to support the development of exceptional students who will advance society as a whole
- Encourage each student to pursue his or her full intellectual and personal potential and develop respect for individual differences
our vision
our inclusion policy
The Manitou ExSP-GT program advocates for all exceptional students. Giftedness occurs in every culture and every ethnic and social group, and our participants are diverse. The ExSP-GT program is committed to ensuring that all gifted youth, regardless of cultural background, ethnicity, national origin, race, faith, ideology, income, educational background, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation have the opportunity to reach their full potential with dignity.