The primary goal of HPS GATE Program is providing students with a student-focused approach to meet specific needs in a selected academic/non-academic curriculum. Additionally, the GATE Program provides students with unique opportunities to develop individual talents and to strengthen skills. Emphasis on a positive self-concept, relationships with others, and strategies to develop critical and creative thinking skills enables students to become independent, self-directed learners.

Goals are focused in three specific areas:

• The gifted student will develop a realistic concept of self and work cooperatively with peers and adults.

• The gifted student will develop the higher level thinking skills of knowledge comprehension, synthesis, application, analysis, and evaluation in order to solve problems.

• The gifted student will create original projects that reflect critical and creative thinking skills as supplemental learning to the regular classroom curriculum.

Gifted education in Texas emerged over forty years ago, with the passage of legislation in 1977, updated and revised in 1996, in 2009, and in 2018 that addressed the specific needs of gifted students. Since that time, gifted education in the state continued to grow and develop. Significant progress has been made in serving gifted and talented students. The adoption of the Texas State Plan for the Education of Gifted/Talented Students in 1990 and the completion of the Texas Performance Standards Project for Gifted/Talented Students in 1999 have all been major historical initiatives in gifted education, not only at the state level, but nationally as well. (Cecelia Boswell, Ed.D. The State of Gifted Education in Texas)