Talented Twenty
Focus has built a process to assist districts in identifying the students who qualify for talented twenty. This process does not encompass all of the talented twenty criteria, but it is intended to provide the district with a starting point for identifying the students who meet the following criteria:
- Students who have a minimum 3.0 GPA
- Students who do not have an alternative assessment for FSA
- Students that meet the minimum required credits in each graduation subject as required by Talented Twenty
- Students who meet the above criteria who are in the top 20% of the 12th grade class
If a student is in the top 20% but is disqualified for the above reasons, another student will be selected in his or her place. The report will also highlight reasons students do not qualify.
1. To run the Talented Twenty process, from the Florida Reports menu, click Talented Twenty.
2. Select the GPA radio button, such as Weighted GPA, Unweighted GPA, or Custom GPA (if applicable for your district); this will be used to determine which students are in the top 20%.
3. The process can be run for the selected school, i.e. the school you are logged into via the school pull-down located in the header. If needed, to run the process for all schools, select the check box to Include all schools.
4. Click Run Program.
The program updates the students' Talented Twenty field to NULL for all students in the selected school(s). Running this process then updates the selected students' Talented Top 20 field (generally located on the Graduation tab) to Yes for students meeting Talented Top 20 criteria.
The output of the application will show you the number of students selected, then the number of students that were in the top 20% that did not meet the 2.5 minimum GPA requirement, the number of students disqualified for alternative assessments, and the number of students disqualified for not meeting all the graduation subject requirements.
For the graduation subject requirements, Focus checks the course history grades as well as the courses in progress for the students to determine if they will meet the requirements for Talented Twenty by the end of their Senior year. Any students that fail to meet these requirements, but were in the top 20%, will be listed at the bottom with the credits they have earned combined with the credits they will earn at the end of the year.
Overrides can be performed by selecting another option from the Talented Top 20 pull-down via the student's record, as shown in the image of step 4.
1. Sending students to Talented 20 can be completed via FASTER; from the Florida Reports menu, click FASTER.
2. In FASTER, click the Outgoing Transcripts tab, then click Add Outgoing Transcript.
3. Select Talented 20 from the Send to: pull-down. Enter the Talented 20 Term as specified; the message and record codes will default to the correct values. Click the Next button when all selections have been made.
4. On the Student Search screen, select More Search Options.
a. Select the Graduation menu, and then select Yes, student is in Talented Top 20 from the Talented Top 20 pull-down. This will find all the students that were flagged for Talented 20. Click the Search button, when all selections have been made.
5. You will then see a list of students; select all students or choose the students you have determined eligible via the check boxes next to student name. Once all students have been selected, click the Next button. This completes the process and the transcripts will be sent to Talented 20 in the nightly FASTER process.
For more information on the FASTER module, see the article titled FASTER.