4.1.3 Feniks: a drop-out center for twice exceptional high school students
Dropping-out of high school is a serious concern for gifted students, especially for twice-exceptional children. They are so creatively gifted they don’t fit in the regular system. The result is an often depressed drop-out with low self-esteem. For those students, drop-out centre ‘Feniks Talent’ was founded in the Netherlands. During this session, the director will share his experiences and lessons learned. We will talk about the possibilities of creating a drop-out centre and about how the students spend their days. Ample time will be spent discussing how to apply these lessons in your school and country.
Author(s):
Tijl Koenderink
tk@novilo.nl
Take on Talents
Netherlands
Tijl Koenderink is an educational author and entrepreneur from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is driven by his own experiences as a child: tremendously bad school results despite an IQ-test score of over 150. To make life better for the young people who are in school now, Tijl started several companies, trained over 500 public schools, set up over 20 full-time gifted programs and created a drop-out center for gifted teenagers. To practice what he preaches, he started his own public school. Tijl is publishing a book called ‘The 7 challenges of the gifted child’ in the US, mid 2017.
Femke Hovinga
femke@takeontalents.com
Take on Talents
Netherlands
Femke Hovinga had her goal clear since she was a first grader. She was struggling to be her gifted self in school and decided to make the school environment better. Grown-up and eventually a university graduate, Femke founded Talentissimo, the European Platform for the Extremely and Profoundly gifted. She also is co-founder of Take on Talents, an international effort to support parents of gifted children. Besides that, Femke is involved in several efforts in giftedness in the Netherlands.