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Amphitheater Public Schools

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Welcome to Amphitheater REACH Gifted Services

REACH: Realizing Excellence through Academic and Creative Help

The video above explains the importance of providing opportunities for transcendent thinking in classrooms, especially at the middle school level.  Our gifted program at all grade levels prioritizes providing these opportunities.  We recognize the importance of cultivating self-identity and allowing students to collaborate with their gifted peers.  We strive to offer opportunities for students to make connections between what they are learning in the classroom to the real world around them and to each other.  We want our students to think about what they want the world to look like in the future and empower them to strive to create that world.

REACH Vision

We envision schools in which giftedness and high potential are recognized, valued, and nurtured to support children from all backgrounds in achieving their personal best and contributing to their local and global communities.

REACH Mission

To support intellectual, academic, creative, social and emotional development of our gifted students and our advanced learners, ensuring they receive an appropriate and engaging gifted education, all day and every day, according to their abilities and potential.

REACH Values

We value diversity, creativity, curiosity, diligence, honesty, caring, fairness, respectfulness, achievement, responsibility and service to the community.

Meet the REACH Institute 2025 Presenters

  • Dr. Beljan, an expert in Gifted and Twice-Gifted EducationDr. Beljan is a pediatric and adult neuropsychologist specializing in the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychological disorders. He has lectured nationally and internationally (Netherlands, Czech Republic, Belgium, Ireland, Argentina, Mexico and Canada) on topics of giftedness, ADHD, executive functioning, developmental disorders, learning disorders and neurocognitive therapy. Dr. Beljan has published research on neurocognitive intervention and math learning disorder.

    Dr. Beljan will talk to both students and parents about bullying.  Please see the abstract below.

    “The Nuts and Bolts of Bullying”

    Bullying is a repeated and chronic pattern of hurtful behavior involving intent to maintain an imbalance of power over another.  Bullying has many causes and means of expression.  It is something no child should have to endure.  Bullying occurs in many environments. There are short- and long-term consequences to bullying that can carry on into adulthood.  This lecture will discuss concepts related to bullying that include projective identification, non-altruistic empathy, and innate aggressiveness.  The role of media, video gaming and its culture, and parenting also will be discussed. 

    Popular culture presents many myths about bullies and their victims.  In reality, bullying is often sustained because in many parts of society it is valued and rewarded.  Parents are provided with ideas for how to deal with a bullying child, that child’s school, and their parent.  Teachers are offered ideas on how to identify bullying and quell the behavior.  Finally, ideas are provided for children and how they can protect themselves from bullying and how to deal with bullying. 

  • Dr. Berens provides therapy for children, adolescents, adults, families and couples in individual and group sessions. She is a speaker for the REACH Institute 2025.Dr. Berens provides therapy for children, adolescents, adults, families and couples in individual and group sessions. She has extensive training in working with anxiety, depression, giftedness, trauma, intimate partner violence, and sleep disorders. Dr. Berens also conducts psychological evaluations and personality testing.

    Dr. Berens will talk to both students and parents about social media and video game addiction.  Please see the abstract below.

    “Gifted Gen Z: Social Media and Video Games: Can’t Live without Them, Can’t Thrive with Them”

    It is said of gifted children and teenagers that, “Anything worth feeling is worth over feeling, and anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” The pitfalls of this gifted way of being will be discussed in context of Generation Z (Gen Z), social media and technology. It has been documented that males and females began expressing epidemic levels of depression, anxiety, and low motivation since the release of the iPhone in 2010. This presentation examines how the change in technology has changed and challenged childhood and adolescent development. It will examine the ‘hows and whys’ of declines in mental health, social connections, sleep, and attention with an emphasis on gifted and gender differences. Various topics include the loss of play-based childhood, fear-based parenting, the lack of interpersonal socialization, and negative effects regarding ease of access to inappropriate content. The presentation will finish with logical suggestions for how to help support our children and improve their mental health.

REACH Teachers