The Primary Talent Pool is designed to find students with high-potential when they are young and to nurture their potential, so they learn and achieve at their highest level. Encouraging and developing talents and abilities in the early years prepares students for advanced learning opportunities in upper grades.

We need to cast a wide net and be as inclusive as possible in the Primary Talent Pool to find more children from poverty, different ethnicities, and those who are twice-exceptional. The goal is for all educators to be talent scouts and talent developers who are looking for high-potential and advanced abilities in students and addressing their advanced needs. This must be a building-wide philosophy – finding and serving these students does not rest just on the shoulders of a G/T teacher who is in the building one or two days a week.

According to the Kentucky Gifted Regulation 704 KAR 3:285, the Primary Talent Pool is a group of primary students (kindergarten through third grade) who are informally selected as having characteristics and behaviors of high-potential learners and who have been further diagnosed using a series of informal and formal measures to determine the need for differentiated services during the primary program. High-potential learners typically represent the top 25% of primary school students.