Purpose
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for the Gifted has been unable to provide in-person services and has therefore been closed. During this time, we have refocused our mission for the future from the provision of direct services and telephone consultations to a primarily online educational format to be fulfilled largely through the Center for the Gifted website.
Center Mission Statement
The Center for the Gifted was established in 1983 to meet the needs of gifted people of all ages. Our mission is to provide educational information and activities that help members of the gifted minority to identify, develop and use their extraordinary abilities for the benefit of themselves and society.
In accord with this refocused mission for the future, the Center for the Gifted is now in the process of becoming a non-profit corporation with tax-exemption status.
The purpose of the Center for the Gifted website is to provide intellectually and creatively gifted people and their families, teachers, counselors, school administrators, and others with information that focuses on meeting their special needs through:
- Gifted Identification & Assessment
- Gifted Education
- Parenting
- Counseling & Psychotherapy
- Career Guidance & Exploration
- Publications
- Resources for the Gifted
- Information About the Center & Associated Professionals
The highly qualified psychologists and educators who are associated with the Center for the Gifted all have a personal understanding of what it means to be gifted as well as extensive professional experience and a continuing commitment to working with members of the gifted minority and their families.
Center Associates
Dr. Suzanne Schneider is a Founding Director of the Center for the Gifted and has served as its President since it was established in 1983. She is a Licensed Psychologist with a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and Counseling.
Prior to becoming a psychologist, Dr. Schneider earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a program director and fund-raising and management consultant for and then with non-profit organizations.
As a recognized authority on the special needs of people who are intellectually and/or creatively gifted, Dr. Schneider worked as a psychotherapist and counselor with gifted people of all ages for over 30 years.
Throughout her serial careers, Dr. Schneider’s continuing mission has been to serve as an agent of constructive social change.
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Dr. Schneider was unaware that she was intellectually gifted until she entered graduate school in midlife. However, she easily got good grades and sang on the radio as a child and won a first prize in a province-wide art competition for young people when she was a teenager.
For many years, she served as Consulting Psychologist and Gifted Children’s Coordinator for Delaware Valley Mensa and as a contributing author and conference presenter for PAGE, Pennsylvania Association for the Gifted Education.
As an educator, Dr. Schneider provided in-service training for school personnel and mental health professionals as well as presentations for parents. She was a seminar co-leader in a psychiatry course for medical students both before and after she earned her doctoral degree, and for many years, she served as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of The Union Institute.
James LoGiudice has been involved in gifted education for the past 45 years as a teacher, administrator, and child advocate, and he has long been regarded as the “Guru of Gifted Education” throughout the tri-state Delaware Valley area. He earned two Master’s degrees, one in Theology and the other in Social Studies, did doctoral level studies in Gifted Education, and received a Fulbright Grant for Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut.
Prior to now serving as a part-time gifted program advisor to school districts in Bucks County, Mr. LoGiudice was Supervisor of Programs for Gifted Students for the Bucks County Intermediate Unit (IU 22) for 30 years.
At IU 22, he also served as Director of Staff and Curriculum Development, as well as Coordinator of the Visual Arts & Music Leadership Councils; and he chaired and arranged for highly successful Challenging the Gifted Conferences from 1992-2015. Mr. LoGiudice is a past president of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE) and served on its Executive Board for 26 years, from 1980-2006.
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He has chaired and assisted with over 80 gifted program evaluations for public and private schools, intermediate units, and American International schools in Singapore and the Philippines. He has also been instrumental in organizing local, state and national conferences and institutes for both educators and parents of the gifted.
Mr. LoGiudice was one of the co-directors of the University of Pennsylvania’s innovative Gifted Education Leadership Certificate Program for three years and served as the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s southeastern regional Liaison for Gifted Support for five years, from 2001-2006. Mr. LoGiudice co-authored Making Connections: Secondary Programs for the Gifted; High School Philosophy Programs for the Gifted; and the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Guidelines for Operating Programs for the Gifted. He was a member of the writing team that developed the most recent Gifted Guidelines, which closely matches the current PDE Chapter 16 Special Education for the Gifted Regulations. In 2007, he also co-authored Understanding and Challenging the Gifted: An Introduction for Teachers, published jointly by the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education and the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA).
Edward Snieska earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Saint Joseph’s University and a Master of Arts degree in Child Psychology, as well as Pennsylvania State Certification in School Psychology, from the Department of Education and Human Development at Bryn Mawr College.
Mr. Snieska has nearly 30 years’ experience working as a school psychologist in public and non-public schools in Philadelphia and Montgomery Counties. His primary responsibility has been to conduct psychoeducational assessments for special education and mentally gifted programming eligibility for students ranging in age from preschool through high school. In addition, Mr. Snieska has provided consultation and guidance to classroom teachers, school counselors, school social workers, principals and administrators regarding students’ educational and mental health issues, and he has served on child study teams, instructional support teams, data review teams, IEP teams, and student assistance program teams.
For 30 years Mr. Snieska served as Senior School Psychologist and the primary evaluator at the Center for the Gifted, where he easily established rapport with examinees of all ages, particularly the younger ones, in order to help them overcome any apprehension they might have had regarding the evaluation process and make the testing experience both enjoyable and rewarding for them.
Dr. Naomi Reiskind has been a practicing clinical psychologist for over 40 years, specializing in the diagnostic evaluation and treatment of children and adolescents. After obtaining her doctoral degree from Adelphi University, she began working as a clinical psychologist at the Irving Schwartz Institute for Children and Youth, an affiliate of the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center.
For 10 years, Dr. Reiskind was a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught a class in psycho-diagnostic assessment, including both cognitive and projective testing, for graduate students in the university’s clinical psychology program.
For almost 20 years, Dr. Reiskind served as the Center for the Gifted’s Projective Assessment Analyst as part of a comprehensive-evaluation team whose purpose was to identify and document the abilities and needs of intellectually and creatively gifted children and youth and make individualized recommendations concerning how parents, teachers, and others can best meet these needs.
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During the almost 20 years that Dr. Reiskind worked at the Irving Schwartz Institute, she performed psycho-diagnostic evaluations of children and adolescents, in addition to providing psychotherapy to this population and their parents. She also supervised psychology interns and staff and designed and taught a seminar in psychological testing for the interns, as well as a similar seminar for predoctoral interns in psychology at the Belmont Center for Comprehensive Treatment.
Dr. Reiskind served as part of an interdisciplinary team at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, providing psychological assessments for the team, whose purpose was to evaluate, refer and follow children who presented with neurologically and/or emotionally based difficulties and ranged in age from a few months to 6 years old. The goal was to provide early intervention with the hope of preventing the development of more significant problems in the future.
In addition, during the period when she was lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Reiskind provided diagnostic and psychotherapeutic services to children in need who could not be cared for at home by family members and were residents at the Presbyterian Children’s Village.
Center for the Gifted Contact Information
- Telephone: (215) 849-5077
- Address: 3324 Midvale Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19129-1404
- EMail Address:
Contact@CenterfortheGifted.org
Logo Symbolism
The swan silhouette in the Center logo is sitting on a water lily with unseen roots reaching down through the water into the mud beneath. The meaning of these elements is drawn from dream symbols, which may mean different things to different people or different things to the same person at different times in his or her life. In the Center logo, the water lily symbolizes the conscious ego or the self, the source of new life and creative power. The water symbolizes emotions, psychic energy, and the unconscious. The swan symbolizes potential for transformation, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Ugly Duckling, and the color blue symbolizes the universal or collective unconscious. The unseen mud below the water symbolizes the primordial basis of life as well as our past experiences, which may hold us back but also have enormous growth potential within them. People who embark on therapeutic journeys dive into the water and delve into the mud to retrieve what they need to grow. Their therapists accompany them to provide support and help them to process the rich mud they retrieve so that they can use it consciously on their continuing voyages of self-discovery.