January 2007
The Array of Services Task Force and Subcommittees met on January 30 for three hours. One hour was spent reviewing information, processes and norms. We all agreed that these will now be available on our website. Below are the reports from the four subcommittees:
I. Moderate Support Needs Subcommittee
- We are examining the best practices that currently support inclusion
- Every school should be able to support students with moderate needs
- The work of our sub-committee is to examine the current roles of adults in our schools for possible restructuring of those roles that would collaboratively support all students’ needs. One result of this restructuring may allow students with more significant needs to access an inclusionary model.
II. Significant Support Needs Subcommittee
We discussed:
- A variety of learning environments and descriptions of current ILCs
- Existing or non-existent entrance and exit criteria
- Different levels of student needs and disabilities within an ILC
- Caseload sizes
- Access to the general education curriculum
- Collaboration between general education and special education personnel
- Training of teachers/paraeducators to facilitate student success
III. Paraeducators Subcommittee
- How do we retain and support qualified, highly trained paraeducators as we move towards the Circles of Instruction?
- How can paraeducators better collaborate with other school personnel and families to improve student learning?
- How can we provide meaningful professional development?
As a group, we discussed the following points:
- Consistency of support
- Seniority vs. merit
- Fewer, highly trained paraeducators better than more, poorly trained paraeducators
- To what degree are we utilizing our more qualified staff
- How do we determine when a student is ready to move forward with less 1:1 support
- How do we give parents the sense of security and accountability needed
- Differentiation
- We need to blur the lines between general education and special education
- Use of paraeducators for classrooms vs. 1:1 with students
- How can we support special education students in the general education classroom if we’re cutting back on paraeducators
- We are in the process of social change, don’t pull the supports in the middle of the changeParaeducators are the main communicators with families, how do we shift so that general education teachers are the main communicators
- Paraeducator salaries based on qualifications
IV. Social/Emotional/Behavioral Subcommittee
- We read the article entitled, Quality Program Indicators for Children with Emotional and Behavior Disorders. At the next meeting we will continue to discuss the six indicators needed for quality programming.
- At our next meeting we will discuss implementing school wide behavior supports and if we agree that this is something we think ought to be pursued, will discuss the efficacy of this and how to roll it out.
- We discussed what curriculum was being used for affective education programming and how an inclusionary affective intensive program effects the school (resources, how to do crisis management, etc). We will continue to discuss this at the next meeting.
- We discussed the fact that BVSD has a lot of services on the continuum from consultative to day treatment, including everything in between like IR supports, but that more services are needed for students with serious mental health issues, especially at the far end of the continuum. For example should there be more programming options other than Halcyon and Flatiron Academy? We feel the loss of Dakota Ridge.
- The team feels there’s a missing link between our “inclusionary” Affective Intensives and needing something more restrictive, but not day treatment. Could we look at some sort of alternative or something more restrictive but not day treatment?
- Everyone took home a copy of the CD rom entitled: Colorado Behavior Resource Manual and we will be discussing this at the next meeting.