Community Unit School District 300 is continuing to reorganize its special education program in an effort to increase the amount of time its special education students spend in regular classrooms.
District 300 already has renamed its Pupil Personnel Services Department to Education Services.
The district tapped Jacobs High School Principal Shelley Nacke for a new district-level position, heading that department, and named directors of both compliance and instruction. And it will hire 10 education service specialists for that department in the next month.
All are part of District 300’s reorganization plan for its special education program, which Nacke shared recently with School Board members.
All also are in keeping with recommendations for the district’s special education program that the Urban Special Education Leadership Collaborative made in March.
The district hired the collaborative to audit its special education program after a state audit last summer found its students with special needs consistently lag about 10 points behind the state average in the time they spend in regular classrooms.
“This audit came out and (people) were expecting us to come in and change everything, but that’s not really our leadership style,” Nacke said.
One of the biggest changes to the department is the creation of the education service specialist positions. Those include an early childhood specialist, an autism spectrum specialist, an emotional disability specialist, a speech and language specialist, a low incident specialists and five high incident specialists, according to the presentation.
Those positions will allow each specialist to become knowledgeable in specific areas for student needs and transition planning. And they’ll be able to provide support for families through their entire District 300 education, Nacke said.
That reorganization also will save the school district about $30,000, according to the presentation.
Another one of the “top priorities” of the district’s plan is to draft and provide training for staff on a comprehensive standard operating procedure manual for special education services, according to Don Wesemann, director of education services-compliance.
Wesemann also assured while discussing several of the collaborative’s recommendations, “We’re not going to throw the baby out with the bath water.”
One of those recommendations was to improve District 300’s use of Response to Intervention and Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports to improve the academic and social-emotional growth of students.
PBIS is the “behavioral side” of the RtI model required by the state before students can be referred to special education. RtI is a process designed to help schools focus on and provide high-quality instruction and interventions to students who may be struggling with learning.
The majority of District 300 schools already have PBIS programming in place, Wesemann noted.
“We already have a solid foundation in our district,” he said. Now all the district needs to do, he continued, is “take that foundation, construct some walls and have a fantastic facility to reach all our students.”
Next up, parents are invited to an informal conversation about changes to the special education program with Nacke, Wesemann and Linda Breen, director of education services-instruction. That conversation will be at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Professional Development Center at Westfield Community School, 2100 Sleepy Hollow Road, Algonquin.(source:couriernews.suntimes.com)
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