Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Special education works with state to improve gradation rates

The coordinator for Special Education at Gurdon schools said the program is now under Continuous Improvement Focus Monitoring by the state in an attempt to get graduation rates up and participation in traditional classrooms on the increase.

Carolyn McClure, coordinator, said at last week's annual public school meeting, "Our school district, along with 12 other schools, was chosen for CIFM. We have been working with a team of people from the state department to improve deficit areas in our school.

"The two triggers (or reasons why we were chosen) were graduation rate and least restrictive environment."

McClure said the state department says special education students should be receiving supports and services during their school career to enable them to graduate from high school in numbers similar to general education students.

She said Gurdon has implemented a number of improvements to offer more support and improve graduation rate. For example, Gurdon now has Arkansas Transition Outcomes Project with Bonnie Boaz. This involves students in the transition process from graduation to post school outcomes and independent living. It starts at age 14.

Moreover, Gurdon has student led IEP Meetings, where students were educated and trained to be involved in and facilitate their own conference.

A re-evaluation of the value of grade retention is being examined. Even as young as primary school students, if the child is identified as having a handicapping condition, the district is seriously considering whether or not retaining the student will benefit him or her in the education process. If a handicapping condition is present, retaining the student will not close the gap or make the condition go away.

The Arkansas Department of Education tells special education programs to focus on the continuous development of student skills, not just remediation or elimination of deficit skills. Special education students are responsible for taking state mandated tests unless they are severely cognitively disabled.

McClure said, "ADE has a goal of 80 percent. They want 80 percent of the population of special education students in regular classrooms 80 percent of the school day."

Other avenues to meet the goal include: co-teaching, where the teacher and special education teacher or aid work collaboratively with the students in the regular classroom, making modifications instead of being pulled out in a resource classroom; and in service, where Tommy Broyles conducted an in-service entitled, "It's time to get past the easy parts of IDEA," with regular education as well as special education teachers. He gave out information on making modifications in the regular classroom and the implementation of a failure review policy.

An annual review conference is now being held. Before the conference, according to McClure, there was a review of the process by which programming and placement decisions have been made.

"We are placing the students back in the regular classrooms as much as we possibly can," McClure said.

In addition, special education teachers attended a workshop hosted by Broyles on due process  paper work. The group reported Broyles "as very helpful and full of information."

McClure said, "Cynthia Anderson is working half-a-day with me to help reduce the amount of paper work for special education teachers. We never have one free moment, as we send out notices, grade level testing and the teacher is still responsible for the IEP. We also do all of the forms of due process.

"We have made many improvements. As to CIFM, we are on step six of the eight step process. The state department will come back in soon and look at progress, plus they will make suggestions designed to meet the needs of our special education students.

"Special education teachers and aids, as well as general education teachers, have worked hard to make improvements in our special education program and deserve to be congratulated."