Washington Community School District special education looking to improve student monitoring tools and service delivery plan

WASHINGTON - The Washington Community School District's special education program will look to continue to improve through reviewing and potentially implementing changes to their student monitoring tools and service delivery plan.

At the Jan. 8 meeting, the district's special education director, Samantha Brinning, updated the board on where the program stands. Currently, the district as a whole serves 282 special education students with 17 teachers across their four buildings, with 97 at Stewart Elementary School, 57 at Lincoln Elementary, 55 at the middle school and 59 at the high school.

In addition to their special education program, Washington Community School District also has the Resilient Individualized Student Education (RISE) program and Behavior Learning Center (BLC), which serves 5 students and 9 students respectively.

Through just the first semester of the school year, Brinning noted that 4 students have been staffed out of the special education program, meaning the students met their individualized education program (IEP) goals, with five more anticipated to staff out by the end of the year. In the RISE program, one student has been staffed out within the year while another student in BLC will graduate at the end of the current term.

In terms of demographics, Brinning explained that special education has made up about 14 to 15 percent of the student population in the last five years, just slightly higher than the state average of 10 to 12 percent.

'We're a little on the high end of that state average, but we're still sitting pretty good,” Brinning said, and noted that the numbers include students who open-enroll into the district from other areas.

'We wouldn't turn a student away because our percentage is a little higher or lower,” Brinning added.

The special education director noted that the district is looking to increase support from Four Oaks to receive training. Brinning explained that a trainer comes into buildings about once a month to do observations and provide feedback to teachers. The district as a whole also partook in training to better understand accommodations and modifications to better understand the supports children may be in need of.

'We're currently in the process of reviewing and revising our progress monitoring tools. We've used the same couple sets of tools for many years and what we're finding is that it gives us a very surface level understanding of students so we're trying to find something a little more diagnostic to be able to dive in and figure those specific skills that students need,” Brinning added.

Other changes that may be on the horizon for the program include 'creating more standards based IEPs,” which would have teachers avoid using 'cookie-cutter language” when developing IEP goals but understanding which standards students may be struggling in.

Brinning also noted that special education will propose a revised service delivery plan to the board in March.

'There's a lot of things we want to do with that. Currently, the caseload matrix no longer reflects our current programming, so we are going to have to do a revamp of our service delivery plan. I'm hopeful that will help with some of the fluctuating numbers in our building,” Brinning noted.

'The services we are providing in our district have changed so we need to update our matrix and our caseload rubric to determine the size of rosters,” the director explained.

During the meeting, the board also approved bid for tuckpointing from Seedorf Masonry, Inc for 7 weeks of work during the summer. The board also approved an application for at risk and dropout prevention funding that would provide $385,225 to sustain the district's programs.