West G Administration Puts Special Ed Under Microscope

February 28, 2019 by Jennifer Turkoc

West Geauga Schools is working to improve its special education programming based on continuous data collection, school officials said during a recent presentation.

Amy Davis, director of pupil personnel, along with co-presenters Meagan Bellan, school psychologist for the high school and Lindsey Elementary School; and Jackie Hersh, department chair of the special education department at West Geauga Middle School and response to intervention specialist, gave an update on special education during the Feb. 11 West Geauga Schools Board of Education meeting.

“We now have the tools to dive deeper to a number of different arenas within special education,” Davis said, adding the presentation would cover the current data for students with disabilities as well as state data.

“We’re going to talk about equity and again, our student achievements and we really need to own our successes and failures,” she said, admitting it has been a “huge challenge” and they have been fortunate to have the input of a number of families, students and teachers in developing their special education programs.

Davis said the district is still involved with the State Systemic Improvement Plan and underwent a voluntary audit about six or seven years ago.

She said West Geauga staff and administration meet with the state on a regular basis.

The latest focus in the special education world is MTSS — Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, which means providing high quality, differentiated instruction for all students, Davis said.

West Geauga has 189 special education students, 31 of whom are accessing scholarships, said Bellan.

There are two scholarships available to students with disabilities, both from the Ohio Department of Education, Davis said in a Feb. 18 email.

The Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program “… provides scholarships to students who are eligible to attend K-12th grade and have an individualized education program from their district,” she said, adding there is also an autism scholarship program that gives the parents of children with autism who qualify for a scholarship the choice to send the child to a special education program other than the one operated by the district of residence.

“We have 22 students who are accessing county programs,” Bellan said during the presentation. “Those would be the Preschool Stars, which is our program primarily focusing on students with autism, and then we have Geauga Achieve, which helps serve some of our students with more cognitive impairments.”

She added, “West G has three students currently that are court placed that we’re serving.”

Hersh presented a chart that showed in the 2015-2016 school year, 44.4 percent of fifth-grade students with disabilities were proficient or above proficient in reading, while 95 percent of students without disabilities were proficient or above proficient.

In the 2016-2017 school year, in eighth-grade math, 26.7 percent of students with disabilities met the criteria, while 83.1 percent of students without disabilities met the proficiency criteria.

Lastly, in the 2017-2018 school year, in third-grade reading, 50 percent of students with disabilities and 95 percent of students without disabilities met the proficiency criteria.

Hersh also indicated during the 2015-2016 school year, 7.7 percent of students with disabilities passed end of course exams in English Language Arts II, while 82.5 percent of students without disabilities passed the exams.

In 2017-2018, the gap between students with disabilities and students without disabilities was 46.2 percent to 94.9 percent in Algebra I. These are typically kids who do not have a cognitive impairment, but mild learning disability issues or another health problem like ADHD, Bellan said.

“We know our students with disabilities have the potential to close that gap,” she said, adding no students on IEP’s are in the AP program.

“We believe that some of our students have the capacity, and should be able, to access some courses including honors and AP, more rigorous, more challenging classes, that currently, they’re not accessing,” she said.

According to the PowerPoint presentation, research says the more diverse a classroom is, the more everyone learns. Intervention should lead to an increase in achievement, i.e. participation in general education classes and honors/AP where appropriate.

“To tackle this problem, one of the things we started with is compliance, making sure that we have intact legal documents … and a lot of professional development directed at that compliance,” Bellan stressed. “So what we’ve found is that we’re driven by a deficit-based system where oftentimes our special education delivery historically has been more ‘pull-out,’ whereas a special education expert takes a disabled child out of general education and fixes the gaps and it’s been found to lead to a very fragmented approach. Research tells us that it needs to be supplemental instruction, it doesn’t need to supplant what’s going on in general education.”

Additionally, there needs to be really strong collaboration between the interventionist and the classroom teacher to make sure that everyone is working together, Bellan said, adding for example, in the high school, the model is co-teaching, where the interventionist comes into the general education classroom and provides the services there.

Bellan said when the district has data that students are struggling, they’ll provide targeted intervention, which helps close the gap.

That is an important reason for providing professional development in data collection, she said.

Some other things being done to improve special education include enhancing kindergarten-through-fifth-grade reading intervention, providing additional behavior interventions and making sure IEP’s being developed for students with disabilities are really strategic, Bellan said.