Reply to What is going on with the Office of Special Education?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Special education is often just good teaching practices. Many children with disabilities can have their IEPs implemented with universal design, a method in which all  students in the class benefits from what is legally required on another child’s IEP.  For example, one child may need class notes from the teacher as an accommodation. The teacher then provides the entire class copies of notes because all students can benefit from the notes.

Teaching is not a zero sum game - this child gets more so this child gets less. [/quote]

The thing that is hard to comprehend if you’re not dealing with it is the shear number of these accommodations that you just want teachers to implement. For example, you give the notes accommodation as one that is easy to implement. I have 3 different preps that I need to provide notes for. Fine. It takes time but I upload each of the 3 slides show daily. But last week I received an email from a parent that the slides aren’t enough. Her child needs the notes that go along with the slides or they’re not helpful. I’m not sure what she wants- a full recording of the class? Annotated slides? Whatever it is, it will be x3. And that’s one of 20 different accommodations.[/quote]

This sounds like something either needs a parent, student, teacher conference or an IEP meeting to resolve. The student is having difficulty getting the information he/she needs to learn from the class discussion. You are providing slides but are not sure what more is needed to be helpful. A face to face conversation might help the student say what he/she is needing to be successful.

As a parent, I don’t know what a prep is. My child has received PowerPoint slides as notes which are sometimes helpful and sometimes not. My child last year had teachers who didn’t provide any notes despite my child’s IEP which impacted my child’s performance till the notes were provided.

Finally, as a General Education Teacher, you should send input of your concerns to the 504/IEP team if you have a child with 20 accommodations. A child with 20 accommodations is a child in need of Special Education Services to teach skills and coping strategies to have greater independence. 20 accommodations is an example of a school system that teaches learned helplessness (we are going to do XYZ for the student) vs. teaching students skills to help them compensate for their disabilities. [/quote]

A prep is a course. High school teachers teach multiple courses and must PREPare for each of them. As far as the 20 accommodations are concerned,  my take is this teacher is not writing about one student with that many accommodations.  Instead, this teacher has 20 other students with 504s/IEPs amongst the 150 or more students this teacher sees every day.[/quote]
The sped kids at our MS school average about 12-15 accommodations each. The 504 kids have about 5 each. Out of about 1000 kids, 150 are sped, another 50 have 504s.

It's a meaningful workload.[/quote]

Nationally, 15% of public school students have IEPs.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgg/students-with-disabilities

Therefore, your school numbers are not outside the norm. What is unusual are the high number of accommodations needed per student with IEPs. MCPS has understaffed Special Education Teachers and Para Educators for years. Are these students receiving appropriate special education services to teach them independent skills so they don’t need double digit accommodations? Seems like an example of learned helplessness that puts the burden on the General Education Teacher versus teaching the students skills to help themselves.

Examples - you can teach a student skills to read or you can simply provide audio accommodations so they never have to read. You can teach a student how to write or you can provide a scribe so they never learn how to write. You can teach a child organization skills so they are self sufficient or you can assign responsibility to a teacher to remind students of daily tasks.

Look at the individual needs of the student and if skills can be taught in lieu of doing something for the child, the special education services should be provided to teach the skills to the student. The number of accommodations should be decreasing as a child progresses through a school system, not increasing. The goals and objectives should adjust as needed so the students is making meaningful progress.[/quote]

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