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Special Education Essay

Decent Essays

My focus for this standard was in the collaboration and trainings in the Special Education Department in Middlebrook School as well as in the district. I worked with the other Special Education Instructional Leaders (SPED ILs) to create similar SPED binders and google drives to create consistency of practice from building to building. We also meet monthly with the Director and Assistant Director of Special Education as a team. We worked to create a district wide transition calendar for all students moving from school to school next year. We scheduled staffings for each team of teachers working with the students and coordinating PPTs to ensure a seamless transition of service and best practice for each student with special needs. We worked …show more content…

I invited SPED staff from other buildings to attend and shared our planning system and materials afterwards. Feedback was not only positive but they asked for additional trainings and were excited to use the skills with our students.
We are now analyzing para support need from building to building and reviewing best practice for scheduling para support for children while still fostering independence. This is a challenge as student IEPs are individualized for a reason, however, we are looking to create some guidelines for staff to ensure efficiency of resources, as well as alternative and more creative ways to schedule our human resources. The challenges we faced in scheduling the transition plan as well as the paraprofessional trainings is three fold: time, culture from building to building and priorities of all stakeholders. First, the time needed to do such work takes us away from our other obligations in our buildings, most significantly, away from the students. The SPED ILs spent countless hours working together to create a transition calendar that would work for all schools. This was challenging when working around district and state testing, as well as building timelines for creating master schedules. Secondly, the culture from building to building is different and while that is ok, we needed to consider and respect each building’s past

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