Special Education Study
Work Team Minutes

March 15, 2005

Our Goal:

A strategic approach to developing a Special Education Instructional Model for resource and BI services

Enduring Understandings:

A system approach helps to show alignment of program curriculum, assessments, and effective instructional practices
Quality instruction is essential for the success of all students in the system

Essential Questions:

How do Special Education services specifically support Goal one of the strategic plan?
What can we learn by understanding IDEA, exploring effective models, and examining current research?

Outcomes:

• KNOWLEDGE BUILDING-debriefing reading assignment
• Continuing our INVESTIGATIONS
• Finalizing DISTRICT VISITATIONS
• TRACKING process for LOOPING OUT
• ASSIGNMENTS : Reading and Research

~ ~ ~     ~ ~ ~     ~ ~ ~

Agenda Items:

1) Welcome, Review norms, Inclusion activity- "Let me tell you about my week..."

2)  TRACKING and LOOPING OUT

Table groups shared and recorded information from the Looping Out sessions that have occurred to date.   The Groups were asked to summarize the information and any system issues that may have surfaced during those meetings.

Brief Summary of Information from six different groups:

• Make sure focus of the study is clear.
• Be clear about expectations and accountability in the outcomes.
• There still remains a question of ownership for special education students – do we believe that ALL really means ALL? 
• Look within the district for promising practices before going outside of the district.
• Existing staff roles are changing or needing to change.
• Professional development is needed for all staff to support struggling learners.  This could impact staff hiring in the future.
• A question that the work is already a “done deal” and it will be 100% inclusion.
• Question: Should special education students who pass the WASL receive special education services?
• Question:  What determines graduation for Current 9^th graders, IEP or WASL?

System Issues:

• How do we develop buy-in and ownership from general education staff?
• Resources for these services
• The curriculum is expected to be taught across the system.
• Highly qualified staff is essential.
• Need to understand early intervention as a K-12 concern, not just PreK.

Introduction of tracking sheet for loop outs.

 3) DISTRICT VISITATIONS: Review of District Criteria and Questions for Visitations

Topic Team #2 shared the revised visitation criteria.  The randomly selected schools will be contacted later in the week and will include: two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school from each income level (low, middle, high).  All four elementary BI programs will be visited, in addition to the BI programs at each of the middle and high schools mentioned above.  Schools who were not randomly selected can request a team to visit their programs.  All principals have been sent a description of the procedure.

4 ) External VISITATIONS:

Team #4 and #5 continued to draft criteria and questions for district outside of Spokane and possibly outside of the State of Washington.

Final drafts will be reviewed next week.

5)  Special Education Data: 

Team #6 continued to review data and recommend data for the Work Team to analyze.

6)  INVESTIGATIONS:

As Topic Teams complete their work on IDEA, visitations and data, they continue investigating their respective research questions.

7)  Questions about Composition and Scheduling of Visitation Teams: 

A question was raised about the composition of visiting teams and the following feedback was given from the group:

• Unbiased approach – prefer to go to any place but home school
• Purpose of our visit is our education (as many people visiting as possible)
• Honor the work and assets of our group
• Expertise may create bias
• Tap into strengths of the whole group
• Our experience would be richer if we do visits to all levels
• Visits are not evaluative
• Consistency of observations by groups
• Having experts in this area visiting your building may feel more like an evaluation
• 3 people: 1 special education, 1 general education, 1?
• We must use our expertise professionally
• We need to trust the work, documents group
• Everyone’s time is limited and precious
• This time of year is difficult this process should not see difficulty.  It can’t look like monitoring
• Diverse groups of teams support the notion of us “learning”
• This is part of our education as part of the process we are going through
• Consistency by level (visits) of visitors

The Work Team agreed that the facilitation team will review and synthesize the information, develop a proposal and send to the Work Team members as soon a possible

8)  ASSIGNMENT:

Continue investigating your research areas/questions.