To: Michael Green
Re: February Monthly Special Services Report
From: Deb Kernen
Date: February 3, 2015
This month I want to update you about our special education preschool program. During the last five years or so we’ve started seeing a major shift in the type of preschool children we have in our special education preschool program. Currently we have 8 students with either autism or emotional/behavioral disabilities. We are also in the process of evaluating 4 more students with similar disability categories. What we have noticed is that we are not able to manage and effectively provide the needed attention for each student with the level of severity they pose. I have tried adding additional staffing, and working with numerous staff to see if we can put some effective strategies in place which hasn’t yielded the results we would have like to have seen. Therefore, we are going to split the class into an AM and PM class in order to reduce class size and split up students who seem to be sensitive to another classmate’s behavior. As you recall, we also have 4 district staff typical preschool age students so that we have age appropriate models for these students that we will continue to support. This new model will begin March 2. During this next month we will be notifying parents in order to give them plenty of time to adjust their schedules, allow transportation to prepare, allow our classroom support staff to apply for the additional hours needed to run the program, to prepare and purchase the additional materials needed, as well as adjust the students Individual Educational Programs (IEP’s). I see this model sustaining into the future, as we will only be transitioning two students into kindergarten next year and our numbers have continued to rise in the program over the last few years. I feel this change will allow us to make more effective strides in preparing these little ones to acquire the necessary learning behaviors to have a better chance at being successful once they reach kindergarten and hopefully not need as much individual assistance.