The Special Services Department has been extremely busy these last few weeks welcoming 26 new students to our district that have special needs, many of them with very high, complex needs. Two of them come from behavioral programs, which are residential day treatment programs that are required to be placed directly to Quest Academy (the new behavior program in Longview). Our Special Ed Preschool program is looking at adding a very high needs, medically fragile transfer preschooler which will necessitate adding additional staffing. We had 2 very high need students move into our Diverse Support Program at WIS, 1 at WHS & 1 at WMS that requires 1:1 para educators according to their IEP’s, which we’ve also had to hire additional staffing for. Our September 1st special education count hit 285 students. We haven’t seen numbers that high on our special education count ever! Most of our programs are at capacity. Our office and staff have been working very hard at transitioning all these new students into our programs.