Lake Washington School District Special Education E-Newsletter

Lake Washington School District

Special Education

Newsletter for Parents & Families

September 21, 2010

Welcome to the new special education

As the parent or guardian of a special education student in Lake Washington School District, you may recall getting a printed special education newsletter from the district. Those newsletters were printed and mailed to you about three times per school year. This year we are moving to an e-newsletter format in order to save on printing and mailing costs. We will continue to send the newsletters at least three times per school year.

This first edition of the newsletter is being sent to all parent/guardian e-mail addresses we have on file. If you don't want to receive the newsletter, just click "SafeUnsubscribe" at the bottom of this e-mail. If you want to get it at a different e-mail address, click on "Update Profile/Email Address" at the bottom of this e-mail.

This newsletter is not exclusive to parents and guardians so feel free to forward it on to others who might want to subscribe, such as a grandparent or interested community member. Just click on the "Forward this email" link at the right under Quick Links.

If you have comments or suggestions on information you'd like to see in future editions, please e-mail newsletters@lwsd.org.

Message from the Director, Paul Vine

Welcome back to a new and exciting year, I sincerely hope you had some time to relax and enjoy time with your family and friends. I am very humbled once again to have the opportunity to serve as the Director of Special Services and have the honor to work with such a supportive group of parents and an outstanding teaching staff. We are looking forward to a very busy and successful year.

We are intending to publish our special education e-newsletter four times this year to keep you apprized on the great work our teaching and administrative staff are doing. We also want to keep you updated on PTSA Special Needs Groups (SNG) and Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) work, events and trainings. October is disability awareness month. Please see the article entitled "Ability Awareness in Lake Washington School District" on page 3 of the June newsletter for your information.

Again, I would like to thank you for your continued support of our schools, teachers, specialists, para-educators, special education IA staff and administrators. It takes our combined efforts to help our students succeed in both school and in their lives.

-Paul Vine, Director of Special Services

Curriculum News: focusMath

The Lake Washington School District Elementary Math Adoption Committee unanimously selected enVisionMATH (Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley) as its recommendation. The component of the adoption specific to special education is called focusMath.

focusMath was purchased for all elementary special education teachers, K-5, including the district's Intervention and Learning Center teachers.

The committee used an evidence-based approach to form a professional judgment about the two final programs to pilot. The evidence included several filters that were applied to the four programs, including:

Strands of mathematical proficiency scoring protocol for program balance
Organization and design scoring protocol
Math standards alignment score
Digital resources scoring protocol
Parent survey input
Results of state reports and recommendations

The 43-member committee includes representatives from all elementary schools and district programs. Programs represented include preschool, English Language Learner (ELL), general education, special education, Safety Net and gifted education. Three district-level administrators and seven elementary principals also serve on the committee. Math content and technology integration specialists are also included.

focusMath is an intensive, K-6 math intervention program designed to identify at-risk students and to align with individual educational programs for students in special education. focusMath is:

Intensive providing concise lessons built on NCTM Focal Points to provide explicit instruction on foundational skills
Balanced utilizing stepped-out instructional models along with strategic questions that let students verbalize their understanding
Individualized by targeting placement and on-going progress monitoring to help teacher individualize instruction

All special education, Safety Net and ELL teachers had an opportunity to attend a two-hour overview of the enVisionMATH curriculum and the companion Math Diagnostic and Intervention System, plus focusMath in June or August. Through the work of an exemplary group of Lake Washington special education teachers, all elementary special education teachers attended a more comprehensive training in August. There are several more trainings scheduled throughout the year.

Thank you to Leslie Elmer, Heidi Peltier, Linda Dauer, Rachel Holmen, Toni Rocco, Whitney Saura, Deanna Vega, and program specialist, Vickie Fitzpatrick, all who worked tirelessly this summer to develop a high quality, professional development training for our teachers. This group of teachers is truly inspirational!

Evidence-based strategies for students with autism and other developmental disabilities

Teachers were invited to attend a special professional development opportunity to receive in-depth, on-going training on how to work with students with ASD and other developmental disabilities. The training includes regular workshops, which include both new information and time for reviewing, troubleshooting, and brainstorming previously addressed strategies, and a coaching component, so that participants can get direct advice (coaching) and feedback on implementing strategies with their student(s).

The workshops included two full days in early August, as well as two-hour workshops every other Wednesday afternoon through December, and monthly two-hour workshops from January through May. For coaching, each participating school can choose three participants (para educators or teachers) to receive 45 minutes of coaching each month on implementing strategies with their particular students.

The following topics will be covered throughout the year:

Structuring the environment for success
Effective instructional strategies
Promoting engagement and independence
Facilitating communication
Facilitating social interactions
Understanding and preventing challenging behaviors
Teaching self-regulation
Teaching new skills to prevent challenging behaviors
Manipulating consequences to reduce challenging behaviors and increase desirable behaviors
Working with families of students with ASD

Schools participating this year are: Audubon, Bell, Blackwell, Keller, Mann, McAuliffe, Mead, and Rockwell. It is our department's goal to reach all our elementary schools over the next two years.

Program changes for the 2010-11 school year

We were very fortunate to make it through another tough budget cycle without staffing cuts for the 2010-11 school year. We have opened a transition center at Kirkland Junior High School in our continuing effort to provide a continuum of levels of support for students within their neighborhood school feeder pattern. We are very excited about this opportunity as we have not been able to offer a transition center classroom at the junior high school level in the Lake Washington Learning Community in the past. We also moved the Samantha Smith Learning Center program to Audubon Elementary as most of the students are from the Redmond and Lake Washington learning communities; this will dramatically cut down on the transportation times for our students. We also converted our half day intervention center classrooms at Redmond Elementary to full day programs based on our current students' needs.

Message from our new PTSA Special Needs Group President Julie Shalaby

My name is Julie Shalaby and I am looking forward to being the new LWSD PTSA Special Needs Group Chairperson. I have two boys who attend Margaret Mead Elementary, one of which is on the Autism Spectrum. Although I have always had a passion for working with families with special needs children, when my second son was diagnosed with autism, it became a personal quest. I have been Mead's Special Needs Liaison, served on the LWSD Special Needs Group team and I am on my second year of PTSA co-president at Mead. I have big shoes to fill following Beth Angelo, so please bear with me while I'm learning the ropes. We have a great Special Needs Group team that is looking forward to serving in the new school year. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at jmshalaby@hotmail.com.

The Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) Special Needs Group is made up of parents in the Lake Washington School District whose children receive special services and/or classroom support. Many special education staff are also part of the group. We meet every month of the school year except December and June.

These informative meetings provide opportunities to:

Hear presentations relevant to the needs of special needs families and children in LWSD
Learn about resources in the community
Network with other parents before or after the meeting
Keep updated on district and PTSA issues that affect our children

Meetings are held every fourth Tuesday of the month in the LWSD Resource Center from 7-8:30 p.m.

To sign up for the private e-mail distribution list for our group, contact Julie Shalaby.

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