10-11+Special+Education+Report


 * __ Single Plan for Student Achievement Planning Report for 2010-2011 __**

Department, Team or Program: Special Education (LH)

Name of person submitting the report: Brent Ford


 * 1) What were your successes in meeting your team goals and supporting the Site Goals?

As a department, we always keep the six goals for our school in mind when we are collaborating and implementing our rigorous, individualized curriculum. We have used Smart goals to help us become more integrated with the General Education program as well as improving our CAHSEE 10th grade passing rate. We currently have data to address our progress on our SMART goals that can be viewed on our department Wiki space, http://ecvspecialed.wikispaces.com. On this website, one can find department goals, subject-alike PLC goals and information about our collaboration schedule. Additionally, we are also working toward meeting our new site QEIA goals.

To summarize our progress on the SMART goals to date, we will be awaiting data on the March administration of the CAHSEE to see if we met our goal of having a minimum 60% of Special Education students pass one or both parts of the exam on their first attempt. In addition, we have SMART goals written for the 4 content areas in English, Math, Social Science, and Science. All these center around improving literacy and CST scores.

Our teachers work hard to improve attendance and are proud to have been a part in the recent school attendance increases. We are always working through the Individualized Transition Program (ITP) to help students make post-secondary plans and encourage college and work readiness. Our literacy pull-out program has shown successful increases in reading scores for both comprehension and decoding which has been leading to encouraging increases in a/b/c rates.

We have added three team-taught classes into our master schedule this year, four collaboration periods to better assist students in their general education classes, as well as the tutorial class we have offered consistently since 2003. While this increased our class sizes by 2-3 students, the release for the two teachers to go into general education classes and modify curriculum/assessments has proved to be a valuable support for our special education students as well as the general education students in these classes. Finally, we added a credit retrieval class within our department to help students pass previously failed classes.


 * 1) What were your challenges in meeting team your goals and supporting the Site Goals?

As always, the challenges in working with students with special needs are many, widespread, and highly individualized. We are trying to meet students’ individual needs as written in their Individual Education Plans (IEP) while still trying to provide a rigorous, standards-based, general-education-aligned curriculum in the classroom. This is in addition to federally mandated paperwork and goal reporting we do: IEP’s, ITP’s, “quick checks”, notices of accommodations and modifications, and daily progress paperwork to ensure student success. This is in addition to our daily teaching paperwork and grading.

Currently, we serve about 220 students on the ECV campus. Most all students are in general education for at least one or two classes. These classes could be PE or an elective; however, we also have students that are mainstreamed for academic classes and that number is constantly fluctuating depending on individual student needs. This is a challenge because it takes constant monitoring and collaborating with the general education teachers.

3. What are your department/team/program needs for supporting student learning for next year in these areas?
 * Professional Development:** The Special Education Department at ECVHS works hard to provide quality, direct instruction at students’ individual levels first and foremost. It is important to all our teachers and aides that we constantly make moves to improve ourselves as educators in order to provide better learning environments for our students. We would like to continue to work with Matt Kershaw to develop our Math curriculum and align our teaching with the standards and general education. We would also like to continue to work with Jonathan LeMaster to develop a comprehensive literacy program to meet all our students’ needs. In addition, we would like to continue to be given time within the school day to collaborate and meet with PLC teams to design development for each other and continue the work that has led us to this juncture.


 * Interventions:** We will be continuing our “pull-out” literacy program as well as working towards starting a similar “pull-out” numeracy program. To help create this numeracy program, we have asked administration to explore the possibility of releasing a General Education Math teacher to pull-out students from our Special Education Math classes in small groups to build/reinforce basic skills as well as higher level math concepts. We are also looking to expanding our team taught classes with General Education teachers next year.

We have requested funding for a computer based literacy program that is used at many other campuses in the district called “Read Naturally”. We are also attempting to move one of our teachers, currently paid through the QEIA grant, onto the Special Education payroll. If this move is not successful, we would like to continue to fund this “extra” teacher though the grant money so as to reduce class size in SE math with a highly qualified instructor. We would like to hire an additional Instructional Aide that could help offset the unbalance between teachers and aides (currently 10 teachers and 7 aides) as well.
 * __Supplemental__** Materials and Supplies to assist students who need additional support to learn (please do not list basic classroom supplies).

Our dream request would be to have a laptop cart with 15-20 laptops for our credit retrieval class.