NPSD School Board ECI Committee Meeting 1-6-22

001a little slower on the blue button so i just hit the go live stand by we are live on youtube we are live on our zoom meeting and north penn television dr g the meeting is yours thank you i'd like to call the order tonight's meeting of our regularly scheduled eci committee meeting we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all could i have a motion to approve the minutes from the last meeting so moved second all in favor do we have dr lewis campbell back uh she's in here if you want to do a quick mic check i do see that she's in the room

002we could do that okay dr lewis campbell can we just have a mic check okay mr fusco down here mr mcdane good evening okay so it sounds like we still need to work with dr lewis campbell maybe mr gilmore can work behind the scenes on that um so um again tonight is our regularly scheduled meeting for eci at the end of the public at the end of our meeting we will have an opportunity for a public comment up to 45 minutes uh in order to meet the requirements of pennsylvania sunshine law it will be necessary to report the names of all citizens who do speak to the committee during the meeting to assure compliance with this requirement it is essential that those planning to address the committee state their name and municipality members of the

003audience will be asked to limit their questions and comments to no more than three minutes this limit will prevent time for all those who wish to speak to the committee up to 45 minutes whenever members of the audience exceed this time limit the committee chair may ask the individual to yield to the next speaker and with that um we have a special presentation from our special education department um we have heard from some and members of our community questions and concerns regarding um the programs that we offer and so we thought this would be a good opportunity at our committee meeting to hear from our director and others that work with our special education department so we appreciate the opportunity for the presentation to the committee and with that we can get started all right

004good evening everybody and happy new year uh tonight's agenda like dr g said the item is special education and in particular we'll be talking about our current structure and service considerations um first i'd like to thank the board directors for having us here tonight and dr dietrich of course for his guidance um i also have the pleasure of introducing the presenters who will be here tonight um they have been part of ongoing discussions and been very dedicated to enhancing our programs so the first person i'd like to introduce that we'll be presenting tonight is dr pamela hart she is our director of curriculum and equity mrs megan mcgee-heim our director of special education dr mike mckenna director of elementary education dr anne-marie lucas supervisor of special education and mrs kate small a learning coach i'd

005also like to acknowledge mrs jackie giamarco she's one of our supervisors as well she oversees professional learning and special areas and i just want to thank her for her assistance in planning um as well she just could not join us tonight she actually had another uh presentation with some teachers earlier today next slide please so this slide is the vision from our special education department so i will give you a minute to read that before sharing the objectives for tonight but i'd really like to stress that you should see some alignment some of the phrases from this vision in which we remain committed will come through tonight during this presentation so again just please leave that up for just maybe another 30 seconds thank you next slide all right so tonight there are several objectives

006um that we really hope to meet so please know that we have listened actively to your feedback and your comments we read your emails very carefully and we have reflected on both it's our sincere hope that we convey to you tonight our commitment um to equity we want to reaffirm that commitment as you see in that first bullet that said many of you have heard me say numerous times if you watch dci or any other presentations in which i've been a part this is a journey we are really proud of a lot of things that we've done but we certainly recognize that there's a lot more work to do and so i want to say that up front um we know that you know there are still some things that we are working on and

007we definitely want to do that in partnership with you um because like you we're also advocates for our students and we do appreciate your input one of the other things that we'll be doing tonight is communicating indea regulations we will be sharing some data highlighting our supports and then one of the other pieces um one of the goals that i also find very important is talking about some action steps so we will be discussing action items that include improving our communication and expanding avenues that we currently have in place to make sure that we're giving all of our parents a space to collaborate and engage with us we did hold an all things equity communication class earlier this year and we do have a couple more scheduled um so i hope that you will sign

008up for those but also even though tonight's presentation is to the board um it's another step that we hope um you recognize is a welcome opportunity for us to share with our very valued community so i just want to thank all of you who registered tonight uh for joining us and at this time i'd like to turn it over to our special education director mrs mcgee high thank you thank you dr witters and to the school board for allowing our team to come this evening and present on behalf of the special education department at north penn school district one of the things i wanted to start with this evening is just to share a little bit about myself as i am newer to north penn school district coming up on a year within the organization

009and i feel like especially with the audience we have this evening a lot of our families are here which is fabulous um to tell a little bit about my background and my journey as an educator so my time as a special education teacher started 15 years ago and i have only been in the special education field it is a passion of mine um within my time as a special educator i was a co-teacher in an inclusive classroom in which um i was across three classrooms and a classroom aid paralleled me for um for the classroom in which i taught him within that time frame we were lucky enough to work with um consultants of like marilyn friend who works on co-teaching models and to become really a model classroom for co-teaching i was lucky enough

010to then transition to an autistic support classroom within the same organization where i was able to work with students on the autism spectrum in a variety of capacities some of which for students who required applied behavioral analysis in a very discrete trial type setting and others who were included in the general education environment and required essentialization of curriculum to meet learning targets in both of those areas i was able to support learners across that continuum and as an administrator i've worked with the families across the k-12 continuum really in supporting the vision and goals of the students and their families and being able to support them in where they feel their child's strengths are and the areas in which they'd like to see them grow i want to reaffirm what dr waters has said is

011that as an organization particularly the administrative cabinet and the administrative team at north penn we are absolutely committed and remain committed to that that vision that was shared a few minutes ago and that we will continue to support that vision and the equity inclusive practice work that has been started um as we continue to move forward so um so i welcome you know continued conversations as dr ward shared in collaboration with families so the first slide today that we're going to talk about is dr whitter said you're going to see kind of themes through the vision and how we're connecting it to our slides is a meaningful access so one of the ways in special education we are charged to provide meaningful access is that we are regulated under the idea which is the individuals

012with disabilities education act which then as you go to pa code falls into chapter 14 and we are charged to follow the regulations within those codes there are really six core tenements that i would say that we um really align to when we talk about idea and they are outlined here and we're going to talk briefly about them this evening so the first part is fake free and appropriate public education which aligns particularly with zero reject and what that means is that as an organization a public school system cannot deny access to education for any child so as a public school organization we are charged to follow and provide faith a free and appropriate public education for our learners in addition to that within the uh the faith offer we are charged to provide an

013appropriate evaluation and assessment so if a student is deemed to be going through an evaluative process where we are suspecting a disability might be um in the in the play we must provide for an appropriate evaluation so and we have school psychologists within north penn school district and related service providers and very uh well-versed multi-disciplinary teams to support that appropriate evaluation if a student is then deemed eligible for needing specially designed instruction per that evaluation we are providing an iep or an individualized education plan the iep is based on the evaluation of the student who is deemed eligible for services and it must be filed in accordance with the regulations within the idea from that iep we then talk about a variety of pieces goals specially designed instruction and we talk about most specifically least

014restrictive environment and education in the least restrictive environment we're going to talk pretty specifically about that in a few minutes but the least restrictive environment regulation states that students with disability receive their education to the maximum extent appropriate with non-disabled peers and that means that maximum extent appropriate really is considered based on the iep team discussion which includes parents and the iup team members to make those recommendations next we talk about parental and student involvement in that decision making process so if students are 14 years of age or older we are required for them to be invited and part of the conversations about their programs and their post-secondary goals so students and families or guardians would get prior written notice which is commonly an invitation um to be part of conversations and iep meetings to

015discuss students programming so school districts are required to provide that prior written notice so that we are engaging our families in the iep process and they must collaborate with students and with parents to implement and design students programming and services and then finally um procedural safeguards or right to due process is a component of the idea that talks about that at times despite efforts and collaboration across the iep team there are times that the district may believe a recommendation is appropriate and a parent may not and if that does come to play and there is not an agreement that is made then the parent do does have a right to um exercise their right to due process and the district does provide for what's called procedural safeguards or parental rights to outline those rights so

016that parents are fully informed of the process and their rights um to due process if that is what they do indeed um would like to proceed with next slide so next we're going to get into a little bit more specific data about our story within north penn so every year annually on around december 1st pennsylvania department of education requires leas or school districts to report data relative to special education so in that data we look at a variety of pieces but in the next few slides you're going to see very specific data to hear kind of our story within north penn for this slide if you draw your attention to the right side you're going to see a pie chart and what that represents is as of 12 1 the representation percentage of students in

017the 13 disability categories you'll notice that the top four areas within north penn are specific learning disability other health impairment which commonly is add your adhd diagnosis not always but common um speech and language impairment and autism are particularly the top four for um north penn school district and you can see the other percentages for our various emotional disturbance hearing impairment intellectual disability multiple disabilities and so on on the left side of the slide you'll see the overall representation of the 2021 school year and i draw your attention to the roughly 17 of our north penn population that are students who require specially designed instruction so we're looking at students with ieps it is about 17 of our population next slide please so as we begin to understand how we deliver those services to those

01817 of the students within north penn school district it's important to understand that we need to represent access to the instruction as well as access to our general education peers so over the next few slides you will hear some terminology to help understand that story so first we're going to discuss what is called facetime so facetime means who is providing the support so what personnel is is working with the student and providing the support and in particular we're looking at any personnel that is tied to special education so you'll also hear terms in a few slides itinerant supplemental and full-time and we'll really define them a little bit more clearly over the next few slides and you may have heard them within the context of your iep meetings as well um but on on the

019converse to that there is place time and what place time is is where the actual support is provided so the classroom setting in which it's provided and that is the percentage of the school day that a student is included in the general education setting so you're going to hear us talk a little bit tonight about face time and place time so next slide as we look more closely at the locations and the definition of those sections within the iep you will see that one is discussing the level of support from special ed personnel the facetime while the other is discussing where the student is receiving instruction which is place time so for the educational placement section of the iep which is section seven um well section uh section b and seven um we talk about

020the level of support and when we talk about the level of support that means any time a student with an individualized education plan is working with special education personnel that could be a special education teacher uh it could be a related service provider speech language otpt hearing support teacher um but it's really important to understand that it is a special education personnel so someone who has a certification as a special education personnel is what counts a paraprofessional does not count towards this this level of support so if you talk conversely on the other side the pen data section which is the final section of the iep it's the last page of the iep calculates the amount of time a general education student or student is accessing the general education classroom or school day so wants

021to know where things are occurring so where the student is receiving the instruction um so for that section we have to calculate any time the student with special education services is not with their general education peers and if you were to look at the last page of an iep you'll see it asked how many minutes are in the day for general education students how many minutes of the day is your student not with general education students and then it gives a percentage and that talks about the percentage in which the students are with general education peers and that is considered pen data and that is the report that is sent also to the state it is important to understand and it is a common misconception that these two sections will likely not match because the

022calculating the calculations are for two different components of the iep there are times they are similar but likely they will not match okay next slide so our next pie chart looks specifically at the data from the 12-1 poll from pde for face time or level of support so i draw your attention to the key which outlines that an itinerant support is 20 or less of the day so it's the least amount of support from special ed personnel the supplemental support is more than 20 but less than 80 percent of the day from support from special ed personnel and then full-time support is 80 or more of the day again support from special education personnel so if you look at the current data the students in north penn are are itinerant for 84 and that so

023that means they're receiving services from special education personnel for 20 or less of the day they are supplemental 10 for 20 for more than 20 but less than 80 percent of the day and about 5.9 of our population is receiving full-time support so if you're sitting there you might say hmm that doesn't seem necessarily accurate because i know that my child is in a co-teaching environment where that special education teacher is in their classroom for pretty much most of the day so we are analyzing that as an educational team and we are looking at what that looks like in terms of how we are providing those supports and as we continue to work with our teams and understanding the differences between face time and place time we will likely see a shift in this particular

024section because right now special education personnel um is not necessarily being delivered at an itinerant level but we're going to look with the iep teams at what is being delivered and make sure we're representing that accordingly within our documents so we represent what students are getting next slide and finally um let's look at the data that's specific to the 121 count for pde that talks about that last page of the iep that that place time so you will see that our students within north penn 87 of our students are in the general education population for 80 or more of the day which means there are instructions occurring in there and they're in with general education peers whereas 13 of our students are in the general education pers general education classroom for 40 or less so

025when you look at that data that has actually been consistent really if you look at it back through the years from about 2015 to current we have read anywhere in between about 82 percent um to about 87 so this has been consistent over those years so that was a lot of data and information at one time so i just wanted to throw it back to the committee to say at this point is there any questions regarding the presentation so not so much a question but um i think a point for context as well because a lot of the concern from families that i've actually heard for four years um even before your time there's been some concern about you know what direction the program would take is that we don't want to go back to

026you know a time when students were at north penn very heavily uh enrolled in full-time programs and although it's not exactly an apple's alpha match it is i think a fairly good indicator i i kind of looked at some of our child find data going back in as far back as like 2 000 which one was it 2008 it was almost 52 percent of students in special ed were in a full-time special education environment or maybe it was 48 maybe it was 52 40. something like that like nearly half of the students that we were educating so i think just in terms of the context of the conversation where the district has gone from to where it is today i think that that's important to understand for you as somebody who's new to the district

027um you know that that there is a history of the district you know over identifying kids and probably placing them into programs whereas you know for any point of comparison that we're looking at the child by data is somewhat useful right because you can kind of see like an itinerant level in and of itself of surface level you know being provided you you talked about 20 i'm sorry you talked about 85 86 of north penn students the pennsylvania average is at least as of last year so we are still 20 25 above the average in our district um relative to other uh school districts in pennsylvania and their programming so just a point correct sure okay thank you okay i think i'm passing it off to dr mckenna next school districts are responsible for making

028sure that students with disabilities are educated alongside students without disabilities to the maximum extent appropriate for the student generally appropriate means that this education meets the students special needs and allows the student to make educational progress the regular education classroom is the first placement choice the iep team must consider when an iep team considers where a student will be educated it must ask what can be provided in the regular education classroom and what supplementary aids and services will provide extra support in the regular education environment examples might include assistive technology special behavior strategies or accommodations or modifications in the curriculum or assignments these aids and services often play a pivotal role in the facilitating and supporting the education of special education students in the regular education environment the recognition that regular class placement may not

029be appropriate for every student with a disability is reflected in the requirement that districts make available a range of placement options known as a continuum of alternative placements and that is the graphic you're seeing there and that's to meet the unique educational needs of students with disabilities idea regulations specify that each public agency is to ensure that a continuum of alternative placements is available to meet the needs of children with disabilities for special education and related services the continuum must one include the alternative placements listed in the definition of special education and found on this graphic and two make provisions for supplementary services such as a resource room or itinerant instruction to be provided in conjunction with regular class placement this continuum represents a range of educational placements in which the iep can be implemented

030to meet the individual needs of students with disabilities a student's placement in the general education classroom is always the first option considered the law and the pennsylvania department of education policy favor education with non-disabled peers however inclusion or education with non-disabled peers is not a foregone conclusion such a decision remains exclusively with the iep team as they consider a free and appropriate public education for some children the iep team may conclude that a more restrictive setting is necessary for the delivery of faith if a more restrictive setting is determined the iep must document the reasons for any decision that results in the student services being delivered outside of the regular education classroom an iep team may choose a more specialized setting if number one the student's iep cannot be implemented satisfactorily in the regular regular

031class in the school the student would attend if not disabled even with the provision of supplementary aids and services or number two the student will receive greater benefit from education in a specialized setting than any regular class after consideration is given to the student's educational physical social emotional and behavioral needs with the provision of supplementary aids and services in relation to specialized classrooms in the 2020-2021 school year at the elementary level in the north penn school district we had nine specialized classrooms currently at the elementary level we have 11 specialized classrooms due to increased enrollment and the needs of the students finally is important to note that student placement options are fluid and individualized a student might receive some services in one setting and other services in a different setting placements can and do change

032over time based on factors such as changes in a student's progress and needs next slide this slide highlights four student profiles commonly found across the school district and if you look through the first student profile is very common and deals with a student in a co-taught setting who has needs in both mathematics and reading and receive their instruction again with in a co-taught classroom and supports from a special education teacher who is in the classroom profile number two uh deals with a student who has a specific uh learning need in speech and language and it is receives a tenured speech language teacher who meets their individual needs the third option is a little bit different it's a student with a disability in reading and requires specialized instruction for dyslexia from a wilson certified teacher this

033student is in the general education classroom for most of her day except when she is receiving her instruction in wilson from the special education teacher the student also receives related services in both speech and occupational therapy the fourth example is a student with a disability with autism who is in general education with special ed with special education assistant support across all settings the special education assistant helps the student access the general education curriculum and next slide this this slide talks about special education assistance and and they are an integral part of our special education programming and inclusion as many of us know uh there is a labor shortage across many sectors of our economy right now and of course this is impacting uh the sector of education we have uh definitely impacting some areas including

034our daily subs bus drivers and our special education assistants we have an ongoing posting here at north penn uh where we are continuing to interview applicants as they apply unfortunately right now across uh k-12 here at north penn we do have current vacancies in the area of our special education education assistance and we're currently continually trying to fill those positions and as you can imagine this can impact our delivery of services this shortage is impacting districts across our county and state and across our country as well we are we have asked our principals our special education supervisors and teachers to really analyze our special education students schedules along with building schedules and and really looking at their the students needs as well to leverage our staff as best we can uh to ensure that this

035short-term issue which could end up being a more of a long-term issue as well is not impacting our special education students and i'm going to stop there that was a lot of information as well and see if the committee has any questions regarding any of those previous slides i i have a question um so i'm curious and i don't know i don't expect that you're probably prepared to answer it at this moment but um serving on personnel and finance committees um you know i've been a part of discussions about hiring for special education assistance in the past and when we've looked at like the number of assistants that we currently employ um it seems to me that it's significantly higher than other surrounding districts so i'm guessing what i'm wondering is um is this a

036very i mean i know the national trend so obviously but in regard to us specifically at north penn is this a very recent trend that um we've had a significant loss of special education assistance over the last say two years uh and do you know like relative to other larger districts in montgomery county if i'm if i'm correct in my perception that we do hire um we do have a lot of special education assistance relative to other large districts in the county so i can answer that um i can tell you based on our county numbers across montgomery county we absolutely are the highest um but i also think we're committed to inclusion at a high level and some of that is that commitment to our professional support in the general education environment i think

037one of the conversations that we as a collective group are talking about is how to support co-teaching specifically to maybe parallel support that when the students are in general education instructional aid support might be more beneficial to the learner than maybe a one-to-one some of the conversations we're having with iep teams and kind of gathering some input from some of the organization just to see kind of what their feel is with respect to um our students and more in our inclusive environments um but we in terms of hiring you're absolutely right it has been tough um and it's that way across the county um and but we definitely are one of the highest but i think it's because of our commitment to inclusion oh absolutely i think that was kind of just highlighting that point

038that yeah yes we're a larger district but also the demands that are placed on you know uh these programs are heavily uh tied to personnel so you know the commitment is a commitment that we're making to our staff in by hiring right so you know that it to me is an evidence of that commitment um dr mckenna can you go back to um i guess a number that you were talking about um but i did i missed the year you you were comparing nine special pro or special programming support classrooms where as opposed to eleven and i couldn't i missed the years yeah so the the nine the nine was from the 2021 school year and the 11 is the current school year at the elementary level and do you know um and i mean

039i'm actually sure miss monkey kind probably knows this better but um maybe if you can just for the public describe what those programs are um in terms of the nine or the eleven sure so um primarily they are classrooms they are autistic support classrooms there are some classrooms where there are students whose profiles are more life skills based in terms of their profiles for academic learning or multiple disabilities um and there are some classrooms that have autistic support and some life skills combined in classrooms um so the so currently of the nine i say i would say about nine classrooms or strictly autistic support classrooms verbal behavior when students transition in from early intervention they are already students who are identified as having a disability per idea so if there is not a current evaluation

040we are charged to follow the evaluation that is completed from the early intervention profile um and so we need to then provide a program that is commensurate to what they were getting because that's their current program uh most times students who are coming in from early intervention in and require that level of of a classroom are receiving at least 15 percent of their day in a specialized learning environment getting applied behavioral analysis so um so in order to replicate that that is sometimes when we look at enrollment numbers when we have students who come in they are requiring that level based on their current iep so we need to provide that for them so in that case an early intervention transition we're able to really know the numbers coming in and project if we need

041to open a classroom because we need to provide the program that is currently within the iep thank you um i do think it is worth um uh briefly just describing why the why i mean we saw the continuum of services um but if you're not as familiar you might not know or understand exactly why it's important that you do have um you started to describe it at that point like why is it important that you have some autistic support classrooms and some life skills classrooms um or kind of the public it might be helpful for people to understand why why it's important that we have those programs sure so as dr mckenna shared not only is it required by idea but it also is something as we meet with iep teams families and guardians have

042different visions on where they believe and how they believe their children learn so some of our families feel very strongly about a more specialized environment where they're getting very individualized attention in a smaller group and they talk about integration into a general education classroom very specifically with goals tied to maybe socialization um or particular goals that working on um you know access to the environment for for example um so when we talk about the need to have those types of classrooms sometimes it's programmatically based it's based on we have students who move into the district and they require this level of service and we are we are charged to provide those those levels um sometimes it is iep team decision based it also is something that as an organization special education is required to respond

043to the data so if we have students let's say that we start in a co-teaching environment in general education and as an iep team we notice the student is not making the educational gains and progress that we want to see we are charged to respond so response sometimes looks like changing the intervention looking at a different intervention tool but sometimes parents request that the change look like a different location for their child to learn so we need to make sure that we maximize that and we utilize all opportunities in our day to say that we do have and can provide a continuum of service for someone who would like to be fully included within that environment and someone who may require and and ask and and to feel that a more you know location of

044a specialized learning environment might work best for their learner thank you so i want to ask this question and i have to think kind of carefully about how to to say it um and again i'm not sure this is a question that there's going to be much of a definitive answer for but one of the the comments that we heard um in our december action meeting from the public was concern around the kindergarten programs um and students coming in so as we take in a lot of the public feedback um i'm really trying to listen with a very careful ear to hear how many people are communicating concerns about their own specific personal experience versus what they feel is like a direction the entire district is moving to um you know because i do think

045when you're a board director and you're in these conversations our our task is a 30 000 foot view of the program right like there's the direction we trust you guys to implement you know the law and the programs and do the work right so to try to get a better understanding of what that dynamic is i'm curious about this for those intakes when kindergarten students are coming in and you're meeting with families and you're deciding on that placement um are you getting a lot of pushback from the new families coming in that where you feel like there's hesitation to uh go into maybe a a program that's more restrictive as opposed to um you know maybe switching up a plan and having parents come and say well i'd actually rather i came here for um

046inclusion i'd rather just have my students you know full-time given the in-class supports like in your estimation how much of that is happening at that kindergarten intake level so um i know i'm newer so i'm just gonna tell you with what i know but um i have not heard of pushback um by any means i hear that a lot of times our families want their programming to look similar than it did in the iu um because that's what they um they believe their child needs and there's programming offers that they like about what that program looks like in terms of services and delivery i think sometimes the transition from kindergarten into school age looks a little different excuse me earlier mentioned into school age and kindergarten looks a little different because the school age program

047does look slightly different our reliance on outside providers is not as heavy because we are charged with providing it if we feel the student needs it um so i would say largely and we've had at least three early intervention transition meetings so far this year um there has not been any kind of pushback because the word you used with with respect to um what can be provided now at this point we're just talking about what their current documents say and that we're going to do an evaluation and we really talk about we had an early intervention parent meeting this year where the team came together with us supervisors and explains really the continuum of what we can offer so i think the transparency is out there that we can really meet kids needs across that

048continuum um but there has not been um a pushback that i that i have felt or seen and i'm not sure if someone who's been here longer might feel differently but i've not seen that okay well thank you didn't sound like it though all right if there's no other questions i think the next slide is mine so good evening everyone my name is emory lucas and i serve as one of our special education supervisors at north penn high school and i'm thrilled tonight to be sharing with you all some of the work that we've been doing around universal design for learning framework as a district and this kind of goes into more of what we were talking about instructionally and what we're doing to meet student needs so the work we've been doing with universal

049design for learning connects back to that vision slide of special education from earlier where we discussed our focus on the goal of providing meaningful access to rigorous curriculum and you might ask yourself well what is udl and quite simply it is as this slide here says it's instructional practices that are essential for some but useful for all and in many cases educators in our buildings find that they're already incorporating some aspects of these guidelines into their practice however there might be barriers to learning that still exist so the framework provides a structure and a thoughtful way for educators to plan and implement instruction based on research of what works best for all learners at its focus is recognizing that all learners learn in unique and different ways and that given that learner variability we approach

050all aspects of instruction with an approach that individualizes and provides for choice the the focus of udl is on reducing barriers and promoting equity inclusion and expert learning for all this is not just a special ed thing this is this is all learners so here at north penn we've been doing the work around the udl framework for many years alongside the work of our inclusion efforts but what i want to talk a little bit more specifically about is what we've done in a focused way over the last three years specifically so the strategies have been applied in most of our schools over the last few years and in 2019 specifically we had some focus administrative teacher and and instructional coach leader groups participating in some cohort work with the montgomery county intermediate uni cabrini university

051and other area school districts along with cass which is a national organization the center for applied science technology they're actually the ones that created the framework these uh north penn teams attended cohort plc sessions at the intermediate unit and they learned more about the framework then they went back to their classrooms and began to apply the methodology as we work towards a more large-scale rollout and implementation again around the other inclusive practices we were already doing at that time then covet happened and kind of took some pauses and and you know had some regrouping on things but this year we've revisited it again and our efforts have focused administratively with another udl leadership team working through the framework and action planning as we look at larger scale implementation district wide we also have schools across

052the district that are participating in that continued plc work with the support of the montgomery county intermediate unit some other area school districts cabrini and cass once again next slide so this slide and i know it's hard to see but in the presentation you can click on the visual and it goes out to the actual link on the cast website but this is the actual framework the actual guide that was developed by cast and this is what our teachers our teams our our co-teachers would plan around and use to then implement this methodology to explain it a little bit better to everybody here the udl guidelines they're organized both horizontally and vertically as you can see vertically you see the three principles of udl at the top you've got engagement representation and action and expression

053these principles are then broken down into the guidelines and you see them as the checkpoints with more detailed suggestions um there are those categories on the left hand side of the access build and internalize and the teachers would use this in their planning instructional lessons to make sure as i said earlier we're looking at the barriers and we're reducing those barriers so everyone can access instruction so in summary you take this all all together the udl guidelines really are leading to that ultimate goal of providing meaningful access to regular regular rigorous curriculum for all of our learners here at north penn we we're excited to be continuing this work this year and look forward to the larger outcomes we're going to have as we implement further um across the district so at this time are

054there any questions if there's any questions on these slides i'm hoping to answer them um if not i'll pass the presentation on to miss kate small dr um dr lucas i'm wondering um when you talk about it being implemented on a mark on a larger scale are we talking about not just within special education but across all you know across everyone because um you know one of the things that we have started to talk a little bit at this committee is about assessment and the udl framework absolutely impacts um the way you assess learning and the way you think about how learning should be assessed and what um [Music] what it means to actually transfer knowledge um and not just kind of that recall level one um you know web depth of knowledge like just

055wrote tasks and so the udl framework definitely leads into that and i'm wondering about the connection to the work that we're trying to do or hopefully trying to do around assessment and when you say that this is a larger scale are we saying that teachers across like beyond special education or we is this just being used by special education at this point no it is currently being used by um school teams outside of special education like so we will have special education teachers part of those teams but this is bigger than special education and that is the goal of it too is a large scale roll out across all classrooms to your point which is what its ultimate goal is meant to be it's access for all learners so yes um and from the from

056the outset it's been not a special ed thing we've had teams of principals regular ed teachers that's the beauty of this is having all those different perspectives viewpoints and and expertise to guide this planning tool so if i'm a parent just a regular parent at home what does this mean for how my child is learning and how they their learning is assessed and is this at the we'll just say you're the high score i know you've been working at the high school um middle school high schools like where is this you said teams is this just kind of piloting teams at this point or and when would we see it on a larger scale where we actually would kind of notice it everywhere so back in the earlier like 2019 is when we had some

057pilot team so it wasn't everywhere it was uh i believe that time high school we had york avenue we had some representation in some of the other elementary schools but it was just based on interest and who wanted to kind of learn a little bit with the work and the support of the iu cast and cabrini um currently now this year we have a few other school teams that have joined us and an administrative team involving some of the individuals here on this call or in this presentation in a well as well as some of our learning coaches doing this work so um it's definitely it takes time to implement this across and to learn the framework and actually use it with fidelity um and we're going through self-assessment checklists as as a leadership team

058to see how do we get a larger scale rollout going um so i think as a parent you will start to you know over time we'll start to see this a larger scale roll out but we're not there yet we're still getting more of our teachers involved more of our buildings and teams involved um i'm happy to share there's some great podcasts out there by some of our buildings who are doing this work including inglewood has a podcast out there some of the work that they've been doing just to showcase them i know penndale's done some of this work so we're excited as it continues to grow but again it's not just a special ed thing thank you and if there's no other questions i'll turn it over to kate small all right thank you

059dr lucas and good good evening to everybody my name is kate small and i am joining you tonight as the learning coach in north penn that specifically focuses on inclusive practices k to 12. so we are fortunate in our district to have a human resource that is directly aligned to that specific statement in our vision around providing meaningful access to a rigorous curriculum for all students and that resource is known as the inclusion facilitator so one of my main roles and responsibilities in my coaching work is meeting with and guiding our inclusion facilitators in the work that they're doing in their buildings so currently we have 11 inclusion facilitators at the elementary level we have three inclusion facilitators at the middle school level in each one of our middle school buildings and we have a

060team of five inclusion facilitators at north penn high school and they are split amongst departments to be able to support staff and students and one of the most critical components or aspects of the inclusion facilitator role is really having flexibility within the workday so that you're able to prioritize some of the non-instructional responsibilities that are assigned to those individuals and one of those main non-instructional responsibilities is working with staff members to build capacity and understanding so that they are able to best me meet the needs of learner variability within the general education classroom so an inclusion facilitator does that in a variety of ways oftentimes they are hosting plcs they're co-planning with grade level teams or department level teams they're providing consultation to specific iep teams they are providing in the moment coaching by being

061visible in classrooms to really support the environment in which all of our students are learning we do currently have a barrier as it comes to the inclusion facilitator role and that is that these individuals have had to take on more direct instruction this year than they have in previous school years and with that um they're more tied to student learning and less available or accessible to staff members so they're not as actively available for that problem-solving process but that is certainly something that we are committed to revisiting and refining as we move forward so that they're able to prioritize this work and continue to build that capacity amongst staff so here on the screen um you will see a mission statement that the inclusion facilitator team worked together to develop we really wanted to have

062a statement that sort of showcases our beliefs as it comes to students and the learning that we support so our inclusion facilitator team is committed to creating and maintaining learning environments that are representative of all learners through supporting students to become lifelong learners who can advocate their wants needs and best interests to the world providing students with meaningful access to a rigorous curriculum through staff development around modification of instruction and adaptations to curriculum resources this year specifically our inclusion facilitators have done a lot of work with the essential elements which are the standards that are available to students who qualify to take the pasa assessment which is our state alternative assessment and they've worked to align those essential elements with our common core state standards so that students with more significant disabilities are still able

063to access their learning in the general education classroom and then finally leading solutions oriented conversations at the building level the classroom level and the individual student level to remove as many barriers as possible and to provide more inclusive learning opportunities for all students so at this time i would be happy in conjunction with mrs mcgee heim to answer any questions that the committee might have around this position specifically um i have a question um when the uh the move to um have inclusion facilitators provide more direct instruction to students um is that happening in what environments classroom environments is that like a pull-out environment is a hallway is that like where is that um interaction taking place and how is it this is it sort of as an ad a needed basis are they working

064with specific groups like what does that look like i think kate has more specifics to that on that okay great all right well then you work with the group so i'll let kate answer that question sure absolutely um so that question is a bit difficult to answer just in that it really varies building to building based on the students that are at that building and what their specific needs are we have seen more students requiring direct instruction where they are removed from the general education classroom so because our inclusion facilitators have had that flexibility within their day they have been a integral part of being able to provide some of that direct instruction but with that happening it has certainly taken away from their ability to provide that level of support to the staff within

065their building so again as we kind of look at planning for the coming school year we want to make sure that we're aware of that and that when our inclusion facilitators do need to be providing instruction to students which of course will always be part of their role in some to some extent um that they could be the ones that are providing that instruction in a cot fashion or a push-in fashion so that they're really able to kind of model a an inclusive special education service delivery through the work that they're doing each day and i would say to couple with that one of the components is definitely the reassessment of students transition back during covid was the learning loss component so we were really assessing where our students were and as kate said there

066was an increase for a need based on the data of needing to provide something maybe a little bit different which when we looked at the resources we had um you know in front of us in some of the buildings and it does evidence locates absolutely right um you know the inclusion facilitators are playing a role with some of that as well so the other thing i'm wondering is um i've been um asking about question facilitators um for a little while now and the approach of the flexibility that building administrators have in terms of the way that they are sort of used right there's at least in the past it seemed to be more of a and it sounds this is still the case you know depending on who they're working with depending on you know

067the building and the needs that their role is sort of being defined um by building to building more than consistently sort of a more defined you know day expectation um throughout the district in that role so i guess my question is just is that a direction we're continuing with with that role or do you think that you that the goal is to streamline that position more so there's more continuity in the uh role itself i think for you know for kate's role as the coach it would be great for it to be consistent across all the buildings but i think the one thing that we find is definitely each building has their story so their needs are just so varied so i think depending on what the needs of the buildings are especially at the

068elementary level we're looking at two of our buildings do not have inclusion facilitators so how do we make sure that there's equitable access for all um and really one of the things that kate and i have really worked on this year was looking at how can we universally design some of the pieces for some of our learners so that our inclusion facilitators can help support the inclusive opportunities for things like executive functioning social skills regulation um so i'd like to say i'd like to say consistency um i definitely think that that's key to their role and for them to feel that they are valued in the role that they play um but i definitely think that each year and each situation will lend for variability based on what the students need in that building because

069of the priorities the student always so that's i think that's hard to say it's going to be absolutely consistent right i was just kind of getting a sense of what the thinking was of senior men on that so sure sure okay if there are no other questions i will turn it over to dr hart good evening everyone happy thursday i am delighted to be here with you um this evening um it's been fabulous to listen to the conversation because so many of the things that we've talked about will tie in beautifully with the things that i want to share as well um so we've spent quite some time this evening we're talking about our current program our philosophical framework the structure that we have in place um and the support that we've been providing um

070for students and teachers um and so um as all good educators we want to always take an opportunity to reflect on where we are so that we can really kind of decide where it is that we want to be going um it is a dynamic process uh we every summer put plans in place uh with really good um intentions and we use research and data to make those decisions uh we implement programs and then we have an opportunity once that's in place to reflect on what is going well um what we can refine um and what have we really maybe have had a misstep and we want to kind of take a look at the go back to the drawing board and do some things differently we revise and then we kind of go through

071that planning process again um and so while that happens on a big scale um in the summer very often and in the spring it is something and you can really hear that through the presentations that have happened before i have spoken that that's happening as we're moving through the year um as well um and so if we'll go to the next slide um one of the things that we think about i mean the lens through which we're using to think about our experiences of all students particularly those that are receiving special education services is really through the lens of cultural proficiency and equity um the slide the slide here um has some key terms and you can kind of read through those but i think the big takeaway that i hope that you'll have on

072from my um presentation this evening um is the recognition that equity means that students are getting what they need but the inclusive piece is that we're doing that in really meaningful ways and so i recognize earlier this year and i think megan talked about this a while ago we had we hosted um an all things equity session um and really focusing on cultural proficiency and equity and we felt really good about the presentation and there were a number of parents there whose children are receiving special education services and they were pretty honest and saying they don't really see themselves or their children in our cultural proficiency and equity work and while that was really hard to hear it was a conversation that was really important because we recognize that while we think about special education

073as an integral part of our cultural proficiency and equity work we have not done an amazing job in being intentional in our communication and really being transparent about that as well i'm so i'm delighted that we have this opportunity to really engage in this conversation this evening um to kind of go back to this notion of high expectations for all when we think about cultural proficiency and equity it is not just about race and ethnicity and religion and gender learning profiles um neurodiversity are all an integral part of that um and we're i'm really committed to doing what we can to be more transparent about that um as we're moving forward um the other piece of the slide that i want to highlight for you is also this notion of belonging it is one thing

074to have children included in a general education classroom and kind of present but we want to make sure that kids feel really connected with their peers and have a sense that they belong there as well um and families feel that same sense as well um one of the things that we've talked a lot about as a team is this notion of making sure that children and families have a sense that they belong to all of us not their students or your students or my students but all of our students um and regardless of the role of responsibility that we have in our school or in the district we're thinking about each of the students um as our own as though they were our own and we want to make the best decisions that we can

075as well um we're in really challenging times um and the social emotional piece plays a really important role and it's always paired with the instructional piece but that's even more important today than ever um and i just want to make sure that everyone sort of knows that that's part of our discourse um when we're kind of thinking about our plans and what our hopes and our dreams are for instructional program for students for all students but those particularly reading receiving special education student services at this time um so we'll go to the next slide um so we've talked about kind of where we are and so i want to take a minute or two to talk a little bit about where we hope to go um we just ended kate's presentation talking a little bit

076about the inclusion facilitators and what the intent of that role has been really leading professional development really refining um instructional practices uh with teachers um and because of some of the barriers that we've experienced we've not been as consistent in that work as we wanted to be um and so one of the things that we're talking a lot about is if we continue to find ourselves in these challenging times what are some things that we're able to do differently more creatively to ensure that general education teachers special education teachers are able to benefit from the expertise of our inclusion facilitators and how we are able to provide structures and time for them to really engage in those really important conversations model lessons to make sure um that the instructional practices that are happening in classrooms

077are good for all of our students um another action item is really to reconvene inclusion task force as part of our cultural proficiency and equity work um the conversations and feedback regarding how students and families are experiencing school are really really important um and so we've had some of those smaller conversations but we do want to make sure that we strengthen that partnership as well and so there'll be work to come and know that that'll be happening um in a not too distant future uh we talked a little bit about um in one of the presentations earlier regarding just um making sure we have a continuum of services for students part of the reason that's so important is that we want to make sure that all the students who can be in north penn schools

078are there and some have very specialized needs and in order for them not to be an approved private school or not to be in another setting but to come back to the school district we have to make sure that there's a space and a place an instructional program that really does meet their needs and that continues to be one of our goals um finally as we think about on our students in the secondary area um those i mean post secondary um we want to make sure that we're increasing and expanding our offerings for those students as well um so that they um have the rich experiences that we want um for them to have as they transition i'm out of the school district um next slide please um around the professional development piece um although

079i'm new to north penn um it is my understanding that about five or seven years ago the district had a really intense focus on um and inclusive practices um and as time went on we felt as though our staff really began to embed the philosophical framework language and instructional practices into their work and so it wasn't necessarily as important to have district-wide professional development sessions because we wanted to because we had a foundation and we wanted to make sure that the professional development that was taking place was more job embedded we know that there's a great variation within each of the schools of our district different needs within teams and students and that professional development has been much more individualized to ensure that students and teams and individual buildings are getting exactly what they need

080um to grow and to learn and to make sure that students are successful and even though we don't um have not had sort of the district-wide focus um as we had maybe a few years ago i would be remiss in not mentioning that um our induction program is probably one of the best i've ever seen and inclusive practices is an integral part of that program so it's not just the sessions that new teachers engage in in the summer but in every monthly session which i just attended one earlier with kate today the idea of inclusive practices is an integral part of the conversation and so it's been really amazing for me to watch teachers who are new to the profession or new to our school district shift their language their philosophical um perspectives in the

081ways in which they think about meeting the needs of all students in those sessions um and so that has been really fabulous um for me to be able to see um as well um i think the other thing that i do um want to share um which i really have loved as well and we talked about this earlier and i'm glad that i re highlighted this is when we think about um udl it really is the benefit of all students to ensure that when we're engaged in inclusive practices students who may be receiving special education services can be as successful as they can in those settings as well the other piece i want to highlight is the professional development for all staff very often if we think about professional development we think about classroom teachers

082special area teachers support teachers such as speech and language therapists or even reading specialists one of the things we've been really intentional about and we recognize how important it is to make sure that our instructional assistants participate in really meaningful professional development as well in many situations it is the instructional assistant that's playing a really important role for students to be really successful in a general education setting and so we want to make sure that they have they're grounded in the content um the curriculum that's being used as well as strategies um instructionally and behaviorally to ensure that their support makes sure that students are as um successful as they can be as well um and so um this continues to be a work in progress there are bits and pieces of this happening in

083the district so i don't want to give the impression it's not happening at all and hopefully through the presentations that have taken place you can see this i think our collective goal is for to be um more consistent recognizing that we do have some hurdles around staffing and some other challenges we are doing everything that we kind of want to continue to be um as intentional as we can to make sure that this is an integral part of everything that we're doing um and so um i have one more slide left and then i'll open up to any questions um it is kind of on behalf of our team um i want to thank you all for the opportunity to um share with you um what special education looks like there's some amazing things that

084are happening and we also recognize mr piggy back to end the way that dr waters began we recognize that there's always more work to be um done and we're really committed to working as a team and with families and larger community just to make sure that each child gets what they need um and so i want to end with this final thought that inclusion is a belief system it's um it begins with the belief that every child has strengths to build upon interest to share and experiences to honor um so i want to thank you and for giving me this opportunity and if there are any comments or questions that you want to pass my way or to the team i will be very happy and i'll be very happy to entertain them um i

085would like to just add an action item um because i think that part of um what we've heard from the community um is similar in terms of the in terms of feedback regarding you know transparency i don't think the community has felt that this that special education has been discussed enough at the committee level at the work session level um and although this was a incredibly important topic to cover tonight you know we didn't we didn't touch the post 12 program you know we've heard feedback about what we can do about our sensory rooms things like that and while some of that might be pci topics some of it might be finance um and even this presentation in and of itself we have presentations from mr skaraki of finance that are very intentionally and explicitly

086meant to just to explain not just to the community but to those of us who aren't professionals in finance what act one is and you know what all these considerations that we have to learn about in order to make good decisions um in this capacity so the information provided in this presentation i think is very useful for the rest of the board as well and i think that you know the presentation would be um would be appreciated by the other members that had work session um at some time upcoming uh i don't think there's time for it on next week's uh workstation agenda but certainly sometime in the near future uh i think it's an action item on the part of the board itself to um more commonly put special education related concerns with the

087community and just informational items uh as part of this ongoing discussion so i just wanted to add that and i want to thank you all for this presentation um i do think it was um well done special education is confusing right and part of the reason it is so confusing is because it is individualized there's so much to consider in terms of placement you know who's providing the services where the service is being provided what are the needs what are the expenses what are the personnel needs what are the academic reporting needs what are the state requirements um so i think that you did a fantastic job of communicating this information on level for people who who don't know special education um as their profession um in a way that it was easily consumable so

088thank you very much for that and thank you for starting this conversation for the community tonight appreciate it thank you echo those same sentiments um this has been very helpful to me as a board member um having not been in that special education space i can imagine the people at home as well who are not uh dealing with special education they learned a lot tonight and i want to thank each one of you for your presentations as i sat back and listened and even heard of where we were up to where we are now and what we plan to do in the future i think we're on a good track to really make sure that all students are taught and educated and trained in our school district you know i was kind of wondering and

089i thought well maybe i shouldn't ask this but since i didn't know i figured i will ask um do we ever have any uh students with learning disabilities who transition out of special education uh do the the the facilitators like kate do they play a role in helping those students get to that point or do they just go through school all their lives be in a special education that's a very good question so um we are charged to provide a triennial evaluation every three years for students with disabilities um at that time we look at current present educational data and sometimes we have conversations around additional testing that may be needed um and at times there are times who ex there are students who exit special education because they have met their iep goals and

090they no longer have that discrepancy particularly for the learning disability that you've shared i absolutely think that every team member helps a child get there from the gym teacher to the general education teacher to the special education teacher and i'm sure the inclusion facilitators um but absolutely i feel like it is a team effort and um you know we all were collectively together to get the student including the parents to to that piece that they are no longer eligible as a student with a disability and meeting specially designed instruction dr campbell the the ultimate goal of special education is to get students out of it honestly it really is i mean that's such a north pen that is the goal of special education you provide the services that are needed and then you want the

091students to be able to be with those peers so when you have those times when you have um students have exited special education it's a celebration right it's it's usually something in the meetings i've been a part of you know where we took our hats to the to the child and or the young adult you know and and the family you know that that they've proven that the supports worked and that they are right there with their peers so that is always the goal especially as a general education teacher myself for a long time i can say there are things about my own students that i've that i've really needed the help of a special education teacher or an aide or an inclusion facilitator to help me understand because there's just so much for for

092any one person to understand about all kinds of different student needs it is absolutely essential and i'm just floored by the thorough nature by which everyone here in the whole team has has tackled this even against a very difficult time for any kind of education so uh thank you so much for your work and i'm really kind of uh boosted by what i've seen tonight so thank you so much so um thank you from the committee for your comments um i think i'd just like to highlight you know the voices that aren't in the room um we have a large special education population and a lot of teachers that are working every day in our classrooms who you know aren't on their phone on this call but they're really doing the work every single day

093and it's not lost on well it's definitely not lost on me because i'm a principal building so i get to work with those people and see um how the response um in you i think outlined that in your presentation is so individual and um often in the moment and definitely a team decision and team you know the teams working with the family and so all to all of those educators you know i think we just have to thank them especially at this time in the past three years their job has been extraordinary um to be able to provide faith um when we're virtual when we're hybrid when some kids are virtual when some are hybrid when some are in person um i mean it really is unbelievable what's been asked of asked of all teachers

094all educators um who are helping to support our students so i'm glad that we ended with talking about the importance of equity around special education and talking about the learning profiles and neurodiversity of all of our students special education and non-social education right and that sense of belonging and how important that is to have that so i appreciated that dr hart ended in that way i think that was a great way for us to and um thank you as a team for working together on this i'd like to see maybe this presentation i know it's posted in board docs but frankly i think it should be posted on like the front of our webpage like you know here if you missed it here's the special education um uh presentation because i think it is important

095um as uh mr costco said so with that um if there's i believe that's the end of that part of our um presentation and so the only other item on our agenda would be our student um representative update hello everyone so a lot there's been a lot of talk with the students about maybe a pod is there any possibility that there are we might go virtual especially since like southerton has and also like central bucks because it feels like a lot of in our classes that's like a pretty popular topic talking about like how we would adapt to gun virtual and also if we were to with things like winter ball jprom but those things have to get canceled thank you for the question enough is i think you said is there any chance i

096guess um you'd have to say there's always some chance but i think everyone needs to know that the overwhelming consensus of the educators the mental health specialists and the medical profession is to keep schools open and to have in-person instruction continue in a safe way so um you know i would say that there's always a chance but it's not in the plans we're working very hard to be able to keep schools open and that is the general consensus among all the individuals that we have constant conversations with all right thank you um i think that i'll just note that um i we certainly recognize how um important um some of those events and activities are and i believe that um you know you mentioned things at the high school the winter ball which i know

097was postponed um and i think and i'm sure that dr bauer can talk about it but i'm sure that we're just going to be making every effort we can um to make sure these things happen to the best of our ability um i've read in one of the emails which it struck me as odd that uh the seniors from this year that this would be they would be the only ones who had attended a dance which was strange to me like wait the sophomores and the juniors have never attended a dance um and so it just made me realize how important it is that we attempt to um to do everything we can within our health and safety guidelines and that's what we have to do we first have to make sure that everyone is

098safe and healthy um but i that was the second part of your question you know would everything kind of be cancelled so um dr bower could you speak to the second part of the question i know you might not be able to be specific and make promises but just generally how we'll be approaching um some of those student activities absolutely dr g and thank you good evening everyone and first before i speak to it uh thank you to everybody who presented tonight you were outstanding uh and a point of pride for us but i was really hoping this wouldn't come up because a month or two ago i i spoke to how excited we were to have winter ball and then this week um obviously it's no secret if you take a look at our

099dashboard or watch the news the challenges surrounding the pandemic of late but mr nicholson did reach out to dr dietrich and i monday morning and or actually this was tuesday after our first day back from the break and looking at our data and the concern and the staff numbers and kind of called us and said what do you think and we said and i'm proud to say we said why don't you talk to the kids um so mr nicholson called the class officers in and said look i'm concerned what do you guys think and they were apparently the kids response was yeah it's just not worth it right now we might not even sell enough tickets then we'll lose money this is supposed to be a fundraiser for our our senior and junior proms so

100why don't we postpone a couple weeks hopefully things will get closer to normal so they're pushing it from this upcoming martin luther king weekend it was supposed to be friday an early dismissal day um now they are pushing it tentatively to the thursday of president's weekend also an early dismissal day so it gives adequate time for people to go home maybe get their hair did get ready whatever they have to do take pictures so i'm excited that the kids were completely on board with finding a convenient time for everyone and trying to still hold the winter ball it's important to know that the winter ball is the only dance that we hold for all students we have the junior prom which of course is for juniors and the senior prom but the winter ball is

101the dance where the whole school can come together so we're hoping that we see some improvements so enough we i i said to you a few months ago i'm so excited that we're going to have a winter ball and i don't think i'm a liar we are it's just going to be a little bit later than we thought they will refer to it as like a valentine's ball as opposed to the winner ball so thank you dr dude okay um so for my back to my screen here um items that would need to move to action i don't believe there are and there's a lot of information and everything was informational and um any additional topics before we get to public comment okay all right so we will have public comment as i said at

102the beginning for up to 45 minutes um at after that time if there are additional people who wish to wish to comment or address the committee you can feel free to email us and we are certainly um you know happy to hear um from the community um we will not um be kind of taking questions and and going back and forth but we are happy of course to hear public comment um please remember as i stated in the beginning to state your name and municipality um as that is part of the pennsylvania sunshine law requirement so um mr gilmore do we have anyone that has their hand raised that would like to make a comment we do so if we're ready to begin here i'll just uh couple you've already done it so i appreciate

103it if you intend to make public comment tonight go ahead and raise your hand it'll put you in line i just hit that yellow hand at the right hand of your uh screen there so up first will be katie hirsch katie i have enabled your microphone so when you're ready to begin please state your name in township or borough and begin your comments please can you make some questions sorry i'm sorry miss hersh can you just make sure the timer's up so ms hirsch news you know she can piece herself and then yep very good thank you katie hirsch north wales i first want to thank the board for using this meeting to focus on special education and i also want to thank the presenters tonight especially dr waters and hart for your words on

104inclusion um i'm having some difficulty however in reconciling the talk of the commitment to inclusion tonight with what is actually happening in our schools for example there was a required in-service for paraprofessionals on june 14th which included an overview of autism spectrum disorder i encourage all of you to take a look at what that presentation included it describes autistic children as annoying tantruming unable to communicate and generally in a completely demeaning derogatory manner it's the exact opposite of neurodiversity affirming language and practices it focuses on compliance which is an outdated ableist practice stemming from the idea that disabled people need to be fixed and puts the onus on them to change the mindset of inclusion means that we as the adults find ways to adapt so that the students can access their education as they

105are this training is specifically designed to shape the way paraprofessionals understand and see autism and students instead of doing so in an affirming inclusive way the district chose the opposite additionally mrs mcgiheim has hosted two in-services this fall about implementing verbal behavior-based programming please note it appears that there were no other in-services with alternative programming options this isn't just a matter of a handful of parents taking issue with some of the words being used within the department we are highly educated trained professionals and in some cases adults with the very disabilities these methods are supposed to fix words matter so do actions these compliance-focused methods are harmful to students they cause trauma and put the community at a seven times higher risk of sexual assault than their peers i'll leave you with this from a

106recent article in psychology today titled are we giving autistic children ptsd from school many interventions treat behavior perceived from the outside without understanding the meaning or necessity for the child the behavior is the tip of an iceberg which goes down to sensory social emotional motoric and cognitive issues the child experiences a child who is acting out may be responding to internal frustration over stimulation anxiety or some other distress plans that often focus on eliminate eliminating the acting out behavior instead of recognizing the stress we need to support children not single-mindedly focus on correcting behavior accommodations and change are possible and aren't necessarily expensive what's necessary is open-mindedness and willingness to adopt systemic change i implore all of you to look at the professional development that actually deployed in schools look at what's actually being taught

107to our teachers and make sure that our inclusion philosophy that you all have reaffirmed a commitment to is what is actually being taught throughout our district as a parent i've heard multiple frustrations from other parents and as well as staff that this is not what has been deployed this school year thank you miss hersh okay up next is antoinette leedy antoinette i've enabled your microphone so you're ready to begin please state your name and your borrower township please hello my name is antoinette lady i am from lansdale so i want to thank everyone for this important first step in working to address our issues i believe this is critical but i do believe it is a first step with a lot of work ahead of us this is mcgee heim both you and dr g

108reaffirmed your commitment to north penn's vision for special education tonight yet the parents have made it very clear that we have serious concerns about that level of commitment tonight we'd like to specifically address your parental partnerships you referenced in your vision statement we are seeing the district failing to inform parents of missing therapies critical personnel shortages dissemination of the pros health program an exuberant amount of staffing transfers missing compensatory services blatant disregards for ieps and instructions from admin to limit paraprofessionals communication with parents therefore isolating members of the team further you mentioned multiple i'm sorry further you mentioned numerous times tonight your desire are required to follow idea however both o s e p and i d e a strongly advised against school attorneys attending iep meetings they have consistently warned that quote even if

109an attorney possessed knowledge or special expertise regarding the child an attorney's presence could have the potential for creating an adversarial environment that would not necessarily be in the best interest of that child therefore osep's long-standing position is that the attendance of an attorney for the iep meeting should be strongly discouraged end quote obviously we're concerned about the blatant disregard for that guidance from idea and the adversarial effects this is having on the iep team as a whole we hope that we can continue to have these meetings and that the administration is open to having further conversations with parents to figure out how we can mend these fences thank you okay thank you very much up next it will be uh nina bose nina i have enabled your microphones you're ready to begin you can state

110your name or borrow a township and i'm not sure if you're there i'm not hearing you if you want to unmute your mic you try it now i'm you all right okay i got it now okay um yes my name is nina vos um upper glenda township um i do want to thank everybody for having this meeting this was great um i do want to talk about um there was no mention of the post 12 program um in this in all of this um they are part of special ed i mean it's a big you know it's a big thing my son's in the post-12 program now and he's transitioning out but i didn't hear any mention of anything to do with post-12 so i know i spoke to um uh megan mcgee and anne-marie

111lucas you know about my concerns with the post 12 program but i didn't see it mentioned anywhere and that that's kind of because that's the concern for me because i think it's very important very very important because young adults are going to be transitioning out into the i guess you could say real world and i just don't know why um nothing was mentioned about them that's it and i have to say dr hart i love what you had to say thank you very much uh for that thank you hey thank you up next will be diana blystone diana i have enabled your microphone so you're ready to begin you can state your name and your borough or township please hey diana gleister in lansdowne um dr hart i want to thank you for your presentation

112for the first time i felt someone with someone's voice of how i've always wanted my son to be seen in this district so i thank you moving forward the staff storage shortage should never affect a student from being being being able to access general education classroom for a once a year activity like holiday party that my son didn't have access to this year i am sure along with many other parents chose north penn for their child to be safe while getting the best education alternative placement are high our placements are higher in this district than surrounding districts so when we compare our programs to others we need to take a deep look at why so many kids are pushed out of the district from either the school or the parents due to faith not being

113delivered behaviors are a form of communication and when we don't address them immediately and appropriately the escalate to a point where the child is no longer learning and eventually north penn is no longer an appropriate place for for a student and the student suffers i believe we need to add more bcbas and address these needs and train our staff accordingly these are our children and when we as parents are limited to 45 minutes i find that really disheartening we are advocating for our children so they get to have best outcome just like your children have in this district i appreciate this topic being given a priority right now and looking forward to getting north penn to where our children feel welcome here thank you hey thank you up next thank you we'll be margaret burke

114margaret i have enabled your microphones and you're ready to begin state your name and your borough township please hi good evening thank you for a wonderful presentation my name is margaret burke i'm from upper gwynedd um i am a parent of a special education student that is now in 11th grade so i have a perspective from the time when my child went to kindergarten in north penn and i i wanna i know some other parents have this perspective as well but i wanna add to the the um parents of the younger special education students there's a mindset change within the district that i can see from 2020 2010 until 2021 and if there's anything i which to this excellent presentation that i could suggest is to add the change that we've seen in the district

115and somehow capture the mindset which isn't captured with data at the time of my son's placement in kindergarten the data looked really great because they took every student special education student who could be included from all 13 elementary schools and sent them to one kindergarten um one elementary school and two kindergarten classes and had um aids teach them the teachers totally ignored them when i asked my son's kindergarten teacher how's he doing she said you would have to ask the aides this was at our meeting our teacher parent teacher meeting you would have to ask aid who wasn't there of course how your son is doing i don't interact with those children so i i don't see that mindset anymore there's been a change in personnel um we have a ways to go i see

116a change from this presentation to what it was um several years ago so if we could somehow capture improvement and the continuous improvement in part of it i love so um just one example of changing the mindset i see only have a minute is something like saying uh that we hope that special the kids the meet the goal of a special education student is to not need special education anymore an inclusive view is some students that would be great there's other students who have certain diagnoses physical or autism who it's almost ableist to think that we can work them out of being a special education student or that somehow they're failing if that's not an expectation for them um another example would be um well i have an example that if anybody wants to ask

117me about the lawyers where instead of reaching out to help a student they would reach out to an outside lawyer to make sure they couldn't be sued um from missing a party type of thing which somebody had uh mentioned whereas i was looking for help to make my student attend um and i later found out the school district just made sure that they couldn't be sued anyway thank you for your time excellent presentation thank you thank you um if anybody else has any comments now would be the time you would need to raise your hand okay we do have three here so next up is uh jason lanier jason i have enabled your microphones you're ready to begin state your name and borrow township please lanier lansdale borough um i wanted to talk a little

118bit more generally about the education and some of the things that uh pointed to the overall curriculum over the overall perceived success in some of the curriculum in the education and how well the school district is doing uh i think dr hart said something about continue the continuing the improvement and uh it was it was in in uh in in regards to the the ubl i believe it was uh i want to know what your measurement for success is meaning i mean i think my idea of success and the success of the boards uh the board states is different than what is actually looking to be success or what the actual goal is when when i you know you look at the school rankings north penn has continuously dropped in school rankings in the state

119in montgomery county the high school the same in in the in the in the overall teacher reviews of best places to teach teachers are moving out not not into the district and i wonder why why is that what is what is the actual goal and why is it that that that there's there is a continuously there there's a continuous drop why is it that the people want to to uh to why do teachers want to leave why why do they not feel comfortable why is it that students don't feel comfortable about being in school and i i don't know how to dovetail this with the special education i i i i don't have a student in special education but it sounds to me is there's a lot of frustration uh with the parents in in

120their their their treatment as uh there's a phrase used by by ms mcgee about being uh their due process that sounds horribly adversarial meaning meaning you you're arguing or fighting the cheating the parents is defendant of uh uh regarding their their kids better uh the betterment of their child i i really what is the stated goal what what do you what does the school district what does the board hope to accomplish by implementing all these changes which seem to be showing uh lower rankings not higher rankings you haven't there's these aren't improving the education it seems to be diminishing the education i'll leave it there thank you okay up next is stephanie harrison stephanie i've enabled your microphones and you're ready to begin please state your name and your borough township please hi my name

121is stephanie harrison i'm from hatfield township i have a special education kindergartner at oak park i want to say thank you to the board members who asked really thoughtful questions tonight and brought up community concerns i will say i am horribly disturbed by some of the information revealed from the parents regarding the training for the districts and i hope this can be remedied immediately it was interesting to hear about what special education looks like across the district and how the inclusion facilitators are utilized i urge the committee and the board to consider hiring additional special education teachers or inclusion facilitators in the building as i understand it oak park inclusion facilitator takes on all of the roles and responsibilities mentioned in the presentation but also takes on the role of case manager for several students

122across grade levels a student case manager can be a large time commitment depending on the needs of the special education student in some cases the inclusion facilitator in some schools is the case manager for all the special education students in multiple grade levels so this seems like a typical role that these staff play in addition to the large roles of the inclusion facilitator for the collaboration and staff assistance it might be interesting for the board to find out what the caseload of the inclusion facilitators are in each school in addition to their role responsibilities due to being exceptionally extended our inclusion facilitator has had to call me on her lunch and even on her way home from her personal cell phone to update me about situations that have happened during the day that meet that

123need immediate attention yes this makes her a wonderfully dedicated teacher but it also shows the amount of work that encompasses this position i know the board is concerned with teacher burnout and the mental health of teachers and it's clear these individuals need additional support in the building so they can be effective in their roles and help our special education students receive the services that they're promised in their iep and the quality services that they deserve thank you thank you up next will be robert quinn hall robert i've enabled your microphone so you're ready to begin you can state your name and state your uh township or borrow please i think you have two devices open there robert okay i think we handled that uh this is i don't know why i'm registered as robert quinn

124hall but this is betsy winterhall um of lansdale and uh first i'd like to thank everyone for um for these presentations uh it was helpful to hear um and i want to applaud in particular the uh what dr hart talked about um around the inclusion facilitator role and how we can better support inclusion in very specific ways and i'm hoping that the uh inclusion task force will follow the lead of the universal design for learning effort that dr lucas described and transcend special education to be a district-wide effort that encompasses you know special education certainly but all things um but i didn't prepare this but i wanted to speak uh both at the 30 000 foot level and at the very personal level about dr mr fusco's question about whether incoming kindergarten families push back

125on restrictive environments um so from the 30 000 foot view we heard two different types of of vision i think for the district today uh one was one of about inclusion and use the word inclusion and the other was very um parsing and nuancing special education law and what the district is sort of required to do as opposed to what our uh what we see as our charge um so from personal experience i can say that parents with students with special needs know the law they know it because they have to know it they know all of the acronyms eventually but they don't know it when they're coming in as kindergarten parents parents coming in with kindergartners look to the district to be the experts they look to the district to guide them to their

126child's least restrictive environment and to guide them in how that can look ideally among non-disabled peers in general education with curriculum core curriculum and access to that they don't know yet what they're hearing what to ask for what they get is a hard pitch for what the district thinks their child needs and often that's been set up before that child ever had an evaluation before that child was seen um the parents don't want due process and that feels like the only recourse i guess i i ask how can we better guide parents to children's least restrictive environment and how can we help them be successful in gen ed thank you okay up next is jesse bradica jesse i have enabled your microphone so when you're ready to begin state your name and your township for

127borrow please hi jessie bradica upper gwynedd i want to give a kudos to the board and to the presenters tonight for bringing special education to the forefront of the meeting and providing a great overview for the north penn community it was important especially after listening to all the concerns from the last board meeting um the action that you took tonight was a great step i think to healing the community um i do have a couple questions and i know i won't get answers tonight but hopefully somebody can answer me or the community in some future way one is what are the metrics that you are using to hold yourselves accountable for the successes and failures of both your special education and dei programs and um is there any place that we can look to find

128out the increasing or decreasing of expenditures of the due process that was mentioned tonight and being that you know you mentioned dei curriculum kind of you know for all students i'd like to know what this board and administration is doing to address the white privilege walks the or the privilege walks the white privilege assignments pronouns um being asked as part of attendance and the purchasing of sexually explicit library books thank you very much okay thank you up next is jamie younger jamie i haven't enabled your microphones you're ready to begin state your name and your township or borrow please hi this is james there you go hi this is jamie a younger um landfill to also say thank you for holding this needing to bring [Music] this juice to light after repairing perspective jamie your

129mic's breaking up uh it actually sounds like the bandwidth is a little bit low so you're coming in really slow and broken up it's difficult to hear i'll leave your hand up there i'm not sure if you can get closer to your hot spot or your access point and we can come back to you i just want to make sure we just really can't hear you there so i'm just going to move along and keep you up there jamie and we'll try you here at the end up next is john siegler john i have enabled your microphone so you're ready to begin please state your name and your borough township please yes good evening um john siegler lansdale pa i just wanted to comment on the challenges of inclusion for students entering kindergarten i wanted

130to comment it on this from my perspective as a psychologist who's done some work with students entering kindergarten as well as working in programs with preschool children aged children um it's it's really hard to uh emphasize enough the importance of the quality of the services that uh children that are uh living with neurodiversity the quality of the services they received prior to entering kindergarten and the importance of early kindergarten registration and quality meetings you know in the spring prior to entering kindergarten to give the district the best opportunity to understand what works for the child and to prepare to provide them with a meaningful inclusion experience um that's really all i wanted to share thank you very much for your time thank you john all right i'm gonna head to kristen feltus next and then

131after kristen i'll go to back to jamie here we'll see if you're uh we can hear you a little bit better right up next is kristen kristen i've enabled your microphone so if you want to state your name and your country bro you can begin hi my name is kristen feltes and i'm in town winston township um i did not prepare to speak tonight so i'm going off the cuff here but i just wanted to thank the board and thank the speakers for presenting on special ed tonight it's a very important topic that often gets over missed overlooked however the presentation tonight was a lot of definitions and a lot of statistics and that's excellent if you have limited special ed knowledge so i understand the board's comment and hearing this presentation it did not

132address the multiple concerns that the parents of this district are facing since the new director of special ed was hired a year ago there has been a complete shift in mentality from the district at the guidance of the director down to the families we are feeling this and we are elevating our concerns the iep team process is not being allowed to happen as it should um to quote miss mcgee-heim it is when she defined idea is implement and design student services that is correct however north penn is issuing pre-determination as a blanket north penn is not going to do that type of statement in iep meetings that is not the definition of idea and it is not an individual that's a part of the iep an individual education plan um it is not being driven

133by another quote from miss nikki heim um uh this is a quote from dr mckenna that we are required now listen we were required to respond to the data and meaning changing locations to learn or curriculums our iep meetings are not being driven by the data it is being um predetermined from the district of we will not do this and we will just deny until the parent is forced to go to due process which she said is all right however many parents cannot afford an attorney to do so and now if a parent has had to i've been a special ed parent for 10 years i have a children on the get on the gifted spectrum and i have children in the autism spectrum i represent parents of children with extreme disabilities my children are

134the ones with the extreme disabilities um we are now seeing if you have hired an advocate to come to your iep meeting because um these new guidances that are being pushed down from the director you're now going to have an attorney at your meeting you're not bringing an attorney the district is going to bring into an attorney if you bring an advocate now miss mcgee heim will try to say well many advocates come from a law firm or they come from they have knowledge that is simply not true it is a bully attempt it is an attempt to limit parents and what they can do and just to deny until we have to go to due process which many people will just roll over because they cannot afford to do so this is not what

135is in the best interest of the special ed families and i ask that you seek our input and that you would like to hear from us instead of just a presentation about statistics and definitions thank you thank you kristin all right up next i'm going to go to jamie younger again jamie uh we're gonna try you again and see if we can hear you a little better this time so i've enabled your mic so when you're ready to begin please state your name and borrow township hi jamie younger lansdale can you hear me better no much better much better okay sorry i was in the car um so um a little bit late to the meeting i was just saying thank you obviously for um taking the time to um address the concerns that many

136parents have been expressing over many many months um i just sort of wanted to echo some of the concerns regarding professional development and continuing education for um special ed and um just even the staff that is geared to um you know special education teachers paraprofessionals all very important for them to be educated but also making sure that the general education teachers are also benefiting from professional development around special education i had questioned dr dietrich over the summer during one of his community conversations regarding um you know how much of this the general education teachers are also participating in because for inclusion to work everybody has to be on board it's not fair to have these kids um with needs sort of thrown in their classrooms and the power professional is sort of left to navigate

137that on their own and and the general ed teacher just sort of being the bystander or and or them themselves not feeling like they have the resources and the education to support these um these kids in their classrooms i can see how that would be frustrating um just also wanted to get expressed concern regarding the content of um the professional development um as katie hirsch had said you know there was a presentation that was presented to the paraprofessionals that it you know that basically autistic kids which that's what my child is um need to be fixed and you know all these sort of derogatory descriptions of them and um we as the adults actually if you know neurodiversity affirming um strategies we need a mind shift to make sure that we are not trying to

138fix these kids and it concerns me that you know one of the goals that was expressed and maybe for some but not for everybody to transition out of special ed again that sort of you know brings this idea that there's something wrong with these children and they need to be fixed so i just want to make sure that we are being conscientious about exactly what the um continuing ed is looking like for these teachers and who is involved and making sure that is everybody on the team and making sure that it's current and not antiquated thinking thank you okay thank you up next is justine mcandrew justine i have enabled your microphone so you're ready to begin please state your name in your borrower township hi my name is justine mcandrew from upper gwened um

139i would like to thank everybody for this presentation i did find it uh very useful and helpful um however i do want to express a few concerns that i have one concern is in just hearing the board directors questions and comments um in regards to the presentation i believe each of them stated that they don't really have any background or understanding of special ed and so that was kind of a red flag to me and if that is the case then i do implore you as a board to encourage board members that do have more experience with special ed to join these meetings especially since this is the topic um and in regards to uh legal counsel north penn school district legal counsel now attending iep meetings for children i have expressed questions and concerns

140and requests as to policy or some type of written document specifically to the north penn supervisors and to mrs mcgee herself um in regards to you know where is the documentation that states that legal counsel is now going to be attending iep meetings and i have not received any of that response i haven't received any follow-up or response from north penn regarding written documentation as to why this is now happening my concern is especially mr fusco if i'm sure you will appreciate this especially asking about new kindergartners and and pushback if um parents who have children who have ieps go into this process and it's learning they're learning the whole system um as they're entering the district and so when north penn school district has legal counsel there it it does shift the uh tone

141of the iep meeting um in a more adversarial way and i feel that um open transparency sometimes is also a concern with legal counsel there and so it's definitely um not really the best way forward one of my other concerns as far as legality goes is with esy there are children who have ada accommodations and esy is not being automatically considered in their ieps they're supposed to be uh reevaluated by the end of february but yeah okay thank you i'm sorry thank you if you want to finish we try to let you finish yourself but you can certainly feel free to email us if you have a concern regarding okay yes why thank you was that our last public comment now we have uh one more is here uh up next is um trying to

142get my hands to move there i apologize uh joanne or pezza if i pronounce that properly joanne i've enabled your microphones if you're ready to begin you can state your name and your borrow attachment begin your comments please hi joanna arpisa hatfield township um i have never in the 11 years i've been in north bend special education program known of so many families who have needed to hire legal help or are headed in that direction to acquire the services their children need seems the school board chose to hire someone whose main mission seems to be cutting the budget for special needs students in fact that was celebrated at a board meeting last march excuse me what that equals is cutting services to special education students this on top of the fact that it was happening

143during a pandemic where many were denied their education for months for our family the new special ed director who was only here a few short months decided to uproot a group of special needs students from the teacher and aid that had supported them for 10 years they knew these children inside and out they knew how to predict and prevent before issues even occurred because they had put the work in and made it so their time in school was more successful they were willing and able to make to move the move to the high school with these students after being with most of them since kindergarten we begged the special ed director dietrich bower and this school board to help make these students transition to high school easier on them and more successful no one cared

144what was best for this group of special seven special needs students was not taken into account instead the only reason we were given as to why they would now lose the support so crucial to them was because there were already staff at the high school north penn put this program into place for 10 years and then ripped it away at the worst time for these kids we were asking for this staff to at least be added i'm sorry again for a year to make this transition significantly easier and more successful for the students and the existing staff let me be clear the new teachers and aides the ones working with my son are working so hard and trying their best however naturally there are still lots of issues happening that could have been prevented if

145the correct sports were put in place to begin with my son is really struggling on top of all all of his other struggles all because administration either believed they knew better than the parents or just simply didn't care a change is needed it's time to give these special education students the respect and supports needed instead of finding ways to cut their services thank you okay that are all the comments of everybody that has spoke once through here uh and i believe that will conclude public comments for tonight okay um i believe there is no further business at this time i will make one note um you know we do try to correct kind of things that are like misinformation um and uh there was a comment or question regarding um the lack of kind of

146understanding or experience among the committee in terms of special education and um among our committee we're fortunate enough to have four educators that are on this committee um and so actually a high school teacher a special education as someone who actually is a special education provider and um myself as an administrator all of us having you know let's say an understanding no one's perfect but certainly an understanding of special education so um just to kind of clarify that for the um the person who commented had a question as to whether we had an understanding often times we'll ask questions that we may know the answer to because we want the public to know the answers to those questions and so you'll often hear us um do that at the committee level and at the at

147the board level um so i'll just make that one clarification can i make one oh go ahead absolutely mr fusco um i want to apologize um to the folks who suggested that my comments were ableist um i actually agree sometimes speaking extemporaneously you say something and then you kind of think in these meeting formats maybe that wasn't exactly what i meant to clarify and it's obviously the case that not every student is going to exit from special education i think um my lens most of mine eventually do because of my tinder and hearing support um but uh i think what i more meant to say was the goal is for those supplementary aids and supports for those things to lessen over time so that you can get to the level of independence that that every

148child that every student is is capable of right is really the more is really a better way to define what i meant to say about the goal of special education not to exit everybody i do apologize for those insensitive comments it's not what i truly believe or meant to say thank you um mr fusco and again i would just thank the committee and the people who called in and listened this evening and um you know made public comment um i think as dr waters um kind of said at the beginning as we this is a journey and we continue to listen and hear and try to um take it in and determine kind of what our next steps um should be so um we appreciate those people who cared enough to um listen in and

149to give comment um and of course the people who presented the scene so with that um i believe there is nothing else on the agenda and our next eci meeting will be on tuesday february 1st at 6 pm in a virtual format can i have a motion to addre so moved second [Music] all in favor thank you everyone thank you good night everybody everyone thank you bye thank you yeah just waiting for everybody to exit out of the meeting have a great night