About the author: Carl Skordahl is director of special education for Osseo Area Schools, Minnesota This article originally appeared in the January 1997 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
Minnesota school districts, like many districts in other states, are facing serious fiscal limitations. The district I represent not only faces reduced state-level support but also is located in an area that does not have a strong tax base for generating local funds. This fiscal dilemma is occurring in the face of inflation and increased learner needs for those with and without disabilities. Consequently, staff and leadership must address this problem and take steps for its resolution.
This article is an attempt to share with you one possible solution for meeting the needs of students and staff despite fiscal limitations. The solution will be presented in the context of the district I represent.
The Osseo Area School District is located in a west suburban area of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Osseo Area Schools serve 21,000 students in 20 elementary schools (grades K-6), four junior high schools (grades 7-9), and three senior high schools (grades 10-12). About 11% of the population receives special education services, and 85% to 90% of those students are labeled mildly disabled.
I have been with this district for 32 years and have watched it grow from five elementary schools, one junior high, and one senior high to its current size of fifth largest in Minnesota. It has experienced many of the typical growing pains of rapidly expanding districts.
In the district's years of expansion, special education has expanded right along with it. I want to focus on the special education area, as embedded in its plan for addressing expansion issues is a possible solution for all learners.
As the Director of Special Education, I believe that meeting the needs of students with mild disabilities must be accomplished in a partnership with general education. Another way to express my personal belief or bias in addressing the needs of students with mild disabilities (about 2,000 in my district) is as follows: "Keep high incidence service plans as close to general education as is appropriate!"
This needs to be emphasized over and over to educators. Special education and general education need to pool their efforts and resources in meeting the needs of students with mild disabilities and without disabilities. My goal as the Special Education Director for Osseo Area Schools is to do just that!
Specifically, the goal is to create partnerships in staff development projects for special and general education staff to plan, implement, and evaluate each project. The staff also share resources that provide the training. We are using Federal B Flow-Through funds from special education, and general education uses a portion of its staff development funds in the form of substitute days.
Staff development partnerships are expensive, but the payoffs are huge for all learners. In addition, mainstreaming and inclusion almost become nonissues! I believe the most significant contributing factor here is giving staff--general and special--the skills and strategies they need to address all learners.
Making this goal become a reality requires a willingness on the part of leadership to let individual school sites do their own planning with the assurances that when they are ready to move forward, the resources are there for them to access. You are probably wondering, "Do they have a blank check?" Absolutely not! However, you give them the parameters of the resources and let them design their inservice budgets. This means administrators must be transparent about the resources and stay out of the way. The practitioners know what they want and they don't want several committees to make it happen!
This reminds me of an inservice presenter we had some time back who advised "Don't shoot skinny rabbits!" I believe we spend too much time in committees trying to "pinpoint" everything we are going to do and its outcome. The practitioner doesn't have time for this. Sometimes, we need to let motivated staff go after something that appears useful to them as an effective educational practice and discuss outcomes afterwards. It gets the educator "unstuck" or "out of a rut," if nothing else. This "ready, fire, and aim" planning is fun, exciting, and empowering for the practitioner.
You're probably thinking this is cavalier or frivolous. Let me tell you how you can control this type of planning.
As a leadership person who is responsible for creating systemic change to meet the constantly changing needs of the learner, whether the learner has disabilities or not, you better
Consequently, when a teacher wants to try new approaches, you have proven approaches to offer. Then, you need not be so worried about extensive planning time. Proven practices have already been field-tested and researched, proving their effectiveness up front!
I realized the value and benefits of this scenario some time ago as an educator in a leadership position. In 1984, I decided to become more focused on instructional delivery, strategies for learning, and effective planning practices in designing curricula for lesson delivery. Whatever I was willing to support and offer as a new and innovative educational practice had to meet three criteria:
It should be no surprise that the work of the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning meets the above three criteria in its Strategic Instruction Model (SIM). Osseo Area Schools hold this model as a main area of focus for staff development. Another area is the Learning Styles training provided by Winnelle Carpenter, a consultant and trainer of several learning styles approaches.
Six salient points need to be reemphasized:
Both of these projects meet my belief of educating students with mild disabilities and students without disabilities in an inclusive setting where effective mainstreaming will occur if staff development opportunities are made available with adequate resources.
Osseo Area Schools now face a budget adjustment process in which major expenditure areas will be reduced. Most of this adjustment will occur by reducing staff. This, as mentioned earlier, in the face of increased learner needs! For the teacher, whether general or special education, students with more complex needs, whether they have disabilities or not, are on the increase. We need to take the next step of responding to this reality by providing staff with more effective educational practices through staff development. This means leadership must realign resources to continue to directly support staff in accessing new and proven practices.
On the surface, these budget reductions coupled with increasing needs may appear to be a dilemma. However, getting past the problem to solutions is a fun and exciting experience. Leaders must model a tenacious and aggressive posture of overcoming the problem. Avoid committees that spend too much time on recapping the problems and get to the solutions. The solutions you attempt may give you a feeling of risk-taking because there is less time for staff to plan them. But, if leaders provide proven options, schools have little to lose. If we culture staff development around practices that meet the three criteria mentioned earlier, risks of failure are drastically reduced.
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