Student Services Spotlight
Video Recording: Northampton Open Media – 10/10/24 School Committee
Video Time Stamp: 48:37
Matt Holloway: I’m the director of student services, and I’m going to provide a brief Spotlight update on the state of student services so far, as of October 10th. So, we’re going to start with the student numbers. I’m kind of following past practice here. I would welcome input in terms of what numbers are valuable and useful here. Before I put the slide up, I just want to contextualize this a little bit. I really think it’s important to have consistent numbers across the district, so when I pull data for student numbers, I go through the Registrar’s office. She is on a cycle with the Department of Ed.
The Department of Ed has two major data reporting windows: one in March and one in October. Our October window is currently open, so the student data I’m going to show you is the official data. It’s not fully certified; the June set is still not fully certified by the Department of Ed, so I just want to give you that context that these numbers are end-of-the-year numbers.
For this first slide. I’ll be happy to come back later in the year when we have October numbers certified, and we can have that conversation then.
So this is where I’ll kind of talk through the columns first. The first column is the school, and you can’t see it – that last cell says ‘Services only’ students. Those are students who are either homeschooled and coming in for services, in a private school and getting services, or preschool but not coming to preschool.
The first column is school, the second column is the count of IEPs in October of last school year, the third column is the count of IEPs in June of this past school year, and then the fourth column is what percent of students per school was on an IEP at the end of the school year. The next column is full-time equivalent special education teachers per school, and the final column is the budgeted staff-to-student ratio per school.
Now, a question came up. So obviously, these were the student numbers that the previous director and the district were working with last year when they made staffing allocations and other kinds of decisions around students. When we do staffing, particularly with paraeducator staffing at the beginning over the summer and until the beginning of the school year, we’re looking at where students actually are. We’re not making paraprofessional assignments based on the previous year’s assignments; we’re basing it on the current reality. That’s something that’s true through the summer as IEPs get signed, get changed, students move in, students move out. It’s a dynamic process for paraprofessional staffing. What you’re looking at here is teacher staffing only.
Emily Serafy-Cox: I’m wondering if this presentation . . . the last time I checked the agenda, the presentation wasn’t on there. Is it on there now?”
Superintendent Portia Bonner: No, it’s not loaded.
Emily Serafy-Cox: Okay, is it possible to get it emailed to us?
Matt Holloway: Yes.
Superintendent Portia Bonner: I don’t have possession of it, so Matt will send it to you.
Emily Serafy-Cox: Yeah, I mean, this is not directed at you, Director Holloway, at all, just generally that I find it difficult to follow along with a presentation . . . of just watching it on the screen. But if I can follow along and then go back to something I was confused about, and that sort of thing, you know, if I have it on my own device to be able to do that, I can just understand it a lot better and ask fewer questions.
Matt Holloway: No, I appreciate that, and I will certainly endeavor to do that. I was also asked to just sort of give a snapshot, I think, for folks to have a feeling for the 504 enrollment across the district.
A 504 plan is issued for students who have disabilities but who do not require specially designed instruction and related services. So, it’s a protection and an accommodation plan for kids with disabilities. You see those numbers go up pretty significantly at the middle and high school level. That’s pretty common. What you see is, as testing and academic expectations begin to rise, we find that it’s more important to document disabilities and the accommodations that support them. So, that’s why those numbers kind of go up over the course of the students’ careers in K-12.
This slide I want to take a moment with, and this was something that I just want to give some context around, particularly because I know that we have some folks here from Bridge Street and others who are going to want to speak about this issue.
What you see there on the left is a special populations box that comes directly off the Department of Ed website from last school year. Again, you see the names of the schools on the left. The middle column is the high needs population. You see the definition of high needs in the bottom right: students who are either economically disadvantaged, English learners or former English learners, or students with disabilities.
I wanted to really call attention to that last column, economically disadvantaged. You see that that number kind of stands out pretty starkly. I think another important thing for folks to realize, and for me to realize obviously as I started in August, is that Bridge Street School has also absorbed a substantial number of new students who are economically disadvantaged, disproportionately so. One thing that’s really important for folks to know is that we are supporting a group of students who are – I’m sorry, that column to the right – let me talk about that for a second, and then I’ll come back to Bridge.
On the right there, you see McKinney-Vento means students who are experiencing homelessness. I didn’t want to break those out by school because the numbers get kind of small, and we don’t want to risk potentially identifying students. But you can see our elementary, we have 30 — sorry – that should be secondary, and it says NHS. That meant to be secondary; that’s a typo. So we have 30 at the elementary level, 25 at the secondary level, and then students in foster care we have 18 at elementary, 15 at the secondary level. I’ll fix that typo before I send this out for the agenda.
I wanted to call attention to that – and coming back to Bridge for a moment – you know, Bridge did absorb a disproportionately high number of students who are economically disadvantaged, as well as supporting a group of students who are in a serious state of refugee crisis coming out of the Quality Inn. That’s been sort of, you know, a major area of support for us in the district. We’ve provided a lot of — I mean, we’ve endeavored to provide – as much support as we can to Bridge in particular around that, and that includes, you know, as you all know, we transitioned in a third English Learner teacher into Bridge Street. The English Learning department has provided additional translation assistance. Some of these students are what’s called—are designated by the term SLIFE. If folks aren’t familiar with SLIFE, that’s students who have had substantial limitations in their formal education.
What that means is that, you know, not only are these students newcomers to the country potentially, but they’ve had significant gaps in their schooling, in their country of origin. A lot of resources have gone around supporting those families both in school and out of school. Our district-wide social workers and our school social workers have been working very, very hard to support those families.
As folks know, our English Learning department has been working hard. I actually had a wonderful hour and a half meeting this afternoon with members of the special education team about supporting students, some of whom were in that cohort. So I just wanted it to be known to the committee that, you know, Bridge Street in particular is under a lot of really acute stress right now. Not only due to student numbers—the student numbers are high for Bridge Street in general—but, you know, the acuity of need at the Bridge Street School is substantial. I think we all just need to bear that in mind as we work with each other, work with the staff, and try to support the team.
Gwen Agna: So do you want me to call on people?
Matt Holloway: Yes.
Michael Stein: I just had a question about the economically disadvantaged category: so is that giving us—is it the poverty line? Is it a percentage above? Like, what’s that catch-all for that?
Matt Holloway: The formula changed about eight years ago, ten years ago. It used to be everybody who used free lunch or reduced lunch was in that category; that’s no longer the case. So now it’s not actually the poverty line; it’s a formula based on the poverty line. I don’t have it off the top of my head. The DESE site has an ‘About the Data’ tab that gives you kind of good details on it.
Michael Stein: Okay, so I can find it on DESE?
Matt Holloway: Yeah.
Michael Stein: And it would be that same—it’s named the same?
Matt Holloway: Yes.
Michael Stein: And just the other question I had was, you mentioned a lot of students coming in, particularly to Bridge Street. Did – you know we have a fancy savings account – we love savings accounts here – did anyone come to the district unplanned, with special education needs, to Bridge Street School?
Matt Holloway: Well, I would say yes, but I would also say that students come into all our schools unplanned. I mean, when a student moves into the town, is that what you mean?
Michael Stein: Yeah, so we have a pot of resources for this case, so if we could find out the number of students who were unplanned and unbudgeted because they just arrived in town who have service needs, That would be awesome.
Matt Holloway: Okay, that’s a little bit difficult.
Superintendent Portia Bonner: Just a second. So I want to address the economically disadvantaged. Okay, thank you. All right, so economically disadvantaged is a student who participated in one of the following state-administered programs, such as SNAP, food stamps, TAFDC, which is welfare, foster care, MassHealth, Medicaid. There are targeted months in which they look at in order to classify those students who are considered to be economically disadvantaged.
And then your question about the fluidity in terms of when students arrive: students are coming in and out of the district all the time. That’s in every school system. So there were approximately—about, depends on which school you’re speaking to—there were approximately 30 or so new students that arrived, let’s say for instance Bridge Street, also with some transits of some moving out of that district. That mix are a mix of students that are coming from different areas and not necessarily considered to be newcomers.
I just wanted to clarify that. We have people moving in from Holyoke and so on, and those who come into our district, we always make sure that we’re meeting their needs. So there are some that may have had IEPs that we have to follow that may need some resources. I know that our Director has been addressing those needs, working with principals in terms of addressing those needs, but they were unaccounted for. And we do know that anytime that we are planning in any case, we have to know that there will be some changes during the course of the summer. So I could turn it back over to . . .
Michael Stein: Just to follow up on that. I understand all that. Specifically, though, there is resources set aside to address some of these needs, so if they’re needed, we need to know, and we need, as a body, to pass something and get our councilors to also pass something to access some of that money. So if they’re requiring one-to-ones, they’re requiring compensatory services, they’re requiring other things, we’ve got 600,000 sitting around that we can access for those things, and we need to be asking for it.
So again, I just say I’d like to get those numbers—how many students on IEPs or who became on IEPs when they came to the district. I don’t need to know anything about them, their individual identification, nothing. Just what are we talking about for unbudgeted needs? What does it look like? Because that puts stress on our known needs, right? So we need to access the money that was put away in order to help remediate that. Thank you.
Gwen Agna: Member Serafy-Cox are you still with your hand up for another question?
Emily Serafy-Cox: No, I think it just never came down.
Gwen Agna: Okay, great. Thank you.
Matt Holloway: Okay, so then I’m going to move on to a staffing update specific to vacancies.
So I’ve shared this with different groups, and then the final column there was asked of me recently. So we had three—the first three rows there—so budgeted positions: Teacher of the Deaf, Intensive Needs Teacher, and SLPA, which is a Speech Pathology Assistant. Those were all vacancies that occurred mostly late summer. I believe the SLPA was early in the summer, but positions that we started the school year vacant for—they were all budgeted.
I was asked to kind of lay out what did we do, what are we doing about it, what’s the fiscal impact. So if you— we’ll start just go by row by row by row there. The Teacher of the Deaf is a districtwide position. We’re supporting it with a 0.2 retiree and 0.6 contractor, and the posting is still active. I’ll be totally honest with you, I joined the district in August. I got that notice sometime late July, early August, and I thought, well, you know, this is Northampton; I’m not going to worry. I mean, we’re going to post for it; we’re going to go through a process, but I’m not going to worry.
It’s been a bit of a surprise that we have not had a great candidate pool for Teacher of the Deaf, with, you know, Clarke School recently made some major changes. So that has been a surprise to me. We’ve worked the networks—I mean, I think that’s how you find folks in this form: you talk to other people who are in the world. We’ve worked the networks, and we haven’t been able to make a hire for it. But so you see we’re actually covering the services quite well; we didn’t have any missed services with the Teacher of the Deaf And the fiscal impact—this is not the decision-making point because we’re budgeted at a 1.0 for the position, but the fiscal impact is actually that we’re saving $162 a day for its worth.
And you had asked, Member Stein, you had asked me to kind of break down the fiscal impact of these things, and it’s important to think about it from a daily perspective. Staffing is a highly fluid thing, especially in my line of work, unfortunately – fluid is a nice word to put it—it is a little stressful. But that’s a really daily impact.
The Intensive Needs Teacher at Ryan Road is an interesting situation. We were able to supplement it with existing staff with stipends, which has been an amazing benefit to us. There’s a relatively low caseload of students for that intensive needs teacher, and because of the model of that program – it’s not a program – you know, I think at one point it was a program – the model of support for those students with more intensive needs has been to essentially have intensive case management, intensive services, intensive liasoning with families and internal and external teams.
So we’ve been very lucky. Two of our veteran inclusion teachers have agreed to do this work on stipends, and it’s been really quite effective. In fact, the families have been generally very happy with the liaison aspect of the work. So I’ve been very grateful for that, and it’s actually been a great way for me to get to know members of our team on a closer level by working with, you know, kind of complex circumstances like this.
The fiscal impact on that, you know, again, is actually net positive. You know, just with the stipends, there is a hiring process underway, and actually I believe that the principal announced a new hire yesterday, so that’ll be ending this week or next week.
The SLPA, believe it or not, is the thing that is most expensive for us, and that’s because we did not have a good candidate pool early in the school year. I’ve learned with staffing, especially for positions like paraeducators and SLPAs, that there’s a cycle on things. So trying to hire folks in the last two weeks of the summer and the first two weeks of school—forget it. You know, it’s a really, really tough time to make good hires. But I do find that once you get a month or two into the school year, once you get closer to the winter break, you know, there are—it’s kind of peaks and valleys and ebbs and flows with that.
And so Jackson Street has made a hire. I believe they have a tentative agreement. I’m not sure what the start date is, but they have made a hire. So the SLPA at Jackson Street will be filled. Obviously, we’ve gone, you know, a month and a half—almost two months—with some significant service interruptions. So the contractor will be continuing to stay on for a little while to help make up the missed services that happened at the beginning of the school year. And then we’ll be using them in another capacity for a little bit longer, but we won’t keep that contract all year. So those are the three sort of defined lapse service situations in terms of vacancies.
Then I want to talk about paraeducators because I think, obviously, you know—and I say this many times—for me, paraeducators are the glue not only of the special education system but literally of the educational system that we have in public education. And so there’s a lot of, you know, it’s tough because these folks do not have high salaries. They don’t have—it’s not a cut-and-dry set of credentials that you look for in a paraeducator. And it really is a matter of finding great people who care about kids, who work well in teams, who have a great set of skills, and then working with them, supporting them, cultivating them—really building that sort of esprit de corps, that professional pride of that position.
So I bring all that up because, you know, the folks who are in this room are well aware that without enough paras and without the right paras in the right places, our schools just don’t function. And so that is always a challenging task: to maintain this workforce of incredibly talented folks who are paid a very, very low salary, as we all know, and who don’t have clear credentials. In other words, you know, we might get 25 applicants for a slot, but to actually figure out which one of those folks is going to be a great fit is a time-intensive process.
So I listed JFK specifically next to paraeducators—that maybe that’s the most acute situation we had. Everybody knows that JFK has had a significant leadership transition at the very end of the summer, with an accompanying scheduling change at the very end of the summer. Several professional-level, certified positions that were urgent hires, and so we started this school year down seven or eight budgeted paraeducator slots at JFK—just vacancies. And you know, that’s the other thing about this position: these folks move. There’s always a little bit of attrition in the paraeducator ranks, and I don’t care how healthy things are, that just happens.
The leadership transition—we are working to fill the second vice principal slot, and that has slowed down the hiring process. I am happy to say that tonight I did confirm that the middle school has hired all of their budgeted para slots, and they will be fully staffed up in paraeducators in the next two to three weeks, depending on start dates, which I don’t have precisely. So that’s a big deal. Sorry, that’s a big deal for me, you know, clearly. It is those inclusion paras—it’s the inclusion paras, it’s the small group paras in general. We scramble and move people around to fill our one-to-one slots when those are vacant. But you know, it’s those inclusion paras, it’s those inclusion minutes that are really hard to maintain; you know, that full roster.
We’ve had one or two other vacancies around the district. In answer to your earlier question, Member Stein, you know, a student moves in and needs a one-to-one para—we’re not—we’re going to make that hire; we’re going to post for that, we’re going to pursue that, we’re going to find funds within the budget. That’s our job, you know. So we certainly absolutely meet those needs when they come into the district, but there are – I think the circumstance that I want to just take a quick minute and I think folks here can speak to this, you know, very strongly I know our building principals can – if we staff – if Celeste and I, and and the business office, and the building principals spend hour upon, I mean dozens of hours, going through service grids, IEPs, looking at active IEPs, looking at proposed IEPs – it’s very tough to quantify that stuff. And then, you know, making the case for the paras that we need in the buildings. And I think there’s just a reality, which is that, you know, if I sit with my service delivery grids and my staff roster and I say, ‘Okay, I know where every single person is every single minute of the day,’ somebody might say, ‘Well, that’s really good budgeting, really good staffing.’ But the reality in public education is that – people leave; people leave mid-year, and then that creates a ripple effect with hiring.
People get sick. People do get sick. That’s part of what being an employee is—you take sick days. A building principal on a Monday or a Friday is scrambling to make sure they’ve got their staff covered, and that’s just the reality. Everybody gets sick. There are lunch breaks; we have mandatory lunch breaks for our paraeducators that need to be covered as well. I was talking to some of the folks at Bridge this afternoon about that situation where we have a paraeducator on a lunch break, and sometimes the special education teacher needs to step in.
That brings me to one more point, which is that there are times when our most intensive needs students, if their paraeducator is out sick or if there’s a vacancy, our building administrators are asking—sometimes it is the special education teacher who gets asked to help support those students. Hopefully, not all day. I really counsel principals away from doing that at all, but there are times when the number of people who have the skills to work with high-needs students is just… its tough. So that does happen, and that has been an issue as well.
Working with those circumstances, I think one of the major things . . . that my entry process concerns is figuring out a sustainable staffing model for paraeducators in the district, so that every new kid who moves in or every new IEP that gets changed doesn’t suddenly send us all scrambling to make a hire or to shuffle things around. That’s tough when you have four small elementary schools feeding into one large middle school; there’s less efficiency around that work. Just because, you know, we might only have two classes at a given grade level at a given elementary school. So it’s tough to find those sort of – redundancies is the wrong word – but it’s tough to find those positions that you can justify on a budget, but then are able to fill in when somebody is sick or somebody’s taking a break.
Michael Stein: Yeah, I know. Thank you. I just want to acknowledge I appreciate you pulling this all together and even exchanging emails with me before this or some questions. I appreciate it and just recognize that you find yourself early on in a very difficult situation, so thank you. I understand it.
Just a few comments and then a question. You know, when we cut 20 teachers, we don’t have a lot of room to just find money for a one-to-one that’s needed. We do it, but there’s then some other need that’s not being met. This came home to me when we were doing the budget last year with Josh. With areas of concern, essentially the way he mapped it was, if everything goes well, we don’t lose any staff, and everyone shows up, technically we could meet these numbers if we change these three things, right? That’s just not a responsible way to run special education as a district, and it’s not responsible for us to put the special education department in that budgetary situation.
I mean, we can’t even answer doors at schools, so how are we going to cover when there’s a one-to-one out for a high-need student? These are real problems every day that impact everything, and we have to staff as if people are going to get sick because they get sick. We’re going to have to staff, and that people quit because people quit, and it’s irresponsible not to.
But my question really is, and you mentioned this with the SLP and the contractor, and they’re staying on to make up service grids. When services are not delivered because of these issues, how are parents notified, or are they notified? And then, you know, if our parents notified that their one-to-one is actually also covering lunch, or their one-to-one is actually doing this because so-and-so is out, or their one-to-one was out and their student can’t tell them the one-to-one was out because they may have some serious issues—like how’s the communication? How are people being notified? How are we tracking the compensatory services that are being missed?
I think anyone who has a child with an IEP knows the services get missed for many good reasons, especially at the beginning of the year when everyone’s trying to figure everything out. But where do we get that info, and how is that communicated?
Matt Holloway: I have sent out letters … when we have a defined vacancy. So, and so you have clinical level services, Teacher of the Deaf services, the SLPA services, things like that where there’s a defined set of services. We send out a letter to the affected families. I think it’s a—if you have a student with a one-to-one paraeducator and that paraeducator is out, there’s going to be a coverage switch. The student isn’t going to just roam the halls sort of unsupported.
That is going to be the case, and I think it does depend on the particulars of the family situation. The level of need of our students kind of dictates at times the nature of that communication. For a student who is not able to use language to communicate, I think it’s always important that parents are kind of told on a day-to-day basis, “So-and-so is out, and so-and-so is filling in for them.”
In general, I always work with yes, the building principals, yes, the special ed teachers, but really the paraeducators themselves to make sure that folks are comfortable working across different settings. We always want to—I really feel like it’s one of the professional courtesies we can give to our paraeducators is clarity on what their assignment is going to look like, and that’s something that we always strive to do and then hold that as consistent as we can. I think, you know, if you talk to any building principal, they’ll tell you that’s what they want to do that’s that’s the commitment they want to make to their paraeducator and then if if things have to change then, you know, it’s it’s known that this you’re not – you’re not being moved around willy-nilly, this is done because it’s it’s an exigency, it’s unavoidable.
So I guess I will say those things, and then those letters that I send out – and when we have lapses in service grid minutes, we talk about making up the services. There’s a Bureau of Special Education Appeals, and the state has a couple of different mechanisms for finding non-compliance. So they use a term of art, and it’s sort of a remedy that they issue. It’s sort of a quasi administrative law, so they issue a remedy and they use the term “compensatory services” to define that remedy that they issue.
What we do is – our service providers sort of make a point of saying, you know, we’re making up services. We make up services, so this SLPA that I’m speaking to now, when the contractor transitions off and the new person transitions in, that SLPA will be making up the services. So that you’re using a kind of a really specific term of art when you talk about the compensatory thing—that’s something that kind of is a remedy or is an outcome of, you know, sort of a legalistic process.
Michael Stein: Yeah, and I guess it sounds like the only time notifications are being made, except potentially by individuals with high needs with communication disorders, is when there’s a long-term vacancy. So what I’m also having in mind is, as you described, like there are moments when there’s a one-to-one out with the high need students. We may need a special education teacher then to be the one-to-one. Well, that means everyone on their service delivery grids for that day didn’t get those services. So like, are those parents being told, like, “Hey, we couldn’t actually get to you on Thursday; we’re sorry”? What’s the communication about? Because parents and caregivers have these grids, and they think, “Okay, I’m getting whatever amount of services per day for this,” but when that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t sound like there’s any notification to the family that those things weren’t happening.
Matt Holloway: Yeah, I mean, from a strictly transactional point of view, you can look at it that way. We did have a circumstance—I’m not sure if you’re aware of this—but we had a circumstance where we had a first-grade special education teacher covering for a one-to-one paraeducator, not for the full days but for significant chunks of the day – of every day – for several weeks. So when something becomes chronic like that and it comes to my attention, I did send out a notification to those families in that instance. But no, on a day-to-day basis, if somebody gets pulled away for an IEP meeting, somebody’s sick, you know, a special education teacher stays home sick on a given day, we’re not going to notify the families about that.
So, there’s a really strict transactional way to look at it, like taking the grid and a calculator and, you know, multiplying by 180 days. I think there’s also sort of the understanding that we, we’re looking out for our students and we’re providing the services that are called for, and, when those – teachers are out sick, they are trying to make up those services that they miss. That’s the bottom line is that they’re trying to do it.
Michael Stein: I appreciate that. It’s just like, last point and then we’ll move up, just when we—I see budget so closely to staffing to need. Where do you make it up? You know, you can’t make it up. So again, this is just to highlight the pressures that the system is under to actually deliver the services.
Gwen Agna: Could member LaBounty also speak at this point? She’s had her hand up.
Kerry LaBounty: Thanks. It sounds like that you really appreciate the work of the paraeducators; clearly, you’re telling us about that. And you don’t have to answer this right now, but perhaps in the future you could bring to us – what you feel the status is of all the education that we’re offering to those paraeducators, and do you feel like that’s in a good place? Do you feel like there’s something else that we should be offering them? Because, we ask them to do a lot, and like you’re saying, it’s really important that they’re able to do cross-functional sorts of work. Are we preparing them to do that work well?
Superintendent Portia Bonner: I know you want to answer that now.
Matt Holloway: Yeah.
Portia Bonner: We just had this conversation.
Matt Holloway: Okay, yeah. I mean, I just suffice to say it’s sort of a passion area of mine is working with paraeducators and their educator development. I mean, my first—I’m a little early yet to kind of lay out what we can do here, but it is a true passion area. I met with the entire unit a couple weeks ago. I’m going to meet with them again next week. And I think it’s super important and really exciting to think about, not just in terms of . . . credentialing and things like that, but really, the holistic supports that you can get from your clinical folks—from your PT and your OT and your SLP. I mean, there is so much to learn in this field, and I find that, paraeducators are excellent learners, and they just absorb it, you know, because it helps them with the students that they’re working with.
So I know we’re getting a little bit close on time, so I won’t dwell on this too long, but I just want to share these items, because this is kind of my first update to you all. So entry process priorities for me have been to begin to establish trust, orient myself to systems and structures—that SWOT is, typically, is—or it’s a common acronym: it’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—conducting a fiscal assessment – obviously, you know, I do read the newspapers – explore potential long-term goals for the department and then really transition the day-to-day management smoothly from the previous Director to myself.
And, I think that’s the area where I want to just sort of call out our special education department, our administrators, Celeste, our district-wide social workers, the entire team, have been really fabulous just in the support they’ve given and sort of the, warm handoff from Josh to myself. So that’s been great.
And then some of the routines and activities—I don’t really need to go through every one of these, I guess, but I’ll be quick. Working routines with building principals, that for me, that’s really how it works. Nothing in a public school building happens without sort of building principal buy-in, in my opinion. Routines and schedules for working with our staff, routines and relationships with the central office team, visibility in all the schools, which, you know, frankly is as much for my benefit as is for anybody else’s. I really like to just connect with the staff and students on a regular basis.
Routines or communications with families, delivering and scheduling visits with out of district programs—that’s a big priority for me as well is to, just physically be present in those programs, see what our students are experiencing, and then deliver and maintain systems for compliance and compliance-related and complaint-related activities, obviously, is, you know, kind of a major part of my role as well.
And then finally, I’ll just make a quick – when I said, when I talk about smoothness of the transition, our SEPAC is amazing. This is one of the most organized and thoughtful and intelligent and just on-the-ball SEPAC committees that I’ve had the pleasure to work with. And so we have a monthly standing consultation where I meet with the officers, which is great.
We did a public meet and greet. I was very grateful some members of this committee and the town and the city council attended that public meet and greet. There’s, to your point, there are a lot of big feelings, so I decided to kind of hold open some office hours and just let folks—you know, there’s a lot of people who are just kind of speaking, and I wanted to have an opportunity for dialogue, people to come in and actually have a conversation. You know, because the meet and greet didn’t always feel that way.
And so I’ve just been holding these office hour sessions, and it’s been nice. Again, it’s been small groups of two or three folks at a time, and just a chance to talk, so those have been good. I put a link in there because they’re at different times. We’re going to do a public session at the end of next week, October 21st, on the new IEP form. Dr. Bonner has been great about working with the SEPAC to have a specific RoadShow forum with them for the strategic planning process.
And then that last item is something that SEPAC has organized on their own. It’s a recognizing and addressing bullying presentation from the Federation for Children with Special Needs—a really important topic and really excellent group, and so they’ve been great. I’m really excited to continue to work with them and move things forward in that regard as well.
Gwen Agna: Thank you, Director Holloway. Does anyone have a question or a comment?
Michael Stein: Just a question. I have a lot of constituents interested in the answer to this question. We had a presentation yesterday at the curriculum subcommittee on addressing reading deficiencies among our students, specifically yesterday it was about JFK, but also the high school obviously is part of this as well.
I know that we have a new curriculum at the elementary level, and this is a nationwide, sort of problem. The question really is—and it wasn’t clear from watching the presentation yesterday—how many staff we actually have trained in Orton Gillingham or in similar methodology to provide that sort of one-to-one work with students, especially how many do we have, interventionists for non-IEP students? Yesterday we heard about the IEP, so if you could share with us more about, like, what the plan is to remediate, the reading discrepancies and the reading difficulty at JFK, that would be great.
Matt Holloway: Yeah, I’m going to punt that one back to the building principal and the incoming Curriculum Director. Just, I mean, you know, this is a large district and it’s a very busy district, and so I have been going out of my way to get to know general education teachers as well as special education teachers. But in terms of the non-special education intervention list, I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to give you that off the top of my head, but I would be happy to look into it and come back.
Mike Stein: What about the IEP sort of list? Like, what are the reading Interventions resources look like at JFK? Like, I understand the elementary model just because of my own experience there. I haven’t made it to JFK yet, but anything you could say about that would be great.
Matt Holloway: Those resources that you all saw at the curriculum committee, Dr. Bonner had asked me to kind of touch base with. So at JFK, there’s the model they call it the Literacy Center, and there are three positions for reading interventionists who provide IEP services specific to reading, and one of those, unfortunately, is a resignation. So somebody just resigned—the new hire just resigned this week. And so they’re back down to two of the three.
And I met with them. I just want to understand a little bit more about the schedule. You know, how are you actually, getting access to the right students at the right time, with enough time to support them? And so I just say that, we have— so the two—there’s two there, and then there’s one dedicated special education reading interventionist at the high school level, and so all three of those folks are Orton-Gillingham or Wilson, or both, certified in various—and these are, you know, these are brand names of programs which are evidence-based reading intervention programs kind of science of reading and then multisensory, where students really are able to make gains . . . and they have good schedules. I mean, I will say at JFK the schedules are strong. I think losing that person until we get that backfilled is probably going to throw that schedule off. I—from quick conversations I’ve had with them and with the principal, they will be—their group size will go up, you know, while they fill that position. That is what happens when we have that kind of vacancy.
Those services won’t be missed, but the group sizes will go up, so they become less effective, as you know, as happens. And then the high school is something that, I wish I could give you a standing opinion right here, right now. The truth is that high school block schedule—the four long periods—on some levels, it lends itself really well to doing interventions and services; on others, it creates some challenges.
I did meet with the amazing high school special education reading teacher, and talked through her schedule a lot. And she really—she is an extremely talented person – who just works with the time given to her, you know, and the students that are in her room. But it’s something that, you know —it’s going to be another ongoing area of massive interest for me over the course of the year, is doing that work.
As I think everybody knows, once you get to high school, you know, you really need high-quality targeted intervention to make progress in reading. That window—I mean, it doesn’t close, but that window gets smaller the older that students get. So, we really need talented folks doing that work, and it is complex.
Michael Stein: Great, now thank you, and I look forward to hearing more from the Curriculum Director and you about that. I know there’s a lot of parents and caregivers who feel like their children are in a situation that needs redress with a sense of urgency, and I hope as a district we can do that.
Gwen Agna: Great, thank you, Director Holloway. Does anyone else have any comments or questions? Um, looking around at our members here—no, thank you so much for taking the time to present to us, and we will look forward to hearing from you again soon. Thank you.
Matt Holloway: Thank you all very much, appreciate it.