A Rouses employee in Baton Rouge was surprised with a free car Monday morning (Aug. 6), days after the employee let a teen with autism help him stock shelves in the store, Fox 44 Baton Rouge reports.
Jordan Taylor was stocking shelves of orange juice one day when Jack Ryan Edwards and his father came across Taylor. A video that has gone viral shows Taylor patiently teaching Edwards how to stock those shelves for roughly 30 minutes, Fox 44 reported.
With Taylor’s kindness in mind, Neighbors FCU President and CEO Steve Webb acknowledged Taylor during the Central Community School System Convocation Monday. Fox 44 reported that Neighbors worked with “community partners” to provide Taylor with his own new vehicle.
Taylor’s actions also spurred the Edwards family to create a GoFundMe account to raise $100,000 for Taylor’s college tuition. In five days, more than 3,300 people have donated $115,485 as of Monday afternoon.
Graduation season comes with inspiring stories about remarkable students, and Tulane University recently shared one about one of its own graduates.
Ben Alexander, a nonverbal student with autism, graduated from Tulane May 19, with the support of his father who accompanied him to every class since 2014.
Dr. Sam Alexander told Tulane he always wanted his son Ben Alexander to have the same opportunities that Ben’s two siblings had, according to a Tulane news release. Sam Alexander, an obstetrician-gynecologist, lauded Tulane’s students and professors for always expressing acceptance toward his son, who communicates via computer.
“Obviously I wish he could have gone by himself, without his father hanging all over him. But what a wonderful experience it was,” Sam Alexander said in a statement.
Sam Alexander’s efforts were also praised by Patrick Randolph, director of Tulane’s Goldman Center for Student Accessibility. Randolph said Ben Alexander would likely not even be at Tulane if not “for the constant and unwavering support of his father.”
The Cypress Academy community took members of the Orleans Parish School Board to task Tuesday night (May 22) during a meeting at the Mid-City school hours after OPSB announced it would directly manage the charter school to keep it from closing by Wednesday.
Tuesday’s meeting was initially planned by the Cypress administration to explain to parents why its board voted on Sunday to merge the charter with the Lafayette Academy Extension at the Paul Dunbar Building in Hollygrove. The weekend announcement stated the school’s small headcount of students made it “very difficult” for the school to pay for the needs of its students.
Parents in the Cypress cafeteria audibly gasped after head of school Bob Berk told them Cypress has to raise about $600,000 to balance its budget for the next school year. Berk said Cypress even opened this school year on “a leaner model” than they did last year in an effort to maintain the school, which involved only using one co-teacher across grade levels instead of two. However, Berk said the school realized that the leaner model “wasn’t working school-wide.”
Berk said he managed to find a few donors willing to pay up to $250,000 to Cypress, but he acknowledged he did not feel like they would still be able to raise the full amount of funding in time. Several parents in the room filled with more than 30 people told Berk the board should have been more transparent with parents about their financial burdens…
In announcing a budget plan that included more money for Pennsylvania schools, Gov. Tom Wolf this week trumpeted the growth in state education spending during his tenure.
“The first thing I did when I got to Harrisburg was to draw a line in the sand on education,” Wolf told lawmakers during Tuesday’s budget address, as he declared that investments in schools were paying off.
But the tide of expenses continues to wash over that line, school officials say.
“Districts are still pretty much just treading water,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, citing increasing costs for pensions, special education, and charter-school payments.
If Wolf’s plan for next year is enacted, it will increase the state’s main pot of money for schools to nearly $6.1 billion, an increase of just under 10 percent since he took office in 2015…
Did you know that game-based learning is gaining popularity in education as more young people and adults learn from games in and out of the classroom? Well-designed games can motivate students to actively engage in content that relates to coursework, and to master challenging tasks designed to sharpen critical thinking and problem solving, as well as employment and life skills.
On January 8, 2018, the 5th annual ED Games Expo occurred at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The event was organized in collaboration between the Department of Education’s (ED) Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Kennedy Center’s Education team. The event showcased more than 100 learning games, most developed with funding from 17 different government programs within and outside ED. The games were for students of all ages in education and special education and covered topics across STEM, reading, social studies and social development. Many incorporated emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality and maker spaces with 3D printing stations, as well as engaging approaches to learning, such as narrative adventures and puzzle games.
A Unique Opportunity
This year the Expo featured panel sessions with game developers and live demos by more than 80 developers from around the country. At a daytime panel session on the Millennium Stage titled “So You Want to Be a Game Developer,” 13 different game developers shared inspiring stories for why and how they became game developers. The audience included more than 500 DC-area school students, many of whom took the microphone and asked questions such as “What is it like to be a game developer?” and “What can I do to be a game developer?”
The live demos of learning games and technologies occurred across multiple galleries on the Terrace Level of the Kennedy Center. Across the day and into the early evening, the students and more than 200 other visitors played games while meeting face-to-face with the developers. The experience provided a unique opportunity for attendees to discuss how the games were developed and to learn about the research findings on how games can impact student performance.
Learning Games Emerge Across Many Government Programs
Along with being a fun and rich learning experience for everyone, the Expo demonstrated the impact of a wide range of government programs that invest in learning games as a strategy to advance their mission to support education and learning.
Outside of ED, learning games at the Expo were supported by ten different government programs, including the SBIR programs at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes for Health and research programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. A group of games were also developed from programs at USAID, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lastly, the Kennedy Center joined the Expo this year in recognition of the arts and creativity embedded in the game development process. The Expo provided tangible opportunities for students to learn directly from game developers how they use the creative artistic process to design multi-modal, differentiated games that are engaging, customized learning experiences for all. Through its Education programs, the Kennedy Center encourages a broad audience of students and stakeholders to consider game development as an opportunity for a range of learning experiences, through concept ideation, design, coding, graphic art creation, musical score writing and performance, or research and evaluation during and after development.
Edward Metz is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Education Sciences within the Department of Education, where he leads the SBIR and the Education Technology Research Grants programs.
Jeanette McCune is the Director of School and Community Programs in Education at the Kennedy Center.
Follow IES (@IESResearch) and the Kennedy Center (@Kencen) for updates on the next ED Games Expo and other initiatives.
TEXAS — TEA drafts corrective action plan for special education AUSTIN – At the direction of Governor Greg Abbott, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has drafted an initial corrective action plan regarding the support and delivery of special education services in our state’s public schools. The initial draft addresses all issues identified in a recent federal monitoring report, including the proper identification of special education students and assuring access to appropriate services at the local level.
Commissioner of Education Mike Morath stressed this initial plan is simply a first draft still requiring additional public comment. Before a final plan is submitted to the U.S. Department of Education, TEA will engage in a significant outreach effort over the next two months to hear from special education students, families, educators, advocacy groups, district and school officials, and all others seeking to provide input on the plan.
“This corrective action plan provides the state of Texas the chance to make meaningful, lasting change in how we educate and support children with special needs,” said Commissioner Morath. “We are approaching this planning process with the seriousness that it requires and hope to solicit the kind of collective feedback, support and collaboration that our students deserve as we work to earn back the trust parents place in us for their children. My top priority has and continues to be to improve outcomes for all students in Texas.”
A copy of the draft plan was shared with the Governor’s Office and made publicly available today on the TEA website (https://tea.texas.gov/TexasSPED). Significant actions that are part of the draft plan include:
TEA would create a suite of resources intended to be shared with the parents of children suspected of having a disability to help fully inform them of their rights to a free and appropriate public education, and accompany those resources with a large outreach effort.
TEA would roll out a large scale statewide special education professional development system, including multiple opportunities for follow-up support for all educators (general education, special education, and others).
For students who are found to have needed services and did not receive them, the school system is responsible for providing compensatory services. TEA would identify funds to support effective service delivery.
TEA would further strengthen its staffing and resources devoted to special education, allowing for greater oversight as well as additional on-site support to local school districts.
TEA will be accepting an initial round of public comments on the draft plan through Feb. 18. A website has been established providing a copy of the draft, an overview of TEA’s outreach efforts with various stakeholders, and an email address to provide comment.
Following the initial round of public comments and stakeholder engagement, a revised draft plan will be available on or around March 1. Additional public comment will be accepted through March 31.
Under the current timeline, the final State corrective action plan would be submitted to the U.S. Department of Education on or around April 18 (pending additional conversations and feedback from federal officials).
Disability advocates hailed the U.S. Department of Education’s finding that Texas for years put roadblocks in the path of children who potentially qualified for special education—a clear violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“It shows that they are willing to stand up when a state is clearly not doing what’s right,” said Robbi Cooper, a leader of the parent advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia Texas and the mother of a son with dyslexia. “Now let’s just hope that we can get the policies right.”
The Jan. 11 monitoring report from the office of special education services—the first to be issued under the leadership of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—outlines a series of IDEA violations by the state.
In conversations with Texas parents and educators, federal officials heard conflicting reports about how children with dyslexia should be screened and served. Children who struggled in school were shifted to response-to-intervention programs that were supposed to meet their needs, but, once there, some languished for years, the monitoring report said…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
They’re both believers in school choice and a smaller foot-print for the federal government in K-12. They both like the idea of a slimmer bureacracy.
As unpopular as No Child Left Behind was by the time it was ushered off the stage in 2015, advocates for students with disabilities could always point to one aspect of the law that they liked: by requiring that test scores of different student groups be reported separately, the law exposed the low academic performance of students in special education and required schools to do something about it.
The replacement for NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act, still requires that the academic performance of students with disabilities be reported, along with other student subgroups.
But the law trades federal mandates for state flexibility on what should happen to a school whose students with disabilities are consistently lagging their peers.
States and some lawmakers have cheered the end of what they call federal overreach. But some advocates worry that the accountability goals states have set for themselves won’t move the needle for a group of students who have long struggled with low achievement. At worst, they worry, states can create rules that allow the performance of students with disabilities to again be obscured by the relatively higher test scores of the general student population.
Lower Goals
“A lot of the really crucial decisionmaking got left to the states,” said Ricki Sabia, the senior policy advisor at the National Down Syndrome Congress. “Our concern was with how they would use this discretion.”
Sabia and Candace Cortiella, the founder of the Advocacy Institute, examined drafts of the accountability roadmaps developed by 37 states. All of the states have submitted ESSA plans to the U.S. Department of Education for evaluation; the department has given its stamp of approval to 14 states and the District of Columbia.
A reading of the draft plans illustrates some of Sabia’s and Cortiella’s concerns. In New Mexico’s accountability blueprint, for example, it set a goal for itself to increase the high school graduation rate of students with disabilities to 79 percent in 2022, up from 62 percent in 2016.
At the same time, however, the plan sets a goal to have 50 percent of students with disabilities scoring proficient on the state’sEnglish/language arts and math assessments by 2022. That’s an ambitious goal—less than 7 percent of New Mexican special education students meet that bar now.
But “it is difficult to understand how [students with disabilities] can be expected to graduate at a rate of 79 percent in 4 years while just 50 percent are expected to be proficient in reading and math,” Sabia and Cortiella wrote in a letter intended to support local advocates.
Plan Omissions
Another concern is that the goals for students with disabilities are too low. New York, for example, is aiming for 63 percent of its students with disabilities to graduate with a standard diploma by 2022, up from 55 percent in 2016. New York notes that its end goal for all students, including students with disabilities, is a 95 percent graduation rate. But it also proposes resetting its goals each year.
Educators didn’t like the 100-percent proficiency goal that was embedded in the old law, Sabia said. “But how do you say that some students aren’t going to be proficient? How do you say it’s OK if 5 percent or 10 percent aren’t? That’s what some of these new plans do.”
The education nonprofit Achieve, in its analysis of state plans, found that 26 states and the District of Columbia set the same long-term graduation goal for all subgroups. Twenty-four states set different end point goals for students with disabilities and other subgroups.
Others have pointed not to what’s in the state plans, but what they believe has been left out. Laura Kaloi is a government relations policy consultant with the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a group that represents children in special education and their families. COPAA was looking for states to offer specific plans about how to prevent bullying and harassment, discipline that removes children from the classroom, and “aversive behavioral interventions that compromise student health and safety.”
In an examination of the state plans that were submitted this spring, she said, those topics were not addressed.
“We know many, many school districts need work in this area,” Kaloi said.
The plans are light on some details because states were not required by the law to provide them. In March, the Senate overturned some accountability guidelines that were passed during the Obama administration, saying they were too prescriptive and not keeping in the spirit of the law and its focus on state-based accountability. For example, the law requires states to identify a minimum number of students in a particular subgroup that a school would have to enroll in order for that group to be counted in school accountability, known as the N-size. Under the ESSA accountability rules that the Senate threw out, states could select any N-size but had to offer a justification if they chose a number over 30. The Education Department does not require states to provide a justification for its N-size selection.
Some states, such as Ohio, have chosen to provide such justification, however, suggesting that in some cases states are committing to a more rigorous standard.
Ohio is moving from an N-size of 30 down to 15 by the 2019-2020 school year, which means that more schools will potentially be subject to accountability measures. After the change, 86 percent of the state’s schools will have to report on the progress of the special education subgroup, compared to 58 percent that are required to do so now.
Melissa Turner, the senior manager for state policy for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said her organization is also examining the state plans, with an eye to strong accountability for student subgroups, clearly defined policies that explain how states will help struggling groups of students, and greater use of accommodations and the appropriate use of “alternate assessments.”
ESSA places a 1 percent cap on the percentage of all students who can take alternate assessments. That equates to about 10 percent of students with disabilities. Such alternate assessments are intended for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. Some groups, such as NCLD, have been concerned that schools have steered students to the alternate assessments in the past, instead of providing the teaching and support that would allow students to take the same tests as their peers in general education.
Positive Implications
Turner mentioned some plans that stand out as potentially positive for students with disabilities. Iowa, for example, has organized its ESSA accountability blueprint around “multitiered systems of support,” which are intended to provide research-backed instruction for all students in academics and in social-emotional development.
Turner also singled out New Hampshire for its plans for personalized learning. “That’s something that we applaud. We think that’s a strong opportunity for states to meet the needs of all kids,” she said.
The organization is concerned, as other groups are, about different goals for different student subgroups. If the overall graduation rate goal is 95 percent, it should be the same for students with disabilities, she said.
“We’re really hoping to see that gap narrow in the long-term goals,” she said.
With just a handful of weeks left in this presidential administration, the U.S. Department of Education released a final rule Monday that could have a major impact on how districts spend their federal special education money.
The department’s regulation creates a standard approach that states must use in determining if their districts are over-enrolling minority students in special education compared to their peers of other races. If the disparities are large enough, districts are required to use 15 percent of their federal allotment under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act on “coordinated, early intervening services” aimed at addressing the issue.
The new rule also requires states to use a standard approach to determine whether minority special education students are in segregated settings more than peers of other races, or if they face more suspensions and expulsions than their peers. Disparities in those areas would also trigger the requirement to use federal money to fix the problem. Though the 15 percent set-aside is for what the law calls “early intervening” services, districts could use that money for students from age 3 through 12th grade, the regulations state.
The requirement will go into effect no later than the 2018-19 school year…
Did you know that game-based learning is gaining popularity in education as more young people and adults learn from games in and out of the classroom? Well-designed games can motivate students to actively engage in content that relates to coursework, and to master challenging tasks designed to sharpen critical thinking and problem solving, as well as employment and life skills.
Disability advocates hailed the U.S. Department of Education’s finding that Texas for years put roadblocks in the path of children who potentially qualified for special education—a clear violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
