District Administration - January 2012 - (Page 54)

Special Ed therapist not working well within our culture, he or she can be replaced. We’ve done that several times.” In North Carolina, the rural Anson County School District an hour from Charlotte has forged a similar contract with Futures. Anson’s superintendent, Gregory Firn, who previously led districts in Connecticut and Washington state, where special education populations ranged between 10 percent and 12 percent of the student cial education programs for more than 200 school districts around the country, also helped define an “exit strategy”—based on more careful measures of student progress—for reducing the number of Anson County students receiving special education services, even before the term of their IEPs is up. “We know that it works better when we adopt the philosophy that special ed is a service and not a place,” explains Bittel. Firn got that message. “It’s a different of students needing speech and language therapy, Superintendent Michael Sander contracted with San Francisco-based Presence Learning earlier this year to deliver those services over the Internet to 14 additional students. The students work twice a week in front of computers connected to an Ohio-licensed speech therapist in an arrangement that combines distance learning and interactivity. “If they’re working on short ‘a’ or short ‘e’ sounds,” Sander says by way of example, “the therapist [who is visible in a 3x5 rectangle box in an upper corner of the screen] can ask them to click on the correct sound. And when the therapist demonstrates how to pronounce the sounds, the students can hear and see it, just as if she was in the classroom.” The outsourcing will save the district $35,000 a year compared to the salaries and benefits required to provide the additional therapy in-house. “It saves money,” notes Sanders, “but if it didn’t also meet the needs of the students, it wouldn’t be an option.” Concerns About Outsourcing Donna Potts, the elementary school counselor in the Clinton-Massie Local Schools in Ohio, sets up a computer for speech and language programs that are delivered via the Internet to students. Seeking Savings in body, discovered a 20 percent rate when he came to Anson County in 2007. The special education program also was devouring almost $7 million of the district’s $39 million budget. “Something just wasn’t right. We were expending a lot of money,” Firn recalls. “I couldn’t put my finger on the problem, and neither could my special education director.” Firn hired Futures to analyze the school district’s special education services during the 2007-2008 school year, and in the following year he inked a fixed-cost contract for the company to take over the special education program. Over the past three years, Firn calculates, the district has saved $1.1 million. But Firn says he has realized more than savings. Futures, which has analyzed spe- mindset sitting down with parents and saying our game plan is that, in X time, your child will be exiting the IEP,’” he says. Using the Internet The Clinton-Massie Local School District in Ohio outsources physical and occupational therapy services to the Southwest Ohio Educational Service Center, an educational collaborative serving 14 surrounding districts. Specialists from the center visit Clinton-Massie’s schools, which saves the district money because there are not enough students needing those therapies to justify even part-time specialists on staff. Clinton-Massie, which has 2,000 students, does use two of its own part-time speech and language therapists to service 28 students. But with increasing numbers While the outsourcing of entire special education programs is a new feature of the cost-stressed landscape of public schools, districts have for years outsourced “lowincidence” special education services for students with particularly severe physical, emotional or cognitive disabilities. These disabilities can range from autism and traumatic brain injury to significant visual, auditory or orthopedic impairments. Sometimes those students attend special facilities outside of the district. At other times, their needs are met more economically by providing intensive occupational, speech and language, and physical therapy through local educational collaboratives that include—depending upon the state—educational service agencies, county offices of education, and boards of educational cooperative services. In Hampden County, Mass., the Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative did some pioneering of its own in 2008 by 54 January 2012 District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - January 2012

District Administration - January 2012
Contents
Letters
News Update
Conversations
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Finding the Perfect Fit
Kansas City Plots Next Steps
Seeking Savings in Special Ed
K12 Guide to Audio/Visual Solutions
Equipping Teachers to Infuse Technology
Flipped Classrooms Gaining Ground
Buying in Bulk
Online Identity Management
Going Mobile
Student Counsel
Online Edge
New Books
New Products
Product Focus
Professional Opinion

District Administration - January 2012

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