Cutter Morning Star School District was recently approved as a pilot district for the Inclusive Practices Professional Learning Community, starting this fall.
The district was notified on May 13 that it was selected into the cohort for the project, which is meant to help increase the number of students with disabilities being taught to grade expectations and who are making progress toward proficiency on grade-level standards.
Cutter Morning Star School Superintendent Nancy Anderson said the initiative, which she fully supports, will teach special education students the core curriculum.
"For I don't even know how many years, you would have special ed kids pulled out -- like pulled out of a math class, and they go into a resource room math class. And that resource teacher teaches them based on their IEP (individualized education program). Now we've always tried to teach them grade-level skills with just some modifications and things like that, but what the inclusive practice initiative means is these kids will actually go into core classes," she said.
"They will go into the classroom and we will be providing them support either by the special ed teacher, an aide or whatever. If they're in the resource room, they will get grade-level curriculum taught to them."
She said this is important because many people do not realize that when students are given state-mandated tests, it does not matter whether they have a learning disability -- they are all taking the same tests.
"So if you have a fourth-grader that's in special education, and you have a fourth-grader that's in regular education, they're given the same test," she said. "They have the same test. And so it's been unrealistic for our special ed kids to be tested over subjects and material that they may have not ever even been exposed to. So now the inclusive practices is making sure that those kids, those special education students, are exposed to the grade-level standards and skills."
The project will be phased in, she said, and will start at the elementary level.
Cutter Morning Star Elementary Principal Laura Baber said they are very excited to be selected, noting Solution Tree education consulting along with the Arkansas Department of Education will spend at least 12 days on campus this next school year providing support on how to successfully integrate the initiative.
"We are very excited that because of this initiative, we got into this cohort to help us better prepare ourselves for giving our students what they need in order to be successful in their grade-level content standards with inclusive practices. It was a rigorous process and application process and interview and we're very excited. Because for one thing, we're going to get the training that we need in order to do it successfully and we're ahead of the game a little bit because we're a pilot," she said.
Anderson said the benefit of the program is that the students are getting exposed to the information and the standards that they're actually held accountable for on their state-mandated testing.
"You know, I have said for years, it's just not fair to our special education population to never be exposed to this set of skills, but yet the state department comes and tests them over that set of skills," she said.
"And so they're already at a disadvantage. Now I do know that they're in special education because they have a learning disability, and we work with them, but we need to take those regular fourth-grade, fifth-grade, whatever grade level skills, and we need to make adjustments for them and now we're teaching them those skills with all the supports that they need to understand and grasp those. So we're real excited about that," Anderson said.