Beginning next school year, Brown County special education students will have a classroom in their home school according to their age and grade.
In recent school years, special education students were instead instructed in a classroom at the now-closed Brown County Intermediate School.
The school district plans to bring in extra help to make the change possible.
BCIS closed at the end of this school year and is being remade into the Educational Service Center. Next school year, all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders will attend the renamed Brown County Middle School and all fifth-grade students will remain in their home elementary buildings for another year.
Director of Student Learning Debbie Harman told the school board on May 20 that this change opened the door to opportunities for changes in student support services.
In the 1980s, almost all students with special needs were educated in Columbus. “They didn’t go to our schools and we put them on a bus to Columbus,” Harman said. When she started working in Brown County in 1986, those students began to return to Brown County for their education.
Starting this fall, all of those students from preschool to 12th grade will receive their education in the school building they are supposed to attend according to their age, home and grade, Harman said.
“If you have a disability, that will be your home school, and if you don’t have a disability, you will be going to that school. All of our students will be in the schools they are legally settled in with their home,” she said.
Harman said that special education teacher Kristen Sample did a “great job” as a teacher at BCIS, but it was a challenge that there was a range of students of many different ages in her classroom and not in the school at large.
“When a third-grader came to her classroom, she did everything she could to give that third-grader an experience with other kids, but it was with fifth-graders, or it might have been a preschooler. It wasn’t exactly with kids their age,” Harman said.
Each school will have full-time, part-time, resource and inclusion positions to help serve students with special needs.
“We have very few children who have full-time special education needs. Most of our students are what we call ‘included.’ That is the goal, to include children in general education classrooms as much as possible,” Harman said.
“Very few in the state have full inclusion with preschool, and Brown County Schools does. We fully include all of our preschoolers with disabilities in our preschool classrooms. We’re very close to full inclusion in a lot of our other grade levels as well, but it’s based on individual student needs.”
The elementary schools also will have a counselor in the building for four days a week — up from two days a week this past school year — with Sprunica Elementary getting a counselor five days a week.
“When we have kids with more significant needs coming back to those buildings is when we need to ramp up the supports in those buildings,” Harman said.
“Kids need more than just a special education teacher. Sometimes they need the support of a counselor. … We really see that as a support for all students, but also those kids with emotional behavior needs. It will really be helpful with that.”
The middle school will have special educators in the building who will do team teaching with general education teachers, like at the high school, Harman explained.
“When you do inclusion, as you move up the grade levels, we try to include kids in some really challenging classes for them. They need support from paraprofessionals and from teachers,” she said.
Sample will move to the middle school next school year. “They will be able to be in the general education classroom some of the time and then in a special education classroom for another part of the time,” Harman said of middle school students with special needs. The middle school students will also receive “targeted post-secondary transition support” from the high school special educators.
A social worker will work in the high school five days a week next school year. That position is being paid for with the district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding. “One of the intentions of ESSER dollars is to make sure kids get the social and emotional support they may be lacking, not just because of the pandemic, but also we know this is something students at the high school have needed,” Harman said.
Middle school students with special needs who previously attended Barb Kelp’s classroom at the high school will stay in the middle school to complete their education there. “That gives us time to have Barb do what we call very specific transition work with students,” Harman said.
“Everyone graduates with a plan, and some students need more assistance in developing that plan than others. … Barb is really, really knowledgeable about post-secondary with students with unique needs.”
Centerstone will also continue to provide therapist and school-based support specialists next school year in all of the schools per a memorandum of understanding with the school district.
