February 2019

Happy New Year to all from myself and all your colleagues in the Special Education and Health Services Department. It always feels a little strange to celebrate a new year when in my work life, we are in the middle of the school year. To create alignment, I like to use this time as check in for the goals our department set at the beginning of the school year. At the beginning of the school year, we created four major goal areas that promotes the work of special education services and connects that work to the four priorities areas of the district. Here are some highlights of the work to date:

Literacy & MTSS: The Special Education Department is excited to share the Updated Professional Instruction Center (PIC) website. PIC has been working to modernize the way we deliver services and supports to teachers, IEP teams, DPFs, Building Administrators, etc… This includes a newly developed framework of how to choose, implement and monitor Special Education interventions has been developed through cross departmental partnerships with Multi-lingual, PSWE, SEL and Teaching and Learning team members. The tool begins with using screening and diagnostics, to inform and assist in crafting standards-based goals. From there PIC supported interventions are highlighted and recommended partnered with the progress monitoring and fidelity checklists to support teachers in measuring success. Using this framework as the foundation, PIC has gathered, updated and developed resources categorized into four areas: Social Emotional Learning (SEL), Literacy, Math and Functional Communication. Everything can be found here: https://sites.google.com/mpls.k12.mn.us/mpspic

The teams that are building these resources are working to deepen the PIC websites by creating embed student portraits to guide teachers through the process as well as deepen the pool of interventions purchased through PIC for teachers are our next step in each of these areas.

Equity: All Special Education Directors have taken the Intercultural Developmental Inventory and participated in training through the YMCA. We continued work to increase graduation rates for Black and Native American students with disabilities through shared Check and Connect positions with the Office of Black Male Students Achievement and Indian Education.

SEL: As a Department, we are immersed in our work of Adult SEL by practicing the three signature practices at our meetings and promoting self-care by having an inter-department email free night once a week. We just had a Soup with Special Education even at the beginning of January. We invited all non-tenured special education licensed staff to join us for dinner and relationship building. We also provided opportunities for technical support and giving the department feedback. It provided us an opportunity to thank them for their hard work and show our gratitude that they are a part of MPS. It was a successful event and we are looking forward to expanding our invitation list. We will also be visiting our latest cohort of St. Thomas Residency students to bring them treats and encouragement. They have been working extremely hard and we want them to know how excited we are that they will soon be teachers in our District.

SEL & Equity: We can’t have one without the other. A team has developed and presented to well over 200 special education teachers Teaching Social Emotional Learning through the MPS Framework. To start we look at the language we use to describe students and how it varies depending on the disability, race, and socioeconomic status of a student. Teachers identified that there is intent behind the language that is used and it was suggested that SEPP (not a noun, not a verb) has somewhat encouraged teachers to include language that can be perceived as biased. We have learned a lot from the attendees of the trainings and have appreciated the feedback. We challenge teachers to use their colleagues as proof readers to look for implicit biases in the language that has been used. We have also touched on a growth mindset in our practices and the perceived outcomes of what is to become a permanent record of a child. Please remind your teams that conference summary notes, present levels, descriptive language, and home family interviews follow students for PreK-21+ and professional language should be reflective of how we would want things written about our own children and families.

~ Sara Stack ~

Parent/Teacher Surveys: The surveys have begun. Please respond to the post IEP meeting surveys in a timely manner. The information gathered from families and teachers will help us define areas of strength and areas for additional PD in the future.

~Sara Stack ~

The New Year has also brought an unexpected transition for us in the Department. Marty Amundson, Special Education Director for Secondary Programs announced her retirement and her last day was at the end of December. Marty provided vision for our secondary programs and created processes and protocols that continued to move programming forward. She had an incredible passion for students and families. Marty also led our Extended School Year programming, Deaf and Blind/Visually Impaired programming and support for students who were bilingual. We will all miss Marty’s great sense of humor and calm demeanor with which she approached every day of the job. Marty was not one for much fanfare about herself, so we kept the celebration small as we thanked her for all she has done at MPS.

Her position has been posted and interviews are in process.

I hope you had some time over the Winter Break to reflect on your “Happy Middle of the Year” and that our goal work is supportive of your work in the school community.

Rochelle Cox