Adams-Cheshire Updated on Autism Program
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The School Committee heard an update on the school district's autism program from Kim Biagini. |
CHESHIRE, Mass. — The Adams-Cheshire Regional School Committee received an update on the district's special education classes.
The school has a nigher number of diagnosed autism children than surrounding communities.
The committee met with C.T. Plunkett autism specialist Kim Biagini on Monday night to discuss her program for kindergarten through second grade.
"Right now I have about six kids that are in the program at C.T. Plunkett," Biagini said. "The kids really all have IEPs (individualized education programs), and it is very individualized. The goal ultimately is to try to get them into general education by third grade."
She said the class encompasses general education, special education, and general life skills.
"We are able to do so much for them in a short amount of time," she said. "They come in and we do circle time ... which includes not only academics, but life skills."
She said these skills include how to use money, how to tell time, safety, and words, letters, and sound.
Biagini said each student has his or her own paraprofessional to work with. She said the paraprofessionals are the "heart and soul" of the program because they conduct the one-on-one work and allow her to visit other schools and perform home visits.
She said one of her main strategies is repetition and reinforcement.
"It's really about smoothing those paths within their brains. It is about repetition, repetition, repetition and then their brains start to learn how to take in information," Biagini said. "Once their brains start doing that, it starts to do it for everything and there are truly those moments when things just start to click."
The school district has both a higher level of students with autism and with special needs than the state and national average.
Two years ago, one out of every 88 students in the school district had autism. Now it is one out of every 68. She said the district's autism rate is 30 percent higher than the state average.
Superintendent Kristen Gordon said she attributes part of this to the autism label itself and overdiagnosing.
"This bucket of autism I think you see a lot of things going in it," she said, "When I was in college it was 'labels are for jars, they are not for children,' and now you can't get on an IEP without a label."
Biagini said the parameters of autism are in limbo at this time because the definition of autism in the DSM-5, a diagnostic manual for phycology in social services, has changed.
"They changed the definition of autism so we are in transition right now," she said. "I do think that people use autism as a go-to ... it really is when someone doesn't know what to say you are."
In addition to this update, Gordon proposed a new curriculum combination plan permission list that will allow regular teachers to provide some special education options to students. She said this is not a way to limit kids in special education, but focus on early intervention.
She said the plan will allow teachers to do things like extend homework time and relay information back to special education teachers to see if the service is actually needed.
She said the program is mandated by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, however most schools file it and leave it alone.
Commissioner Joshua Demarsico-Birkland said it helps eliminate the old practice of waiting for a student to fail.
"It is trying to get away from the whole wait-to-fail model that we have lived off of for so long; that students have to be an amount of time behind before they can get any kind of assistance," Demarsico-Birkland said. "So this is being more proactive."
Tags: ACRSD, autism, special education,
