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September 8, 2004 Meeting |
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The Sevier County Special Education Parent Advisory Committee (SC SpEd PAC) held its twelfth meeting on September 8, 2004. Three members attended. Ongoing Stuff Linda Ogle and Samantha Ensley agreed to work the transition subcommittee with any other parents who may be interested. The subcommittee will look into all aspects of transition at all levels: home to school, primary to intermediate, intermediate to middle, middle to high school, and high school to adult/work life. However, at the May meeting, Jeff Romanczuk gave Samantha some materials, mainly on high school to work transition, and asked that they start with this transition area focus. Linda and Samantha will check at the four high schools to see both what good programs are in place already and what programs could be better. They will make recommendations to Dr. Sandy Enloe about what to keep, add, or change. The Herman and Wilson reading systems are in the SpEd classrooms. We'll be ordering TouchMath materials in October for the self-contained and resource classes to use. New Stuff Jeff gave out the calendar for the school year, the PAC's list of meeting dates, and the list of after-school training sessions for the year. The revised SY04-05 calendar was distributed and is at the top of the “calendar” link on the site. The only change is that the April 25 inservice day was moved two weeks to May 9 because April 25-29 will be TCAP testing week next year. John wants to start an after-school childcare specifically for the special education students. We have some information on how a few other systems have done it, but we need to work out the level of need/interest county wide to figure out at what schools to locate this childcare and what needs might be unique to Sevier County. We intend to offer tutoring and enrichment activities during these hours and there will be a charge for this service. If anyone is interested in being involved with this subcommittee, contact Jeff by e-mail or phone (748-7711). Jeff asked for volunteers to serve as individual education planning meeting parent advocates. We're thinking that, especially for the parents of newly diagnosed students, it might be good if they had an experienced parent to talk to ahead of time about what will happen at the IEP meeting. This advocate could also attend the IEP meeting and provide whatever assistance the parent might need (from finding the meeting location to translating SpEd jargon). Kathy Dufau is already the first volunteer. Anyone else interested should contact Jeff by e-mail or phone (748-7711). These parent advocates don't have to be SpEd PAC members, but they do have to be (or have been) parents of Sevier County Special Education students. Jeff started an online Yahoo! Group for the SpEd PAC. If you aren't already signed up for it, when you go to the link, the first button you'll have to click on is the "Join this group!" one. If you are already a Yahoo! member, that log on will work. If not, you'll need to sign up for your own ID and password, which isn't too tedious. Once we get a few members, we can use this online group for messages to all, file and picture sharing, polls, meeting notifications, and live chat. Next Meeting October 14, 6 pm. Refreshments will be served and childcare with a licensed SpEd teacher (or two) is available free of charge. Contact Jeff by e-mail or phone (748-7711) before October 8 if you plan to use the childcare. An after-school inservice on Behavior Management runs from 3:45 to 5:45 pm. this same night and parents are welcome. Mark Burnette (School Psychologist at New Center), Kelly Kirby (Social Develop Class Teacher at Seymour Intermediate), and Karen Corum (Countywide Behavior Consulting Teacher) will present information and answer questions. |
