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Schools

Special Education Highlighted at West Hempstead Board Meeting

District discusses its approach to getting special education students to reach their potential.

Special education is an integral part of every district in the area and West Hempstead is no exception.

At Tuesday’s monthly meeting of the West Hempstead board of education, Director of Pupil Personnel Services Ellen Loewy discussed specific aspects of the district’s special education program.

Loewy said that although it is often thought that the Department of Pupil Personnel is only responsible for special education, they are also accountable for many other programs and services.

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“Previously, special education was a separate entity segregated from general education,” she continued. “With changes in legislation, our focus has become that special education is not a place – rather, supports and services designed to integrate students to the greatest extent appropriate into general education.”

Lynette Abruzzo, assistant director of Pupil Personnel Services, explained, that “once a child is suspected of having a disability, a multi disciplinary team is convened and conducts an evaluation to determine whether a student has educationally handicap disability.”

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The team, known as a Committee on Special Education (CSE), is group that creates individualized education plan for each student – unique to that student. Every time the IEP needs to be changed, the CSE needs to meet again to discuss the situation.

West Hempstead convenes over 1,000 of the CSE meetings each year, Loewy added. Currently, West Hempstead schools have 35 inclusion students in and . The district recently made special classes in sixth through eighth grade in the . offers a variety of programs and other services to suit each students’ needs, according to Abruzzo.

Abruzzo said that when West Hempstead is not able to give a student the appropriate education in district, they look first to neighboring districts, then BOCES and NYS-approved private schools, and finally to home or hospital settings. Fifteen West Hempstead students are currently being educated in outside districts, including Great Neck, East Meadow, Levittown and Bellmore, among others.

The future vision of special education in West Hempstead, according to Loewy is to “successfully educate all of its students with disabilities so they may reach their potential."

In order to achieve this goal, they plan on putting resources into the classroom, training teachers in administration and scoring of the New York State Alternative Assessment, familiarize staff with IEPs and differentiation of instruction, and use ESL, speech and occupational therapy services when applicable. Additionally, according to Loewy, they are trying to reallocate resources to “begin to investigate and hopefully initiate a peer mentoring program in the new future.”

“In doing so, our plan is to increase academic achievement for students with disabilities," she said, "provide quality transitional services and professional development, decrease number of students in out of district placements and increase the use of assistive technology."

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