Strafford R-VI School District has a mission to “develop the potential in every student by providing a learning environment conducive to developing mature, responsible individuals who contribute to our changing society.” The school makes this their goal with students of all learning levels, including students with a qualified disability.
Strafford R-VI School District has 9 special education teachers that work with 159 students with an IEP and 65 students with a 504 plan each year. With 3 of the special education teachers being new this year, there has been a lot of learning required in a short amount of time. Special education director, CJ August, took on this challenge and aided his staff with completing their evaluations punctually and staying compliant to help students receive education in the least restrictive environment.
“I like being part of kids’ stories and helping [them with] the things that we take for granted in life.”
-CJ August, Special Education Director
Challenges
CJ was promoted to Special Education Director following a decade of experience as a special education teacher. He faced a great challenge in his career this year when 30% of his special education teachers entered as new teachers. The teachers lacked knowledge about the evaluations they needed to complete. They did not know how long the evaluation process would take and had little consistency in special education terminology used in IEPs.
Inexperienced Teachers
Teachers were not prepared to conduct evaluations, such as the Review of Existing Data (RED). This evaluation is required to determine if a student has a remaining disability and still needs related services.
Lack of Process Understanding
With limited knowledge about how long evaluations would take and uncertainty about deadlines that needed to be met, the teachers were worried about falling behind and losing compliance.
Inconsistency with Terminology
Teachers needed a resource to help them write IEPs and evaluations using correct language without taking up an extensive amount of their time. Accurate terminology is crucial to keeping an IEP legally compliant.
Strafford R-VI knew they needed a solution that could help them better meet the needs of students and staff members. The solution should help remove those barriers so they could put their focus back on what they do best, which is aiding the development of students.
Solution
Strafford R-VI found that Euna Special Education was able to meet their needs as they were training new teachers. CJ stated that “with 3 of your 9 teachers being new teachers, having a user-friendly system to educate your new teachers really helps with the amount of IEPs we have and to keep them rolling and successful.”
“We implemented the RED component of Euna Special Education for our teachers so that they had a checklist to go off while they were learning. Since then, they’ve embraced it really well, it’s been easy to use, and we haven’t missed a deadline this year.”
CJ found the built-in checklist feature to be a critical part of walking his staff through the evaluation process and ensuring they were staying compliant. Checklist items show upcoming and past-due deadlines to teachers as they are walking through the process. These appear on their Euna Special Education dashboard, and as the deadline approaches, a reminder email is sent to the user.
CJ also highlighted that meeting deadlines is important to prevent a gap of time where services aren’t provided for qualified students.
“[Teachers] are able to quickly learn what to do, go off their checklist, and look at the error checkers which [shows] them where they need to make corrections.”
Another feature Strafford has found to bring success is the text library. Verbiage can be difficult and time consuming when writing IEPs. Euna Special Education’s text library is customizable and allows a teacher to pull in frequently used paragraphs. Before the school year, CJ and the staff go through the library to refresh it for the year ahead. CJ stated that “the text library and goal implementing library save us a lot of time.”
Strafford R-VI’s special education program is thriving. They are meeting deadlines and staying in compliance, which is essential to student success.
Results
Strafford has successfully onboarded 3 new special education teachers this year. They have transitioned smoothly and reduced the amount of time that would have normally been needed to train new staff on compliance by using Euna Special Education’s checklist and error checker features.
They are now confidently completing the checklist set within the software and have not missed a single deadline this year. This has increased their compliance and allowed them to ensure that students are receiving all the related services they need.
Strafford is a growing district. They had 25 students with an IEP or 504 plan transfer into the district this year. Transfers have a deadline of 30 days that must be complied with, and because the surrounding districts use Euna Special Education as well, they were able to easily meet the transfer deadlines for all students.
Using Euna Special Education has allowed both new teachers and new students to smoothly transition into their new school.
“The reliability, the resources you have, and user-friendliness has been beneficial for me in my career as a teacher, coming back as a teacher and even as an administrator to help the other people.”
Over the last 13 years that Strafford schools have been using Euna Special Education, they have learned from the software and used it as a tool to achieve their ultimate goal, which is to help their students succeed.
With Strafford schools consistently growing, they use Euna Special Education to aid new teachers in learning processes quickly so they can be more successful in their endeavors.
They are now more confident than ever that they are meeting deadlines and staying in full compliance with evaluations and IEPs. Euna Special Education has helped them decrease the amount of time they have to spend writing IEPs and tracking evaluations, which in turn allows them to give time back to their students. They are showing great success through the staffing changes they have faced this year and continue to grow more efficient.
CJ is breaking ground as he has transitioned into being a special education director after a decade of experience as a special education teacher. His encouragement to other special education directors is that “being a new special education director is an overwhelming job but it’s a rewarding job. I would always recommend taking it day by day, make sure you’re in compliance…and be where your two feet are. When you are here, enjoy it, do your job, but also enjoy your family outside of that.”