Armstrong Middle School is now state mandated to improve its students with disabilities on English Language Arts.
Principal Julie Kennedy presented an improvement plan to the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District Board of Trustees on Tuesday night, which unanimously approved it.
AMS houses grades 6-8. About 150 of those students are considered to have disabilities.
Kennedy said AMS was notified by the Mississippi Department of Education in October, but her staff started implementing changes back in August.
“We actually noticed some things we wanted to change before we were targeted,” Kennedy said. “We took a look at our students with disabilities in ELA. We saw some areas of improvement, but our weakest area was in writing. So, that’s going to be our focus.”
AMS was listed as a Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) school based on those students remaining in the lowest 50 percent of overall accountability, largely due to the students’ performance on end-of-year state assessments.
Kennedy said the largest change at AMS since in August was immersing special education students into the general education classroom.
“We have seen that the students are enjoying it better being with their peers,” Kennedy said.
Benefits of inclusion
Julie Jones, SOCSD director of special education, said all schools within the district have started this process. In addition to inclusion, SPED students are now taking Case 21 benchmark assessments, which simulate state testing.
Jones said she expects to see student growth with more grade-level instruction rather than functional-level instruction.
“They were taught on their functional level, but they weren’t being exposed to their grade-level instruction,” Jones said. “While it is a difficult transition, they’re still getting their accommodations and modifications. When they are expected to do grade-level work, they’re going to recognize that material.”
Jones said special education students work in general education classrooms with both SPED and classroom teachers. Whenever those students need more focused instruction, the SPED teacher takes the student for any special services.
The state only allows SPED students with disabilities to receive a general high school diploma or a certificate of attendance, since the state discontinued the occupational diploma. Since those students take the same state tests as every other student, Jones said, it’s important to learn in a general education environment.
“If we’re expecting them to get a typical diploma then we’ve got to give them a chance,” Jones said.
Writing proficiency goals
Since the area most in need of improvement is writing, Kennedy said students with disabilities will write more often in response to daily activities.
Teachers will work with these students on organization and grammar. The goal is to have these students using grade-level word choice and sentence structure, she added.
Another change this year, Kennedy said, is SPED teachers have become more specialized for each grade level. Rather than having general SPED teachers for each grade, now there are specific ELA and math SPED teachers for sixth, seventh and eighth grade.
All grade level state testing goals for the year are focused specifically on the writing portion. Kennedy said she wants sixth grade to increase proficiency from 22.5 percent to 25 percent, seventh grade from 22.9 percent to 25 percent and eighth grade from 32.1 percent to 35 percent.
“For a typical student, you want to shoot for 5-percent growth,” Jones said. “With our students with disabilities, we thought 2.5- to 3-percent growth was a good goal to shoot for … an attainable goal.”
Kennedy told the board that MDE has not released how much growth is necessary to no longer be considered a targeted school, but said she hopes the goals in place will grow students enough to no longer be a TSI.
“We’re always trying to get better in every area,” Kennedy said. “I think we just take what we’ve done and look at the data and see where we made improvements — and if we did not — and then we will make those adjustments.”
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