State plan for special education due in April

The Public School System Special Education program is drilling down on years of data to form a State Systemic Improvement Plan, or SSIP, ahead of an inflexible April 1 deadline.

SpED director Suzanne Lizama and Early Intervention interim coordinator Robin Palacios spoke to the Board of Education yesterday on the annual performance reports for their respective programs, describing the SSIP in the works.

The SSIP is a federal mandate that essentially lets the states “decide what is it you are going to do increase or improve results for kids with disabilities,” according to Education Commissioner Dr. Rita Sablan at the meeting.

An SSIP task force composed of principals, general and special education teachers, and curriculum and instruction staff was formed last year to tackle the plan.

According to Palacios, the SSIP in the works will reflect two to three years of data facilitated through technical help of the University of Guam’s CEDDARS program.

For Early Intervention, she said the SSIP would focus on the “child outcomes” area.

“For the past four years, the CNMI has not made any progress or gains in regards to this outcome area. Indicator 11 [SSIP] will allow us to focus more on this [child outcomes] indicator and develop a plan to have children increase behaviors to appropriately meet their needs,” she told board members.

“We are currently in the process of completing phase 1 of this process so we can hopefully by April determine what are the root causes. We do have bits and pieces of this but there is no determination as of why right now,” she said.

For the SSIP, she said they are required to desegregate date, looking at children ages at referral, their concerns at referral, whether they came in with Down syndrome, deaf or blindness for example, or if they have a developmental delay. They also looked at providers, how long have they served the family, how long has family received services, she said.

“We looked at many areas to try to figure out why progress is not being made,” she said.

Lizama said that PSS is “drilling down, drilling down, and drilling” in their work on the SSIP, which she described as similar to a “complete self-assessment” that will lead them to come up with a goal statement for the program.

She said this goal statement will “most likely be around literacy,” as according to her, across the nation and the CNMI, literacy and reading scores have stagnated.

“But we cannot just say that ‘Kids will increase literacy scores by whatever percentage.’ We got to drill it down even further. What is it about literacy? What is the something or somethings—is it specific schools, or is it specific kids, specific disability categories? So that is what we are all looking at now. Does ethnicity make a difference? Does disability…does time spent in general ed[ucation] make a difference?” she said.

PSS has been working on the plan the last three years, according to Sablan, undergoing professional training and bringing “key players” in to make sure the data they need is had.

According to her, there is no flexibility to the April 1 deadline, as all states were given charts on when these reports were supposed to be met and submitted in years past.

She said the SpED team and their stakeholders have been working on these indicators or target areas late through the night, ahead of the deadline.