Bedford Central BOE responds to special ed report

By JEFF MORRIS 

The Board of Education has received a report providing 14 recommendations for improving special education in the district. 

Toni Ann Carey, Bedford Central’s director of special education, presented a Special Education Action Plan Update at the board’s Sept. 17 meeting.

It is the district’s reaction to the report on the special education program that was delivered in February by Public Consulting Group.

The PCG report provided 14 recommendations for improving special education in the district. Carey said 14 recommendations with substeps within each seemed a little overwhelming, but PCG assured them there were other districts that had double that number. She said PCG helped look at it “one bite at a time” and create a three- to five-year plan. 

Carey said a survey was sent to staff asking which recommendations should initially be focused on, and that allowed them to narrow it down to the top four district priorities: Strengthen Collaboration between General Education and Special Education; Multi-Tiered Systems of Support; Least Restrictive Environment Continuum and Programming (Integrated Co-Teaching Expansion); and Comprehensive Workload Analysis.

The goal of strengthening collaboration between general and special education was one that “really resonated with staff across the district,” Carey said. It encourages everyone to move beyond their silos and work together as a district, and not look separately at children with different needs, such as IEPs or ELLs, but as “all of our students.” 

Carey noted, “The special education department can’t singlehandedly move initiatives forward unless we have the support of principals and administrators, and over the last two years I have felt incredibly supported by our district and our building administrators.” She added, “There’s no lack of willingness or intention to collaborate, but increasing this collaboration is really more about creating structures and systems where they may have been missing.” 

Carey said she had been working with Amy Fishkin, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and assessment, and Adrienne Viscardi, director of ESOL, to create those systems and structures.

Carey said while BCSD has had a robust system in place to provide academic intervention, the PCG report focused on adding social/emotional and behavioral supports for all students, and standardizing expectations for multi-tiered systems of support practices across the district. 

“Many of the findings of PCG for MTSS were already in the works through Amy’s team, but I think it’s important for us to have it as a priority in our plan to show the work that has been ongoing,” Carey said.

Integrated co-teaching, Carey said, has been part of the 6-12 continuum at Fox Lane middle and high schools, but PCG wants them to consider how to add it at the elementary level. She said this past winter, they looked at student projections at all five elementary schools, and determined there were cohorts of learners in the third and fourth grades at Bedford Village Elementary who may need an ICT model. A pilot program was created that is in place this school year, in which a special education teacher works with a teaching assistant to support two grade levels for 90 minutes a day. Students who need it are still able to receive specialized reading instruction for 45 minutes a day. The program includes consultation and prep time, and professional development for teachers. Carey said data from the pilot will help inform the development of future elementary ICT models.

According to Carey, the district’s related service providers and special education teachers go “above and beyond” every day in accordance with Bedford’s high expectations for collaboration and facilitating transfer of skills. “When PCG assessed our caseload, which is the number of students each provider has, what they really determined was that they were on par with local and state averages,” Carey said. “However, what that doesn’t account for is time spent on other essential tasks.” She said that is an underestimation of the actual demand and potential burnout for teachers. 

Completing an analysis of workload vs. caseload is important in order to allow providers to dedicate sufficient time to both direct services and indirect supports that will foster progress toward IEP goals, Carey said. She listed activities related to supporting students including planning, evaluations, meetings, progress monitoring, and supervision of paraprofessionals. “This analysis will help determine if our current flexible support model is still meeting our needs, or if we need to consider a different model,” she said.

Carey went on to list a number of other areas of focus for 2025-26. Among these is improved progress monitoring, providing parents with a clearer picture of their child’s skill development; trying to build capacity among staff in all schools with training in trauma deescalation strategies; and collaborative master scheduling, to provide students who need special education services with equal opportunities to access electives. She also said they are continuing to improve family engagement, keeping lines of communication with parents open. Carey also said the district is working on ensuring that the special education class curriculum includes emphasis on areas that are now being stressed in all the schools, such as literacy, even though this was not actually a recommendation of the PCG report.

In response to a question about how progress would be measured, Superintendent Robert Glass pointed out that the district Action Plan for 2025-26 includes the four priorities based on the PCG report, and it drills down in detail on how these steps are to be tracked for completion.

Glass thanked Carey and her team, along with Fishkin. “This plan would not have taken shape in the way that it did, without your flat-out leadership,” he said. “Being candid with PCG when you needed support, not being afraid to ask for it, asking for their guidance, never being defensive.” He said it had yielded a great plan forward, and he believed there is a lot of trust in the community in the plan, which he called “a big milestone.”