Episode Details

Superintendent Godfrey:
Hello, and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Today, we hear about some of the amazing work being done every day in Jordan School District to take care of students with special needs, especially during a pandemic. We have Kim Lloyd, Director for Special Education. Kim, welcome on the program.

Kim:
Thank you.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Later on, we have the chance to speak with Susie Cuzme, who is a teacher at Kauri Sue Hamilton School. But before we talk with Susie, I wanted to talk with Kim and give our listeners a bit of an idea of what Special Education involves in Jordan School District. You have gone to a lot of work, along with your staff, to help continue to provide services for students with disabilities through the soft closure in the spring, and I know you're doing a lot to gear up for the fall and it's complicated because you're meeting a wide variety of needs and expectations. And so, I just know you've put a lot of work into that, and I really appreciate what you and your staff have been doing.

Kim:
Thank you. Our staff has put a lot of time, effort and energy into meeting the needs of students, as well as following guidelines.

Superintendent Godfrey:
There are a lot of protections in place for students with disabilities, as there should be. And as a result, we put plans together as a District for providing an education, and then your team and our Special Education teachers and specialists, take it from there to be sure that they're able to meet IEP goals, based on what we're doing for the general population of students.

Kim:
We do. We have teacher specialists that work with teachers on how to meet those goals and how to follow the procedures of IEP and meet the overall federal guidelines from IDEA, which is the federal law that we work in under Special Ed. There are several things we had to come up with on how to hold IEP meetings at a distance, how to sign IEP meetings, evaluations that we had to defer until we could have that face-to-face with kids. Now we are also currently working on how to come back to school and provide those services, keeping our staff and students as safe as possible.

Superintendent Godfrey:
And there's a big compliance element, always to Special Education, but it goes well beyond that. It goes to just caring about these kids and their needs and making sure that the momentum that has been created by teachers isn't lost and that learning continues and kids continue to feel cared for and receive the support that they need to learn at the very best levels they can.

Kim:
Yes. And compliance is a big piece of that. Like you said, our teachers love our students. They care about our students. They want the best for our students. There are those compliance pieces that we do need to stay within the law on. We do need to make sure that our students are evaluated, that they're meeting our IEP goals, that they have data to say that either we need to change IEP goals or we need to meet and change those IEP goals so that they're more relevant to students. The documentation, all of our testing, all of our related services. We've had to come up with creative ways to meet those online and make sure that kids were making progress as much as possible online. We're also spending a large amount of time trying to come up with how we're going to come back to school and keep all of our students safe, our staff safe, and everybody able to learn.

Superintendent Godfrey:
It's a big task. And I know that most p