November 17, 2015 at 1:30 PM - Special Population Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Call to order at 1:25

Discussion:  Staff: David Ludwig, Wade Fruhling, Deb Hericks

Discussion:  Steve Milliken was unable to attend today so will come to next meeting.

Discussion:  Executive Director will be meeting with Senator Campbell along with some administrators and SPED Directors. Work to create services that are already available across the state. There are not enough providers available for the services needed across the state.

Discussion:  Larianne Polk discussed the possibility of the ESUCC of hiring a consultant for hiring difficult positions (speech path, school psych, hearing impaired, etc.) Is there a need statewide to provide this kind of service? Not enough interest at this time.

Discussion:  Met with Dean Folkers and the ESU #3 SIMS Development team to explore the possibility of letting the Rule 18 schools use the SIMS School Information System to connect to the NDE Advisor System. ESU#3 SIMS team will look into what they would have to charge to bring SIMS to all of the Rule 18 schools. AAP could potentially be built into the SIMS software package.

Discussion:  Wade Fruhling gave a demo of the AAP website: aapnebraska.org

Discussion:  Para Educator Conference was held on October 29th in Kearney. Keynote from Sue Kemp (UNL Professor), Lunchtime speech by Dr. Blomstedt. Handed out two Para-educator of the year awards. Twenty Eight different break out sessions were offered. Wade Fruhling served as event photographer. Several new districts have joined Project Para and they have added 188 new participants

Discussion:  Most of the coding has been completed for the Bennington data Import/Export system and we are now in the testing phase. System will automatically create SRS records for all Bennington students from the data stored on their local SIMS system. SRS will send IEP Summary Forms to SIMS system to give teachers quick access to IEP data. SRS will send all NSSRS Report data to Bennington’s SIMS system nightly. The State’s NSSRS system alerts districts if there are missing kids on the NSSRS report, but for some reason that didn’t happen last June. This allowed a lot of kids who had exited special education to not have their exit reasons recorded by the State. To fix these problems, we had to generate many NSSRS reports by hand and date them as if they were the June 30 upload to fix these omissions. Ultimately, the glitch on the State’s NSSRS system exposed a weakness on the SRS system. SRS Staff have identified several improvements that we can make on SRS to prevent this from happening again. System Analyst is currently converting several older SRS forms to the Zend Framework Provided SRS trainings at ESU#15, Nebraska Wesleyan, UNO, and South Sioux City. Met with staff from West Point Public Schools to talk about ways to improve usability on SRS. Will be meeting Beatrice Public Schools staff in early December for a similar discussion. NSSRS Reporting was very challenging this year. SRS has a tool that will allow districts to generate the NSSRS Special Education report directly from our forms. Our system will only add a student to the report if the student has up-to-date IEPs and MDTs to pull data. When student’s exit Special Education during the school year their IEPs and MDTs are not re-newed and the forms become outdated. The outdated forms cause the records to be considered incomplete so they get left off of the report. Since the records are not on the report, the exit reason for those students never gets sent to the state

Discussion:  We continue to maintain the ILCD Staff Survey site. Our office emails the data (along with a summary) to school districts upon request. There was a stakeholder meeting yesterday in Lincoln for ILCD. Workshop to gather information to help to bring TIP (Targeted Improvement Plan) and School Improvement Plan (SIP) together. Several other plans could also be brought into the system.