Students with remedial or special needs occupied much of the discussion time at the Feb. 9 Bayfield School Board meeting.
Two middle school teachers described their special classes for sixth graders who are significantly behind in math or reading. Some students are behind in both.
"Some of the sixth graders aren't reading well at all," reading intervention specialist Stephanie Dennison said. Testing in the second quarter showed students up to two years behind on reading skills, she said. Fourteen students were moved into her 8th period reading class.
"The challenge I've noticed with 6th graders they think they read fine and don't need to be in my class," Dennison said. "They're reading really fast but not understanding what they read. ... Kids insist it was the computer that was messed up, not them. I showed them they really are low."
She continued, "The kids come with strategies to make it look like they can read. ... They'll do whatever they can to get out of the class" such as repeated trips to the bathroom or getting in trouble to get sent to the office. "They are reluctant readers. They'll do anything they can to get out of it."
Dennison said, "I tell them we're going to fix it this year. We don't have time to sugar-coat this. ... You don't want to be in ninth or tenth grade and not be able to do your homework." Along with the sixth graders, she is working individually with a seventh grader "who just can't read." He is good at math until it involves reading.
With intervention, she said, "What we are finding with these kids is a huge increase in their reading range." They want to know how they did on quarterly assessment tests, and they see that they are making progress. One student graduated out of the class at Christmas, she said, and another was on track to graduate out in February.
"I have one little girl moving up half a year with each test, but she won't be where she needs to be by the end of the (school) year. She will still need support."
Dennison attributes the success to small class size and getting the kids "to think about their thinking."
But a lot more kids need the intervention. "We have 30 to 40 kids that need to be in the class if we could take them. Right now it's just the bottom group." Just in the sixth grade, she said three more reading intervention classes are probably needed, plus five or six in the very large seventh grade class.
Math teacher Bonnie Albright said that in the first and second quarters, she had around 21 sixth graders in her intervention class, with almost half of them at a second or third grade level in math. "The program I use can target gaps in foundation skills, so they can function in my regular class," she said.
One issue with these kids, she said, is, "They want you to spoon feed them. I think they're trained that if they ask enough, the teacher will give them the answer. I tell them to work it out." They are learning a life skill, "how to figure out stuff on their own."
"In the first quarter, I had some go from third to fifth-grade level. There was a lot of growth. ... In the second quarter, everyone moved out of second-grade level, many from third to fourth-grade level." She is not teaching the intervention class this quarter.
Andrea Bogle from the San Juan Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) told the school board that the district has 112 students in K-12 identified with some type of disability. BOCES provides specialists, including Bogle, to work with these kids in nine districts around Southwest Colorado.
Among the 112, 40.5 percent have specific learning disabilities, according to a pie chart Bogle provided. Next at 15.5 percent is speech/language impairment, followed by 12.9 percent with a health impairment and 12.1 percent with developmental disabilities.
The goal is to get kids with significant disabilities into regular educational programs as much as possible, with support in the classroom and social/emotional learning, Bogle said. At the high school it includes Alternate Cooperative Education (ACE) which provides training in vocational and independent living skills.
