In the Press/Awards

“This is tough work. It’s a lot of work but it’s the right work,” Phelps said.

Part of the challenge is to find the best ways that individual children learn and then adapt accordingly, she said.

On Jan. 20, Hillebrecht led her co-taught (two teachers in the same classroom) class in a game about natural disasters. Students had to communicate without using words to complete sentences with facts about natural disasters and then read them aloud for the rest of the class to repeat.

“Nearly 50 percent of that class is special ed and you’d never know,” she said outside of her classroom. “They love interacting with each other.”

A Poway Unified School District program that has redesigned special education services and instruction to move more students into the general education setting has been honored with a state award.

The district received the the Golden Bell Award from the California School Board Association in the special education category for its Inclusive Practices Program.

At our recent “State of the District” event, PUSD leadership shared stories of success, innovation and challenges within our 39 schools. But one story that really stood out to me and our audience was the story shared by Associate Superintendent Greg Mizel about a young child. He described how the little girl’s mother came up to their principal one day at school and through tears, told him that for the first time in the four years since her child had been attending that elementary school, she had received her first-ever invitation to a classmate’s birthday party.

Poway Unified School District is launching a pilot program in an attempt to take an innovative approach to special education, bringing children with learning disabilties together with the general education population.

 
 

About a dozen of the students in the class are in special education, and the rest are their general education peers. Watching them work, you can’t easily tell who is who. They work in groups of three or four, with a teacher and instructional aid moving between clusters of students to guide them.