Elevating Special Education
October 4, 2010 in Special Needs News by Admin Dawn
“Children with disabilities will only meet their potential if they have effective teachers,” says John O’Connor, executive director for special services at DeKalb (Ga.) County School System, a metropolitan Atlanta school district in the second-largest county in the state.
Through an intense collaborative effort, O’Connor has helped reinvent instruction for special education students who, combined with ELLs, amount to about 17 percent of the total student population.
O’Connor came to DeKalb in 2006 after teaching special education for students with orthopedic impairments and serving as an administrator. Forty-one percent of students with disabilities spent 80 percent or more of their school day in general education classes. “We needed to increase inclusion and to improve instruction in our general and special education classes for students with disabilities.”
Read more here: Elevating Special Education.
Thanks for sharing this Dawn. It’s inspiring to say the least. I am not in GA. I’m in NY but what John O’Connor said is precisely what all school systems that service special needs children, need to embrace.
Michelle