Bethel begins transition of special education students to neighborhood schools

This story has been updated to clarify statements made by Logan Grasseth about the increased need for special education in schools outside of Bethel School District.

Special education students in the Bethel School District will soon go to the same schools as their neighborhood peers.

Bethel will begin a two-year transition this fall of integrating students with social communication challenges into their neighborhood schools from self-contained classrooms. 

The change will bring Bethel up to national special education standards, incorporate more inclusive ways of learning, and potentially increase special education graduation rates.

Teachers, however, are nervous about the change.

Bethel leaders budgeted about $1.2 million to support teachers in the first year of the rollout with extra staffing and professional development. But educators are worried about their ability to manage behavioral issues.

An influx of high-needs kindergarteners

The needs for special education are growing in the district – and will continue for the foreseeable future.

Bethel’s Kindergarten Transition Team noticed the trend when its members visited preschool programs, met with kids and performed evaluations last year.

Their incoming kindergarteners were going to need much more support than in previous years.

Bethel’s director of student services, Logan Grasseth, estimates that nearly 30% of Bethel’s incoming kindergarten class will qualify for special-education services, in contrast to the 18% of all Bethel students who are currently eligible for those services.

“It is unique,” Grasseth said. “It’s something that we haven’t historically seen before.” 

Bethel is not alone. Nationwide, there has been increased need for special education in the past few years, and Grasseth can only speculate on the reasons. The most rapidly increasing diagnosis for students who qualify for special education in Bethel is autism.

Bethel, however, is the only district in the area that still has self-contained classrooms for special education students. There are currently four “social communication classrooms” in the Bethel district, located at Meadow View School and Prairie Mountain School, that serve 36 kindergarten through fifth-grade students.

Grasseth said the classrooms are hard to keep staffed and rarely lead to special education students returning to general education classrooms, which is the goal. The Social Communication Classrooms are also at capacity.

This was the tipping point that spurred Grasseth and his staff to move to a different model.

Inclusive teaching; beefed-up staff

While first- through fifth-grade students can stay in the self-contained classrooms for one more year before moving to their nearest elementary school, kindergarteners with disabilities will go straight into general education classrooms within their neighborhood schools.

However, the district does not expect kindergarten teachers to bear the full brunt of the change.

This year, leaders added a special education assistant to each kindergarten classroom, and each classroom will have three adults. These special educational assistants will help the teacher and another educational assistant assigned to the classroom.

Next year, when all special education students move to their neighborhood schools, centrally located special education teachers will be spread across the schools. The district will reduce the number of educational assistants in kindergarten classrooms back to one next year.

Grasseth said each student’s time in the general education setting will vary based on their specific needs.

“We will have some students who do receive more services in the resource room in their neighborhood school,” Grasseth said. “But it does start them guaranteed in a general education setting to start the day.”

The district also put more emphasis on professional development for kindergarten teachers this year, hosting its third Special Education Summer Institute during the third week of August for all staff. The training included workshops on different topics, including neurodiversity, trauma-informed practices and inclusive literacy instruction.

To make their classrooms more accessible for students with disabilities, teachers will be encouraged to have more routines, visuals, sensory tools, small group instruction and explicit instruction, which is the “I do, we do, you do” model of teaching that has proven to be effective for students of all abilities.

Behavior management concerns

Nancy Mackay, a speech language pathologist at the University of Oregon’s Early Childhood CARES program, works with young children with disabilities from across Lane County before they are old enough to attend kindergarten. She also has teacher friends in Bethel schools who are worried about the special education changes. Mackay wrote a letter to the Bethel School Board opposing the new policy.

She’s worked with children in the class of kindergarteners who are entering schools this fall. She’s most worried about behavioral disruptions teachers will face and potential safety concerns if students get violent or leave school grounds.

“There are more and more behavior issues in the younger kids and we don’t really know why,” Mackay said. “I don’t think there’s any one reason why.”

But not all children who are eligible for special education have disruptive behaviors. Some just need a high level of support that Mackay doesn’t see a general education classroom providing.

“They’re learning to learn,” she said. “They’re learning to attend a group activity, they’re learning to go to circle time, they’re learning to transition — inside, outside, bathroom — they’re learning to sit together at snack and not have significant meltdowns, they’re learning to go to a table and do an activity that’s a teacher’s idea. So that’s kind of where these kids are at, and then putting them into a regular classroom is going to be a shock.”