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The Montana Legislative Audit Division has completed its information systems audit of OPI’s statewide student information system, AIM – Achievement in Montana.  The purpose of the audit was to 1) Verify controls are in place to ensure the availability of real time data in AIM;  2) Ensure controls are in place to prevent unauthorized access to student data in AIM;  3) Verify processing controls are in place to ensure AIM data completeness; and 4) Ensure AIM is generating accurate reports.  Click here to review the audit report Achievement in Montana: Security of Student Information for the Office of Public Instruction.

What: Do you need to know more about how to promote successful outcomes for your students in the area of math skills? Come to the MASP Summer Institute to discover how to apply recent research findings in your classroom. Learn the essentials of math preparation that we now know underlie proficiency in mathematics, including the importance of effective instruction. Find out the implications for identifying mathematics disabilities and for planning intervention. This is an important conference because there is a great deal of new evidence about how to foster the acquisition of good math skills, information that is not widely known yet. This will be one of the first opportunities that most people in our audience will have to learn about current knowledge on how children learn mathematics and how that learning can go wrong.

Dates and Times: June 12, 13, and 14, 2011 Registration opens at 5 o'clock on Sunday evening, June 12, 2011. The conference begins at 6:30 on Sunday evening and concludes for the evening at 9:30. On the following days, June 13 and 14, the conference continues from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm. The doors open at 8 o'clock each morning. Location Where: Hilton Garden Inn Treasure State Salon A & B 2465 Grant Road, Billings, Montana, USA 59102 (near Costco and Best Buy) Tel: 406-655-8800 Fax: 406-655-8802

More Information: Please see the website for more details

Academic achievement is a strong predictor of high school graduation and is critical to long-term success in college, work, and life. A sixth grader who fails math or English, has unsatisfactory behavior, or poor attendance has a 75% likelihood of dropping out.

Click here to register What: We are excited to announce our next webinar in the Achieving Excellence and Innovation in Family, School, and Community Engagement series. This webinar will highlight innovative practices that facilitate the transition to high school, information about how schools can help families stay engaged in their children's education during the high school years, and services that offer essential information and assistance for students and their families throughout the college application process. When: June 23, 2011 at 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Click here to register for this webinar What: The Real Lives, Real Stories webinar will give VR personnel specific, real cases of 3-6 transition age individuals with autism who have achieved competitive employment or are in the process of seeking and achieving competitive, customized employment. This webinar will address the stories and lives of at least 3 individual (Ian’s Story, Chelsea’s Story, Katelyn’s Story, Vincent’s Story, Ashley’s Story, and/or William’s Story) and will cover: An overview including video of the individual. The process of how their goals are decided and a description of the employment outcome. The personal supports each person needs and how they are provided. The paid supports each person needs and how they are provided. Where the person is now and plans for near future. It is expected that VR staff who participate the webinar will learn about the variety of interests, skills, and needs of individuals with autism and the possibilities for employment. In addition, staff will be given general; and specific information about specific types of paid, unpaid, formal, and natural supports individuals may need. When: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 10:00am - 11:00am Mountain Registration: Click here to register for this webinar Deadline for registration is Sept. 5, 2011 The webinar is free of charge.

In October 2010, The Atlantic Published an article entitled, “Autism’s First Child.”  This article chronicled the first documented case of Autism in medical literature dating back to 1943.  However, this article was really more about the man, Donald Triplett, a 77-year-old Mississippian, and his enviable life.  The author of the article, Caren Zucker, explains it best when she said: We wanted readers to come away with a critical lesson — that in real and material ways, the quality of life achievable by a person with autism (or with any disability for that matter) depends significantly on how successfully and spontaneously any society recognizes the humanity of that person in its midst. In short, pity isn’t much help. But community is, when community implies connectedness, inclusiveness, caring, and, quite simply, good old-fashioned friendship. 

Six-year-old Charlie Jones gets super excited when Skyler Bexten, 18, comes over to take care of him and his 3-year-old brother, Max. “It’s kind of hard to excite Charlie with someone coming over,” his mother, Elizabeth Cummings, said.  Both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, Skyler and Charlie share an unspoken deep understanding and a bond that continues to grow. For Cummings, Skyler provides a role model for her son and the community of what people with autism can achieve and contribute. “His success has been tremendous,” she said of Skyler. “He is a fully mainstreamed student who will graduate with honors from Glacier High School this spring.”

Approximately 32 percent of students report being bullied at school. Bullied students are more likely (1) to take a weapon to school, get involved in physical fights, and suffer from anxiety and depression, health problems, and mental health problems. They suffer academically (2) (especially high-achieving black and Latino students). And research suggests that schools where students report a more severe bullying climate score worse (3) on standardized assessments than schools with a better climate.

We all know it takes a village to raise a child and to make sure that child receives a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE); the two most important components in making that happen are the parents and the school.  In order to do that, everyone needs to do be responsible for their role in educating that child as well as work together to address all their areas of need.  I know it’s not an easy task to accomplish; however, the student will have a better opportunity to receive FAPE if both parties work together instead of spending their time working against each other.  Here are some tips that might help to achieve a good working relationship between parents and schools.

Students with learning disabilities (LD) may struggle with schoolwork in many different areas. While most are likely to have trouble with reading, others may have issues with math, memory, organization, or writing. Assistive technology (AT) can be a great way to minimize the extent to which they need to ask for help and to enable them to be more independent learners. Assistive technology (sometimes referred to as "adaptive technology") is a general term that describes the types of tools and devices that assist people to achieve greater independence. For individuals with LD, assistive technology can include such things as scanners and screen reading software, voice recognition software, calculators, highlighting and note-taking programs, electronic/digital organizers, and much more.

The success rate among the graduates of  America’s Special Education Programs has been studied and criticized for decades. In 2005, Dr. Frank Rusch of Pennsylvania State University and this writer addressed the issue related to the inability of young special education high school graduates to achieve success in employment, post-secondary education, adequate housing and community acquiescence. According to the study, Rusch and Pizzuro wrote: “Young adults with disabilities typically leave publicly funded educational institutions without a job, without being enrolled in postsecondary education, and without the security of knowing their roles in society. Fewer than 30 percent of high school leavers obtain jobs after departing mandated education and fewer than 10 percent enroll in postsecondary education. The past 25 years has witnessed continued poverty among young adults with disabilities, despite legislative reauthorizations aimed at improving educational opportunities (The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004) and employment access (The Americans with Disabilities Act).”

Although there are a variety of school-based services available for children with learning, emotional, and social disabilities, one critical need often goes unfulfilled: providing guidance and strategies that instill self-advocacy.       Most students have only a superficial notion of the reasons they receive these special accommodations, and many children are completely uninformed. Resource teachers and specialists do not generally have the authority to label and enlighten students about their disabilities, the foundation for building self-advocacy. If children are to learn how to become better consumers of educational resources, especially as they grow older, someone must take the lead.      Parents of children with disabilities can fill this role by doing the following: Introduce children’s diagnoses to them in elementary school so that they can make sense out of their struggles Use a matter-of-fact tone of voice when explaining to children that they learn/behave/relate differently from other students and, therefore, need extra help to ensure that they can succeed just like their classmates Don’t leave out the disability label—such as writing disability, ADHD, or Aspergers Syndrome—since labels are a reality of their educational life Emphasize that the teachers and special staff at school who help them will be aware of this label and prepared to help in certain ways to make school a fairer place for them to learn and grow      It’s important to review with children the ways in which their school must provide special help and services. Emphasize that these accommodations are rules the school must follow. “You have the responsibility to do your best job, and teachers must follow the learning/behavior/friendship helping rules that make things fair for you,” is one way to put it. Explain how extra time on assessments, decreased homework, or social skills groups are examples of the helping rules that schools must follow. Discuss how there is a written promise called the individualized education plan (IEP), which includes all the helping rules and makes all of this clear.      Find child-friendly resources—such as books, websites, and videos—that explain in detail their specific disability and the ways other children have learned to cope and achieve despite these limitations. Use these materials as a springboard for deeper discussion about past times when their disability created significant stress or barriers to success. Reassure them that this was before their problem was known and that there is so much that can be done to build a plan for success now that it has been identified.      Point out that one of their most important responsibilities is to be able to discuss their disability with teachers and ask for extra help and accommodation when struggles are too great. Make sure that these discussions take place before middle school, when developmental factors make it harder to get such discussions started. Ensure that they know what practical steps are in their IEP at each grade so that they can respectfully remind teaching staff if necessary.      Having a disability is like having to wear glasses; students with glasses have accepted this fact as necessary to seeing clearly.

The report, commissioned by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, offers a number of recommendations for policymakers and educators. They include: high expectations for all learners with accountability measures that indicate how individual students are doing; early-childhood programs that prepare children for reading and identify young children at risk of having reading problems; curricula, instructional practices and tools, and assessments that are science-based and accessible to all students; and teacher training and ongoing professional development that incorporate findings from neuroscience as well as best practices for how to teach reading.

The Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act considers the issues of “self-determination, independence, productivity, and integration and inclusion in all facets of community life” for individuals with developmental disabilities. All of these values presume respect for people with developmental disabilities. Where respect is lacking, self determination and independence are often denied. Integration and inclusion without respect become merely symbolic. As we celebrate Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month 2012, it is clear we have achieved much over the past 50 years, but we still have far to go before we can claim full success.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, Learning Ally serves more than 300,000 K-12, college and graduate students, veterans and lifelong learners – all of whom cannot read standard print due to blindness, visual impairment, dyslexia, or other learning disabilities. Learning Ally’s collection of more than 70,000 digitally recorded textbooks and literature titles – downloadable and accessible on mainstream as well as specialized assistive technology devices – is the largest of its kind in the world. More than 6,000 volunteers across the U.S. help to record and process the educational materials, which students rely on to achieve academic and professional success. 

A Washington, D.C. newspaper is facing rebuke after an editorial written by its own staff criticized federal efforts to hire more people with disabilities. The opinion piece from The Washington Times editorial board focused on a recent U.S. Department of Justice memo informing employees about the agency’s plan to hire more people with so-called targeted disabilities including cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness and severe intellectual disability. “Most employers would balk at even minor mental disabilities in hiring a lawyer, let alone severe ones. But the policy states that the Cabinet department run by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. must ‘achieve a work force from all segments of society,’ which includes those who are teetering on the edge of sanity,” The Washington Times said in its Aug. 22 editorial. The commentary is drawing strong backlash from disability advocates who say the criticisms are baseless and rely on untrue information. “While the Times editorial suggests applicants with disabilities would be fast-tracked into jobs at the DOJ without due screening and assessment, the DOJ memo clearly states otherwise,” said Jonathan Young, chair of the National Council on Disability. “To mischaracterize the DOJ initiative with fear-mongering and hyperbole misses the point.”

Raising the achievement of students with learning disabilities is hard, expensive, controversial and complex. School systems must pay private school tuition for students they can’t adequately serve. Educators and parents sometimes disagree on what methods to use. Education writers like me rarely deal with the subject because it is difficult to explain and lacks many success stories. That explains in part why learning disabilities are so poorly understood, as revealed by a remarkable survey just released by the nonprofit National Center for Learning Disabilities. The representative sampling of 2,000 Americans provides a rare look at the depths of our ignorance. Forty-three percent believe that learning disabilities correlate with IQ. Fifty-five percent think that corrective eyewear can treat certain learning disabilities. Twenty-two percent believe that learning disabilities can be caused by spending too much time watching computer or television screens. All of those impressions are wrong.

one of seven charter schools run by the non-profit UCP, affiliated with the central Florida chapter of United Cerebral Palsy. And it’s unique in several ways. Half of its students are like Ellie and don’t have a disability. The other half has disabilities such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and autism. New research suggests this mix of students raises achievement — not only for the students with disabilities, but their non-disabled classmates as well.

Some of this year's workshops include: Writing, Bollywod Dancing, Understanding Money, Dance NIA, DIY Fashion, International Culture, Intro to College, Japanese Drumming, Taekwondo, Personality Exploration, Sustainable Energy, Cooking and more!What:Keynote speaker and President of Montana State University, Dr. Waded Cruzado is the first woman and first minority to serve as a university president in the state of Montana. Her commitment to teaching and volunteer service is certain to be an inspiration for all Montana girls. History of GFAC:Girls for a Change is a grass-roots initiative designed to empower girls to embrace their future--confident in their individuality, supported by friends, parents and mentors, and secure in their ability to lead and achieve self-sufficiency, fulfillment, balance and success. Founded in 1997 by sixteen girls and their female mentors, Girls for a Change (GFAC) is a signature program of Thrive devoted to supporting and encouraging the successful development of girls.GFAC Activities:Each year GFAC plans an annual conference, does one local and one international community service project, participates and facilitates workshops and attends a retreat. GFAC participants also meet and facilitate activities with international visitors resulting in an ongoing dialogue about girls' and womens' issues in different cultures. Outcomes of GFAC:Girls feel confident about themselves and their ability to succeed--Girls gain public speaking skills--Girls are empowered to accomplish their goals and dreams--Girls learn what strengths they already possess and how to build on those strengths--Girls learn that there are all different kinds of beauty--Girls gain exposure to other girls from different social, cultural and international backgrounds--Girls learn to work together as a team. When:Saturday, February 25, 2012 Where:MSU Strand Union BuildingBozeman, MTContact:Email: gfac@allthrive.orgPhone: (406)587-3840Website: allthrive.org