Sensory Santa 2021

 

Sensory Santa has now opened sign up.

Sensory Santa is a time for individuals with special needs to meet Santa in a calm sensory friendly setting. Family's are scheduled to meet with Santa and are able to let them meet Santa at their comfort level.

Dec 4th - Paoli Friends Meeting ( 301 N Gospel St, Paoli, IN 47454 ) Dec 11th - River's Edge Fellowship Church ( 2900 35th street Bedford, IN 47421 )

Home Santa visits may be scheduled for families if they feel coming to a visit site would be too risky for their family.

To Sign-up for Sensory Santa please visit the link below or call Community Inclusion Ambassadors Inc at (812) 329-0216

https://forms.gle/4fyMuCG2UhrYXLez5

Paoli Friends Food Pantry Project

 

Paoli Friends Food Pantry Project

The Paoli Friends Food Pantry Project is complete. At 8 in the morning on Thursday Oct 14th volunteers started out to pick up the new shelving carts and other started to prepare the food pantry room. By 6:30 that evening the last cans were placed in their spots. Volunteers from Community Inclusion Ambassadors, Paoli Friends Meeting, and Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana troop 6175 pulled together for this project that was made possible by the Amazon Gives program.

The Paoli Friends Food Pantry serves the community as an emergency food resource by helping to bridge times of food insecurity for families. The PFFP is operated by the Paoli Friends Meeting A Quaker Church with pastor Mark Tope coordinating the food pantry. 

Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana Troop #6175 is planning a service project collecting items for the food pantry and we will share more information once the girl scouts have the service project ready.  

Community Inclusion Ambassadors Inc. is a 501c3 non-profit organization that operates to help families raising children with disabilities and to develop resources for families.   If you would like to help support our work for local families please visit our website www.ourcia.org or https://www.paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/3998069

Do you know our SEMP?

 

SEMP 

Special Education Monitoring Program

Starting the 2021 -2022 school year Community Inclusion Ambassadors special education advocates will be using a SEMP to track reports of issues that are effecting students with disabilities. This new system we are hoping will help identify issues and allow the advocates to see if its a isolated issues or a systemic issues. Thus allowing the advocates to develop appropriate response plans and collect supportive data incase the issue needs referred to regulator oversight agency's. 

The Special Education Monitoring Program needs the communities help to find issues that may be occurring. We ask that if you hear of concerning issues in special education programs that you please fill out our online form so that the Special Education Advocates are alerted of the issues and can do an initial assessment of the report.  The more details you can give in your report will help the advocates in using SEMP to make meaningful changes to improve special education programs in the region. 

Anyone can send fill out our report parents, aunties and uncles, Grandparents, neighbors, youth ministers, teachers and aids, school administration.

 Issues we know are happening but need more information on ( this is not a full list of all IEP issues that could come up and we would still like to know of the issues):  

• Bullying of students with disabilities ( By students and staff members)
• Refusing to Evaluate a student for Special education services.
• Requiring a parent to get a note for family doctor for ADD or ADHD before the school will evaluate a student for special education services.
• Telling families a child is required to be on medication for ADD or ADHD to attend pubic school
• Schools putting students on reduced days due to behaviors with no IEP goals of returning to full days.
• Schools refusing to allow parents to have a meaningful role as a IEP team member. 
• Schools refusing to give families Prior Written Notice (PWN) 
• Schools Refusing to set IEP Meetings at a time and location that is mutually agreed upon. 
• Schools failing to do reevaluations when its needed ( Reevaluation is to be considered every 3 years or when a parent or teacher feels its needed to help develop the IEP)
• Special education students left on school buses alone.
• Schools Predetermining students placement or IEP supports with out parents involvement. 
• Schools not meeting the requirements of child find. (1)

Fill your a SEMP report form here:  https://forms.gle/HNCXVBptu5qBQC2EA

(1)Child Find in Indiana Article 7: 511 IAC 7-40-1 Child find ( Sec. 1. (a) The public agency shall establish, maintain, and implement written procedures that ensure the location, identification, and evaluation of all students three (3) years of age, but less than twenty-two (22) years of age, who are in need of special education and related services, regardless of the severity of their disabilities, including students who: (1) have legal settlement within the jurisdiction of the public agency; (2) attend a nonpublic school, are served by an agency, or live in an institution located within the jurisdiction of the public agency; (3) are homeless students as defined at 511 IAC 7-32-46; (4) are wards of the state; (5) are highly mobile students, including migrant students; and (6) are suspected of being students with disabilities in need of special education even though they are advancing from grade to grade. )

August Report

  

As August comes to an end and we can see that this school year is busy already. 

Special Education Advocacy Program ( SEAP )

Our Special Education Advocacy Program is fully volunteer just like all of the Community Inclusion Ambassadors.  

The 2021-2022 School year starts our new Special Education Monitoring Program (SEMP).  This system has been in the planning for the last year to help us timely find concerns in area special education programs along with supporting if the concerns are systemic issues or  isolated individual events.  Any parent, community member or teacher can submit a concern into the system for our advocates to start monitoring. This can be done anonymously or a person can add their contact information to allow our advocates to follow up on concerns.  

Submit concerns to:  https://forms.gle/bSe6YSBizxbRHYa4A

Report of concerns about North Lawrence Community Schools  special education programs were received.  The SEAP Team issued a letter of concern ( https://www.ourcia.org/2021/08/letter-of-concern-to-nlcs-board-about.html ) to the board of NLCS. Due to not receiving a timely response from NLCS that fully addressed the concerns our lead advocate presented the concerns and available supporting data to the rest of the board of directors.  On 8/18/2021 our Lead Special Education Advocate filed a formal complaint with the state of Indiana bringing the concerns to the state and requesting they look into the matter on behalf of students with disabilities in the North Lawrence Community Schools system.  At this time the matter is now in the hands of the start department of education and we entrust that they are investigating the matter fully.  We will update families once we know the outcome of the state's investigation.

Our Advocates have already been working with families in Orange, Lawrence, and Washington counties this school year.  If you would like to talk with a Special Education Advocate please reach out to us at:  (812) 329-0216 or email: PatrickU@ourcia.org

Family Activities / Sensory Friendly Programs

August brought a covid spike to our area resulting in families having children put in close contact quarantine. Due to this our board felt that we could not safely host an event for families.  We start to look at activities that we could do for the time being that allow social spacing.  We are working with a movie licensing company to start our sensory friendly movies.  We are currently trying to get the approval with a community partner to be the host site for monthly movies for the next year ( Our licenses will only cover one location for 1 year).  As soon as we have the location approved we will set the first Sensory Friendly Movie Night date. 

We are working on planning our Halloween activity To Cute to Spook for October.  Move information to come late September to early October. 

Sensory Santa will be coming back for the first two weeks of December. We are working to set our Dates and times for Santa visit sites, we will also have home visits available for families that feel it's not safe for a child to come to one of the events.  Keep an eye out for more information late October.

Donations

This is one of the harder areas for me to talk about.  We are blessed to have the support of community partners to help make programs available in our community. We are a fully volunteer organization and with the help of our community we are able to develop our programs for families.  Donations very greatly but they all have an impact on helping families.  

The donation of time helps us as our volunteers lead planning of activities, the set up and running of events and advocate for studetns with disabilities.

 The donation of goods and services allow us to have resources at events for families. Families see the in-kind donations of goods and services as the food at events, prizes during events, the use of buildings or locations for the events.  

The donation of funds helps us to purchase supplies. Online donations can be made at our online charity portal: paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/3998069

Letter of Concern to NLCS Board about Parkview Elementary

 This has been Emailed to the North Lawrance Community Schools Board and the State of Indiana Deparment of Special Education as a Letter of concern for the students at Parkview Elementary.  

Dear: North Lawrence Community School Board

The responsibility to ensure students are receiving a Free and Appropriate Public Education is entrusted to you by the families in your school district. Concerns are being voiced by families and community members for the educational needs of students with disabilities in your district. 

1. Reports of Parkview Elementary being short staff in the special education classrooms. Resulting in One Special education teacher covering two self contained classrooms.  

This is concerning as it impacts the students ability  to access meaningful learning from a qualified teacher ( 511 IAC 7-36-2 Special education program personnel and 511 IAC 7-36-11 Caseload ) . Without a qualified teacher and a reasonable caseload our concern would be that the students' education would not be appropriate. 

 

2. We have received reports of students in the self contained special education classrooms at Parkview Elementary not receiving specials such as art and music class like their peers in general education classes are receiving. This is concerning to us as the Students in self contained classrooms still have their rights under Least Restrictive Environment as outlined in 511 IAC 7-42-10 Least restrictive environment and delivery of special education and related services

(b) The public agency must do the following: (1) Take steps to make available to students with disabilities the variety of educational programs and services that are made available to nondisabled students served by the public agency, including the following: (A) Vocational education. (B) Art. (C) Music. (D) Industrial arts. (E) Consumer and homemaking education. (F) Field trips. (G) Convocations.

In Conclusion community members within your district have concerns and there is a need to work on building trust and communication with the special education families. We request that North Lawrence Community Schools take Immediate corrective actions and our recommendations are:

1. Hiring of Licensed teaching staff to bring staffing levels to an appropriate level for the caseload in special education services. 

2. Ensure all students with disabilities have equal access to special classes as outlined in 511 IAC 7-42-10

3. Development of a parent advisory council, committee, task force, or group. As outlined in 511 IAC 7-36-1 Parent and community participation.  

4. The creation of a Parent Liaison position within the NLCS special education department to work on strengthening  Parent / School relationships. 

Sincerely 

Patrick Underwood

Board President / Lead Special Education Advocate 

Community Inclusion Ambassadors Inc.

Phone: 812-329-0216   Email: PatrickU@ourcia.org

Back to School Fundriser

 

As school starts back our advocates are actively brushing up on special education policy both federal ( IDEA) and State of Indiana ( Article 7).  We know that families will be having questions and concerns within our monitoring area and we offer no-cost advocate assistance as they are available.  

Back to school also marks our need to get ready for our last family activities of 2021 along with  our Monthly Family Activities we are working on two more special activities. Bringing back To Cute Too Spoke our sensory friendly halloween activity and for our fourth consecutive year Sensory Santa in early December. These activities are made possible by our community partners and by community members that help with donations.  

This year we are setting a goal of raising $4,000 by the end of november to help ensure we meet expected costs of the activities and to help have a start on our program budget for 2022. This will allow us to hit the ground running with activities and increase our community outreach in 2022. 

Our goal for the August 14ths Monthly Family Activity is to have raised $250. If we can meet this goal Patrick our board president and lead advocate will take a cake to the face at the August Family Activity and  post the video on our facebook page.

Donate online at: paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/3998069 

Cancled August Family Activity