A presentation at a Dalton Board of Education meeting on Monday, Jan. 8, put a spotlight on students with disabilities (SWD) data.
Figures presented by the school district indicate that 1,155 SWD were counted within Dalton Public Schools (DPS) as of Oct. 1.
That’s roughly 15.1% of the entire district student population.
“The numbers do continue to rise,” said Pam Wiles, DPS’ director of Exceptional Student Services (ESS). “We’re up again from the last school year, in number, but we’ve also increased in percentage when you compare it to the percentage of total students.”
The 2023 count comprised 13.3% of the total DPS student body. In 2015, the rate stood at 8.1%.
The numbers, she said, are comparable to those in surrounding school districts.
“We value in Dalton inclusion and giving our kids an opportunity to be in the general ed setting as much as possible,” Wiles said. “At least 72.5% of our students who have individualized education plans (IEPs) spend at least 80% of their day in a general education setting.”
So far in the 2023-24 school year, Wiles said DPS has logged 195 initial evaluation referrals.
“It feels like we have had more parent referrals than we’ve had in the past,” Wiles noted. “And we really did feel coming back from COVID we are still having a lot of parent referrals.”
Wiles estimated that about 81 preschool students are currently receiving ESS services.
“Forty-eight of those 81 pre-K schoolers are coming to kindergarten,” she said. “And we have 20 students who are in evaluation that are preschoolers.”
This school year, Wiles said DPS added six new specially-designed elementary school classrooms.
“We’ve had a K-2 room at Blue Ridge for a while, we’ve had a 3-5 room at Park Creek for a while and at Roan for a while,” she said. “The needs have just gotten so strong in each building that we needed to have that option where a student did not have to leave their home school and we were able to provide that level and intensity of support and that also made it a lot easier for us to be creative — where a student might need this intensive level of support for literacy and math, but they could participate in science or we could work them back into the regular classroom setting.”
That brings the total number of specialized classrooms to 10, Wiles said.
“We need the K-2 room at City Park pretty desperately,” she continued. “We see huge gains in the students and in their meeting their goals and them making strides in literacy, especially.”
Wiles noted that most DPS students with autism spectrum diagnoses, generally, are not involved in alternate curriculums.
“If they’re coming into us with significant markers of autism and they cannot communicate, then we want to teach them to communicate before we make a decision that they need to be alternate curriculum because they may not need to be,” she said. “We had students who had been in alt curriculums all their lives … we had students in the eighth grade and in high school that, when we evaluated them, they didn’t have significant cognitive disabilities, their IQ scores were such that they needed to be in the general curriculum.”
On the high school level, Wiles said separate classes are offered in most content areas.
“We have a need to have dual-certified staff that are certified in both content areas and in special education,” she said. “And we also need to have a way for some students that are in the general curriculum to have an opportunity similar to what we have in the Transition Academy … job skill readiness, we want to look at some ways to offer some electives and some elective tracks to give them some additional opportunities that they might need.”
Wiles said 12 elementary teachers and three middle school educators have gone through dyslexia professional development modules.
“And we have 15 teachers who have been through some intensive literacy training and they’re still participating in ongoing professional learning,” she added. “Seven of those have a reading specialist degree, they have the dyslexia endorsement and they have an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) endorsement — they’re very highly-trained teachers.”
As for challenges, Wiles said maintaining full staffing is always a concern.
“Recruiting the teachers with the proper certifications, many times we’re saying ‘OK, we need you to go take Georgia Assessments for the Certification of Educators (GACE) in this area to be properly certified,’” she said.
She also noted a substantial increase in “significant student behaviors” and communication needs.
“And those go hand in hand,” Wiles said. “Because if a student cannot communicate, then their behavior is a way to communicate, they’re telling us something.”
Wiles told board members that the funding model for the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support (GNETS) is expected to change.
“So that means that the funding will come to us instead of being a state grant,” she said. “That means we would then take on the responsibility to provide the staff as well as the therapeutic supports and services.”
Right now, she said DPS — as well as Whitfield County Schools and Murray County Schools — has a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Northstar.
“We are in communication with Northwest Georgia RESA about how they would support us with GNETS,” she said. “They are a school-based model, which means that it would be within Dalton Public Schools.”
Wiles said that DPS could maintain its MOU with Northstar.
“But one of the school districts is going to have to hire the teacher,” she said.
As of January 2024, Wiles said that just four DPS students were at Northstar.
“That’s the lowest it’s been,” she said. “And part of my concern is that we have a lot of movement between Whitfield County and here … honestly, I think we’re about to have five because we found out (Jan. 5) that we have a student that has a Dalton city address, but they’re in school at Northstar.”
From 2022 to 2024, Wiles indicated the number of DPS students with autism diagnoses increased from 106 to 150. Over that same timeframe, she said the number of DPS students with specific learning disabilities increased from 514 to 560, while the number of students with speech language impairment increased from 123 to 165.
“When our learning specialists are able to not just deal with behavior and they’re able to get into the classrooms and work with our teachers and support them as instructional supports instead of just behavioral supports,” she said, “we know what to do and how to support a student with a learning disability.”
Wiles said there are no shortage of SWD-centric needs for DPS, including positions for certified behavior analysts and registered behavior technicians.
“Looking at the College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) scores, we need some additional support in the areas of science and social studies,” she said. “Both in the upper elementary grades and at middle school.”
Wiles concluded the presentation with a few notes on the Transition Academy.
“It’s for our students who completed their credits but could stay — a student with a disability, a significant disability — until the age of 22,” she said.
Wiles said that 14 students are currently involved with the academy.
“We’ve had a partnership now with Cross Plains for six years,” she said.