DCSS exceptional students program experiences growth

ALBANY — Through Project Search, a collaborative effort of the Dougherty County School System Exceptional Students Program and Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, high school students are employed at the hospital, providing the youths a foothold in productive contribution to the community.

Dianne Boges, director of the school system’s Exceptional Students Program, told the Kiwanis Club of Dougherty County on Monday, “We have students that are actually going into job-related activities, and they’re considered ‘fifth-year’ students, which means they did not graduate until their fifth year in high school. In that fifth year, they’re actually at the hospital working. As of the end of this year we have 100 percent of the students participating in Project Search that are now employees at Phoebe.”

Project Search is just one of the community activities in which the Exceptional Students Program participates locally. Others are the annual Council for Exceptional Students Week Celebration, Adopt a Family for Christmas, Georgia Special Olympics and Community-Based Instruction.

The program, as Boges described it, has a mission “to identify students who meet the federal and state criteria as a student with a disability requiring special education and to provide services that empower them to become active members of society based on their individual strengths and abilities. We are committed to providing a caring community of staff and involved parents that meets the diverse academic, emotional, and social needs of all of our students in a respectful and positive environment.”

Exceptional Students is located in the former Lincoln Magnet School on Corn Avenue. Presently, there are 18 departments in the program, whose offices administer 12 eligibility areas and serve 1,400 students, a number that is expected to grow closer to 1,500 in the 2016-17 school year, according to Boges.

Service areas covered under the program range over a wide array of conditions surrounding learning ability, including autism, specific learning disabilities, deaf/blind, deaf/hard-of-hearing, significant developmental delay, other health impairments, intellectual disabilities, speech/hearing impairment, orthopedic impairment, visual impairment, emotional behavior disorder and traumatic brain injury.

“Although we work within an office,” Boges said, “we are very often seen in schools to make sure to provide professional and technical assistance to our teachers and paraprofessionals so that we can make sure, as our statement says, that our children are getting the best education services that they can possibly receive, based on the training that our teachers have.”

Currently 110 teachers and 89 paraprofessionals/personal aides participate in the program, and those numbers are expected to increase next year as well, Boges indicated.

Additionally, Boges said, “A major concern we’re having in (the school system) is with the number of students that are being suspended from school. We have to look at the number of (out-of-school suspensions). There is a process we have to go through, and that is to provide interventions for those students that are non-special ed students, and we have to (commit) a percentage of our budget to intervention and working with those students.”

Participants in the Exceptional Students Program must meet eligibility requirements, including completion of the Response to Intervention process; parental consent to evaluation; hearing/vision examination; comprehensive evaluation by a school psychologist, and approval by an eligibility team based on state guidelines.

Boges also said there is a plan in process to increase the program’s graduation rate.

“This year, we did have an increase in the number of students with disabilities graduating,” she said.