Record number of students utilizing R-6 special ed program

SIKESTON — Sikeston R-6 School District’s special education program is seeing a record-high number of students receiving its services.

Sheri Mitchell, R-6 special education coordinator, provided the annual report for the special education program during Tuesday’s regular board of education meeting at Central Office.

“As of March 3, we have 407 students in special education,” Mitchell told the Board at Tuesday’s meeting. “That is pretty significant. I’ve been doing this job now for seven years and that is by far the most amount of students we’ve had in special education.”

Mitchell said she doesn’t look for that number to decrease due to a variety of reasons.

“Currently, we did go down in the number of our students with an intellectual disability, and we went up in students with emotional disturbances,” Mitchell said. “A lot of that is due to the fact we have gotten several students who transferred in to us that are placed in ISL (individualized supported living).”

Individualized supported living enables people with disabilities to be fully integrated in communities. ISL services provide individualized supports, delivered in a personalized manner, to individuals who live in homes of their choice.

“We have a few different companies in our district and just in the last couple weeks, we’ve gotten eight students who have a lot of emotional needs that have been placed in an ISL in our district, and now they are attending our schools so that is a big reason for the increase of the emotionally disturbed students,” Mitchell said.

There’s also been an increase in language impairment students, which Mitchell credited to two reasons. “One reason is that they changed the criteria last year so it’s easier to qualify for these services, and the other reason is the pandemic has hurt the language development of the younger students,” Mitchell said. “People weren’t getting out and about. They weren’t going to eat. They weren’t getting out in public. They weren’t having conversations about things in the community so students were coming into school with a lack of language.”

However, a language improvement program was started at the Kindergarten Center and goes into elementary grades is helping matters, Mitchell said. Speech numbers are down, and that is due to the speech improvement program, she said.

“As a district, we’re doing a really good job of differentiating struggling students from special education students,” Mitchell said. “We’ve implemented a really rigorous intervention program where we require interventions for 12 weeks for students to really focus on the struggles they’re having in class, specific skills they’re struggling with and reflecting data at the end of those 12 weeks.”

Mitchell said she then attends screening meetings with the building staff, and they review all the data. “We take attendance into consideration, discipline, home life and everything into consideration and use a team to determine whether or not we feel they’re making progress. If they are, we’ll continue the interventions or we may need to seek mental health therapy with our SEMO HealthNetwork or Bootheel Counseling Services or possibly moving forward with a SPED evaluation.”

Currently, Mitchell and the special education team have had 86 initial evaluations this year. Of those. 43 have been completed and 43 are in progress, she said.

“Seventy-seven percent of those we are evaluating are qualifying for services,” Mitchell said. “That tells me our district is doing a really good job of differentiating between the struggling student and the special education student.”

The special education department was lucky to hire another teacher this year, and it does need more, Mitchell said.

“Some of our classrooms have caseloads of over 20 kids, and that may not sound like a lot but when you are planning for instruction for so many different groups, the IEP (individualized education program) paperwork is extensive and the data collection is extensive,” she said.

Dr. Kimberley Blissett, assistant superintendent of elementary education, told the Board the district is being spotlighted by the Autism Center for their partnership/pilot program at Southeast Missouri State University’s Sikeston campus.

“We’ve got some good things going on,” Mitchell said. “I think that support needs to continue if we’re going to meet the needs of these kids and the severity of the behaviors and mental health and the lack of cognitive abilities that we’re getting into our district.”

In the Junior High School achievement update, Head Principal Crystie Ressel briefed the Board with some of the building’s highlights.

“We have more seventh graders who are now in our honors classes,” Ressel said. “We have honors English and honors math. We have taken our second benchmarks, and all of our core classes have shown growth.”

Also, last year the Junior High started some special classes, like its drama class, and student enrollment for next year is underway now.

“We have more kids entering drama, choir and orchestra, and we have new instructors this year, and so, they’ve been great and are growing their programs,” Ressel said. “We also brought back this semester a yearbook class which also has done well. They also have started putting out a newsletter, making it more of a journalism class.”

The Junior High has also continued its ICU program which helps the school identify and notify parents about missing assignments students have, Ressel said, adding at this point, students have have completed 7,000 missing assignments this school year.

Alan Scheeter with Sikeston High School provided the 2021 graduate follow-up survey results

“Our kids are doing what they should be doing,” Scheeter said.

Of the 220 students found from the 2021 class of SHS and New Horizons, 95% of the graduates are either in a two-year school, four-year school, trade school, working or in the military, Scheeter said.

“They are doing what they should be doing,” he said. “The only change I saw — and it wasn’t that significant of a change — we had little bit fewer kids in four-year schools than in the past. I don’t know why that may be.”

It could be a number of reasons, including the pandemic, he said.

“You go around our schools and you watch and see what goes on in the classrooms, it’s no surprise that kids are doing well once they leave Sikeston High School,” Scheeter said. “They go off literally all over the country to pursue their careers and education. So many have gone to trade schools and already received their welding certification and are out in the workforce. … It’s a source of pride for all of our teachers, especially Sikeston Career and Technology Center, but teachers at the high school as well. They get to see their hard work pay off by these kids doing what they should be doing once they leave here.”

More informational items

— Sikeston R-6 Superintendent Dr. Tony Robinson said summer school will be in session July 11-Aug. 4. Robinson said Ryan Lindsey, Sikeston R-6 summer school director, started the process to get ready for summer school.

“We hope to roll out applications and get teachers secured well before the time we did last year,” Robinson said, adding he wanted to put the dates for the summer session out there now.

— The Board is considering a board policy regarding school attendance of children of retired nonresidential staff.

— As of Feb. 1, districtwide enrollment was at 3,363 students, which is 21 students higher than the same time last year.

Action by the Board

— The Board approved the following appointments to the Sikeston Public Schools Foundation Board of Trustees for terms that began Wednesday and will end March 11, 2025: Michelle Worth, Taylor Deere and Clay Driskill.

— The Board approved an amendment to the 2021-2022 school calendar to make April 18 as a day students will be in session. Robinson said this will make up time missed from COVID and weather days.

— The Board approved the GlennView Strategic Planning proposal.

“This would be a stakeholder-led, developed strategic plan,” Robinson said. “They would conduct surveys, focus groups with students, staff, community members business leaders and boards in order to develop a three-year strategic plan. That plan would have objectives and we would come up with action points to address those pieces that were identified from information from the community. This takes place starting in April with a large meeting to bring some folks together and start working on survey focus groups to start developing a strategic plan for the district.”

The findings and plan will then be submitted to the Board for review and consideration of approval.

— Smith and Co. Engineers of Poplar Bluff was selected as the material testing services firm for the Kindergarten Center safe room project.

“The companies (that submitted proposals) were close, but Smith and Co. really actually completed the full requirement of the project so we selected them (for the recommendation for board approval),” Robinson said.