Daily Archives: December 4, 2017

Black River Falls School District working to close special education gap

Stand Up for Public Ed,

La Crosse Tribune: The Black River Falls School District was recently notified by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that, based on state testing, their special education students were lagging behind the average Wisconsin test scores for special education students.

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The district has been working to correct this issue ever since they got a warning last year from DPI.

“The state is changing how they measure special education students. Their literacy is becoming a far heavier weight than it used to be. The previous year we were told that while the new requirements were not firmly in place, they let us know that if all data continued in the way it was going that we were not on track to be making adequate progress. So we kind of had a year warning, and then this year that warning came to fruition,” Severson said.

Dr. Tammy Kielbasa was hired in July as the new director of pupil services and has been working to bring together what has been previously done and make it stronger.

“What they spent time doing last year and this year is that they are really working with the curriculum to make sure that we have a rigorous curriculum not only for our regular education students, but that our curriculum for special education students is just as rigorous as the other students,” Kielbasa said adding that they are also working on providing more professional development and additional resources to make sure the teachers have options to teach all of the students.

Read the complete article on special education improvement efforts in Black River Falls.

Appleton Area School District, city of Appleton share dedicated health clinic

Stand Up for Public Ed,

Post-Crescent: It used to be that only very large employers could afford to offer the “perks” of a dedicated employee health clinic. However, programming by Greg Biese of Associated Benefits and Risk Consulting and ThedaCare At Work broke with tradition last fall. They worked together to establish a shared clinic specifically for eligible employees and families of the Appleton Area School District and the City of Appleton.

The near-site clinic, a term that describes a mutually convenient location for partner-employers but is not actually on-site at any one of their workplaces, is housed on the campus of ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Appleton.

The staff at the Connecting Care Clinic, as it is called, includes a nurse practitioner, physician assistant, registered nurse, and two medical assistants. Hours are set to coincide with the schedules of school district and city employees, including two days a week when the clinic opens at 5:30 a.m. for shift and school-day staffers.

Julie King, chief human resources officer for AASD, and Sandy Matz, director of human resources for the City of Appleton, both worked with Biese and ThedaCare At Work to develop the custom clinic format.

Read the complete article on Appleton’s shared clinic.