S11 E11 Palm Beach County's Journey Towards Inclusion for Young Learners with Disabilities
2:27PM Nov 30, 2023
Speakers:
Tim Villegas
Jani Kozlowski
Catasha Williams
Lori Miranda
Keywords:
palm beach county
classrooms
inclusive
kindergarten
headstart
programs
inclusive education
community
inclusion
children
learner
center
teachers
campuses
students
school district
popcorn
disabilities
evaluations
laurie
Hi friends, I'm Tim Vegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you're listening to think inclusive, our podcast that brings you conversations about inclusive education, and what inclusion looks like in the real world.
This week, I'm recording from my hotel room at the TASH Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. MCIE II will be presenting on a number of topics like collaborative relationships being the key to membership and learning, leading and sustaining inclusive systems change using learner planning tools to support membership, participation and learning, as well as diving deep into Ida and how the intent of the law is inclusion. If you are around at the TASH conference, make sure to say hi, and let us know what you think of our podcast and other resources. This week's guest is Lorient Miranda, an advocate for Inclusive Education and the director of pre K exceptional student education in Palm Beach County, Florida. She has been instrumental in implementing inclusive practices for young children with disabilities in the county school district Headstart programs and communities. For this episode Lorie discusses the importance of inclusive education for students with disabilities in Palm Beach County. She explains that the traditional model of removing students from their natural environments and sending them to separate special education programs was disruptive and limited their opportunities for socialization and learning. To address this issue, Palm Beach County implemented a collaborative approach, partnering with community centers and Headstart programs to provide inclusive education for young learners with disabilities. Laurie highlights the challenges they faced in implementing this model including concerns about behavior management, funding, and even teacher buy in however through extensive training, relationship building and a commitment to putting children and families first, they were able to overcome these barriers and create a successful, inclusive program. This week's episode is brought to you by the Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center in the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and is the second episode in a collaboration between the CTA and the think inclusive podcast on early childhood inclusive practices. After a quick break, we will have Janet Kozlowski and catastral Williams back on the pod to preview my interview with Laurie Miranda.
Janek is ASCII and catastral Williams, welcome back to the thinking cluesive podcast. Thanks
for having us, Tim. Good to be with you. Good to be back.
Last time you were on. We previewed the interview with Valerie Williams. This time, we have a fantastic interview with Lori and Miranda. So why should our listeners be excited about our conversation with Lori? Well, I
mean, you know, I think we started out with hearing from our federal leadership. And now I'm excited that we get to hear from a local leader who is making it work on behalf of children and families. You know, I was so inspired by Laurie story and the fact that she saw an issue in her community in her school, she worked with her partners and Headstart to figure out solutions. And together, they came up with some strategies that that really work for kids and families. And so it's kind of like, starting with a message from the top. And now we're hearing from the message from another part of the cup, you know, at the community level. So I'm super excited to hear from Lori and learn about what she's doing down in Florida.
Yeah, I agree Janee with the local level approach, big these strategies are something that we can all glean from no matter the context. We know that states and systems find themselves in different contexts. And often it's like, oh, that can happen there. But it can't happen here. The partnerships, we can't do the work without it, and finding the solutions. You know, in our center, we have a colleague that reminds us not to admire problems. And this is a perfect example of that. And it's solutions based and oriented. So I'm excited that we get to share this. So
Janney and Katusha what can we expect going forward? You know, we had our interview with Valerie Williams, and we're having our interview with Laurie Miranda, but we're not done with this early childhood series in this partnership with AECT So what can we expect going forward? Yeah,
so lots more coming. There will be stories from states communities, also examples of inclusion in preschool. But it's not limited to that. There's also early intervention that we know experiences of bases, some unique issues. We'll also hear about ECE inclusion. And when we talk about that as the full scope, you know, funding community based settings, state regulatory issues, we really are going to have an opportunity to dig deep and and share with you the stories, the learnings that others have experienced. That's just a couple of things that are on my mind about what we can expect moving forward. Yeah,
I'm super excited about it. I think there's a lot that we have learned, you know, in this work at ECPA. And with the inclusion team, that the rest of the world and the other fellow inclusion lists, as you call them, Tim need to know about and I'm excited to be able to lift up their stories and, and the data around preschool and early intervention, inclusion and early intervention, what that means what that looks like. And I'm also excited that we do have an opportunity to share some of the great work at ACTA, and hopeful that our leaders Christina Casper, Zack and Megan Vin, will be willing to come on and join us for an episode to share a little bit about the full scope of what we do at ACTA.
Thank you, Jenny. And Katusha, we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you.
Thanks, Tim. Bye.
When we return my interview with Laurie Miranda, and you'll hear me ask her about a video she produced at the beginning of our conversation, we'll make sure to link that in the show notes.
Laurie Miranda, welcome to the thinking cluesive podcast.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Of course.
So let's talk about the video because I did see the video, Janet because Lasky from ACTA sent me the video of Palm Beach County School District about moving towards inclusive placements for students with disabilities. So tell me about that. How did like why did you make the video in the first place? What was the purpose of that?
I made the video because we were building an inclusive practice here in Palm Beach County, between the school district Headstart and some community partners. And there was a statewide conference. And they were looking for school districts that had some kind of collaboration going on for inclusion for young children with disabilities. And we were doing that they asked for three to five minute video. And so when I started recording and thinking about what I wanted to spotlight, my recording was actually closer to 17 to 20 minutes long. And I really did not want to edit it because everybody that was interviewed and talking about our program really plays a vital role in the whole process and in programming. So I really chose to not edit the recording. And then when they saw the recording, then they said oh, you know, we see why you really did not want to and could not just use three to five minutes to talk about what you're doing there in Palm Beach County. And that's how the video came to me.
So what besides, you know, that you were moving towards inclusion for for young learners with disabilities? Like why was that important in the first place?
It started a long time ago, I had a childcare center myself, I was the owner operator and I had young children that got on a school bus and went somewhere to a school district school for a few hours and came back and it was very disruptive. And I even I was I'm a school teacher by trade, but I really did not have a full understanding of where they were going. What was happening. There was not much communication back and forth and the parent really did. The parents didn't know what was happening. So I sold the center I moved on. And then when I took this position, I realized that I was Having those same concerns now from looking from a different lens. So I literally followed a school bus to see where these children were going and coming, coming and going from. And when I saw that, I just wasn't comfortable with that there was a lot of children missing opportunities to be with their peers, they were missing instruction. It was a disruption to their day. And I realized that there were a lot of adults in the room who were probably making decisions that were not necessarily in the best interest of the children. And so when I took this position, I came on board with the intent to start thinking about some kind of opportunity. And luckily, my boss, who is still my director, has young children. So when I explained what I wanted to do, he said it was a no brainer. We'll try it and see how it goes. So seven years later, we are starting our seventh year, and we've got an amazing program going on here in Palm Beach County.
And so the so the the main concern was that these learners weren't being educated in their home, like or neighborhood schools, right? Correct.
We were removing them from their natural environments where they were spending the majority of their days to come into a school district for a couple of hours, which was disrupting their whole routine back in their natural environment. It's not appropriate for all children, some children have more needs than the childcare providers can provide. So we have that open door policy and those relationships, it took a long time to build relationships and trust in the community.
Right? Yeah. Yeah, it seems like you, it would be a big shock if you tried to, like, have everyone all back at the same time, right?
Correct. building the relationships took a long time. And we really were not going forward with that if we didn't have the buy in of the teaching staff, we spent a lot of time training and trusting so that teachers would feel comfortable and empowered by having our pre K special education teachers come into their classrooms without judgment, without expectation and just meet them where they are to help build capacity to do some modeling. And it's going really well.
So the so like, this model is different, right, then, then you're then how typically, services are delivered. So for instance, how it previously was done in Palm Beach County, and maybe even in districts, you know, around Florida and around the country. You have a learner, a young learner in a in early childhood center, right, and they have some particular needs based on, you know, based on whatever the school or whatever their team has decided that through assessments through evaluations, they say that they need these particular kinds of services. And how it used to be was or how a lot of a lot of districts are and centers run is that that learner can no longer be in that environment, they have to go somewhere else to receive the services, right? Correct. But for what Palm Beach County is doing, you're saying we have all of these this expertise. Rather than having the learner go somewhere else to receive those services. They're receiving those services now. Where they originally were, were in their natural environment, like you said, correct? Correct. Yeah,
yes. So we have teachers, we started with one just to pilot and see how it would be received. We started with one teacher and five centers, and because of the nature of the relationships and the buy in that we needed from the center staff, we would go to some centers, but not all teachers and not all students who were evaluated. We may have felt like they would have been okay, but if the center staff If I didn't feel confident or comfortable, then we can talk with the parents at the meetings and set, have this open door policy, we're going to start at the school district with the idea that the end goal being the child goes back and receives our services there. So we have a very solid open door policy in relationship with each and every senator, because we need, we're not there all day, every day. So we need to be able to have the classroom teacher at the center feel confident and comfortable to be able to support that student when we are not there. So a lot of the time, we do do direct instruction, we are supporting the IEPs and providing those direct services. But we're also coaching and mentoring those those teachers in the center so that they can do what we're doing, when we're not there all day long. So their child is successful. Right,
right. Did you said that it's been a process, but what kind of what kind of concerns did the center staff have with initially, when you started moving towards this model? What were the kinds of things that were that were brought up as potential barriers,
we absolutely had a long laundry list of potential barriers. One being that the behaviors or the knees were too great for the central staff to be able to maintain and provide solid instruction. Funding was another one. Just buy in altogether, teaching staff feeling confident and comfortable in their own skill set. And being willing to learn some teachers felt like they weren't paid enough to be able to have the these children in their classrooms. So we really took a lot of time to train, and be face to face and do a lot of training and team building and having teachers feel comfortable and confident to have our classroom teachers in their classrooms. So that they became colleagues and co workers and not feeling judged, you know, to see our teaching staff as a resource. So we did spend a lot of time like I said, we didn't just jump right in. Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Let's try it. It didn't work like that. And we had, we did have some centers that said, No, thank you. You know, don't call me I'll call you. And you know what, though? They're calling now. Right? Yeah, so that's a really good feeling, because, and things may have looked a little bit differently if we hadn't gone through COVID. But we're seeing a different profile of children coming into our communities and into our schools into our VPK classrooms. And I think we are all learning from each other because the brains wired a little bit differently during COVID, because of the lack of exposure to others, and yeah, and so we're all learning.
You mentioned an acronym BPK
VPK, I'm sorry, voluntary pre kindergarten, which is our state funded program for four year olds going to kindergarten. So there's no requirement other than to be four and a resident of the state of Florida. So our children who have turning four going to kindergarten next year can come into this program for free. And so these are our children that are coming in these, this is the year that our children that we're moving, you know, our COVID kiddos, basically, they've been home for two to three years, and now their parents are wanting to put them into these programs to get make sure they're ready for kindergarten. And now they're coming from being home into a classroom of 15 to 20, with all these expectations, and we're seeing all kinds of challenging behavior. So we're working together.
So the VPK are those also included in the centers or are they on the schools in the county?
They're everywhere. Anyone can be a provider. We have faith based. We have our childcare centers, we have our public schools.
And so you're in so if they're, I guess within your county, you also you also support those programs as well, right.
We do. My program and my staff support children who are already identified with IEP PS they've already been evaluated. That said, we have 1000 or more on the waitlist for evaluation. So we go where the request is hoping to build more partnerships. We're out in the community, we're out in classrooms that are we try to support wherever we can.
Gotcha, gotcha. So, a center or a school would, would really have to request your services. Is that right?
We have agreements that the partnership, the partnership that we have continues to grow. When I say partnership, we actually have a collaborative agreement that has been signed by our school board, and the agency that we're partnering with. Okay, so we really need to have that so that our board approves us to be on outside agency campuses.
I see, I see. That, that's gonna get complicated.
It is growing. And, you know, we're troubleshooting all the time, because we know that there are a lot of centers out there. And we all know that early childhood has a critical shortage of workforce. So we have more children coming in more children with needs and less of a workforce. So what do we do with that?
Yeah, yeah. What do you think would make your job easier? Like, let's say you could wave a magic wand, and
if I could wave a magic wand, I would ask for higher pay for all teachers. That's my soapbox. We need to make sure that our teachers don't have to work two and three jobs or can make more money. You know, where there's less impact? Yeah. So that's, I think that's huge. Why we don't have enough teaching staff. And then being able to, I think if teachers were paid more, we could have lower staff ratios. The state of Florida in our pre K programs, does not have a cap. So we can have 1520 children in a classroom, all on the spectrum. They're non verbal, we have very challenging behavior, but the state does not cap that. The four year old program, the voluntary pre kindergarten is capped, but we are not. So in order to provide early intervention, we really need to have smaller programs.
Yeah, yes.
That's a big barrier for us.
That's a big barrier. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I was. I've interviewed a few different people and in other states, and Maryland is coming to mind just because I knew there's a district up there. I don't think they quite have the same partnerships with outside agencies or centers. But there is there is more of a cap there with with three year olds and four year olds, like three year olds is much a much lower ratio
in our community programs, to the health department does have ratios. But in our school district programs. We don't have a ratio.
I wonder why they isn't the same. It
is not because it's not. The health department does not govern us. There's there's no accountability for anything like that. We follow. We're on school campuses. So our school campus and our school district policies govern us. So there is no cap by the state of Florida for special education classrooms. We Palm Beach County has an internal allocation that we try to abide by.
Sure. Oh, are the so are the classrooms that are on the classrooms in on the county campuses? Are those inclusive as well? Or are they special education classrooms? That classroom learners with disabilities?
Yes, it's a it's a good question. And I'm completely transparent. The majority of our programs on our school campuses are not inclusive. We have so many children with special needs that there's no room To make them inclusive to bring in other children as peers. So it's our voluntary pre kindergarten class is inclusive. But the self contained classrooms far outweigh the number of inclusive classrooms we have on campus, which is why it's such a win win for our children to be able to say, in their natural environments and for the adults to go to them.
Right. Right. And is that just is that more of like a funding issue? Because the way things are funded, so, you know, for instance, the three year old program is those are special education dollars. So, so then, learners with learners who are, you know, that don't have a disability or that are typically developing? They wouldn't go to a three year old classroom in on a school in the school district. Is that right?
Correct. Okay, correct. There. I think we have one school, one or two schools may have a three year old program, typically for staff, for staff. Sure. Yeah. That's that's a, an outlier. Our programs are self contained. It's not that we don't want to be inclusive, we absolutely do. But our county is so big. And we have so many families moving here, that our space is limited. So pre K programs, because the program is optional. We go wherever there's space on on campus. Right. Right. And so we keep adding evaluation teams. When I started, I think we had eight diagnostic teams, we're up to 15. So and we still have a backlog because of families moving to Florida. But we just don't have enough space on our school campuses.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. So the one of the one of the barriers for families in I'm sure it's not, it's all over the country, regarding, you know, inclusive, inclusive pre k is, and I'll give you a hypothetical hypothetical situation, I used to I was a special education teacher for 16 years in California and Georgia. And one of the roles that I had, in my in my last job. I served, you know, K through 12 campuses. But part of my role is to go observe learners that were in like a four year old program. Typically, they were in like a special needs, quote, unquote, special needs pre K program at one of our schools. And I would observe them and report back to the team about you know, the recommendation for kindergarten. And none of the the programs that I observed were inclusive, they were all special education only. And a lot of times what happened, what would happen is families would go to IPs, a transition IEP to kindergarten, and the IEP team that the receiving school, like let's say it's a homeschool would say, well, this learner has been in a special education, pre K program. So they should go to the self contained classroom, in kindergarten. But but the learner didn't have any other option to be anywhere else except a special education pre K program. So with your VPK classrooms being inclusive, do you see a difference when families and learners are able to transition from that environment to kindergarten to more inclusive environments? Do you see any sort of connection there?
There's definitely a connection. And this year, we are expecting some good solid data. We were disrupted because of COVID. So we're just now getting back to being able to collect some really good data. But so the beauty of having this partnership with our community partners is the goal is always general education, kindergarten. So when we are students who may start in our self contained programs, that's not necessarily where they finish. So we're very fluid and we try to move them into VPK inclusion we call us. I mean I call it the The soft transition to kindergarten because now we are moving those VPK classrooms have a larger student ratio. So it's sort of models that kindergarten. So what we were finding is that a lot of our students who were in those self contained programs for two, sometimes even three years, they're in that smaller setting. And then they go to Gen Ed kindergarten, because we want to give them that opportunity. The team might feel like that student is ready. But now all of a sudden, they're in a classroom of 20. And they've not had that opportunity to be exposed prior to. Right, right. So they're kind of behind the eight ball that way. So that's why we just love our community partners, because they're open to taking our students. And so it's we have that soft transition, because our staff is in that room supporting and providing that extra support. While they're in this gen ed setting, so it's really working well. I'm expecting to have some very good data this year. What we do know is that our children who are in our community settings, every one of them 100%, go to Gen Ed kindergarten, and are doing fine. Some may need a little bit of support, they may need some support facilitation, but 100% are energetic kindergarten class. Yeah, yeah. That's the same thing with our VPK inclusion classrooms. 100% or an agenda kindergarten class.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it seems like, you know, a more, it may it seems like a natural transition, right? If you have those settings available, then you're more likely to have those inclusive placements when they get to kindergarten. So have you seen this model be influencing other districts? Or is the model being replicated anywhere? In Florida or beyond?
I really can't speak to that too much. I think we are somewhat unique, because we have the agreements to send a teacher out to the community sites. I Palm Beach County used to send speech and language pathologist. So you know, for our children who had minor speech and language, we did have that program model. It was what made the difference was when we started adding a teacher. So I really don't know, some school districts have headstart in their school district. They are the grantee, we do not so Lutheran services, Florida is the grantee for Headstart, we do have some Headstart campuses, some has our classrooms, on our campuses, but the majority are outside in the community. So I think that's what made the difference was adding the teacher. Yeah. Because now we can have children out there who have more than speech and language, we have our social emotional goals, we have independent functioning.
Yeah, I'm just thinking about my own community. And and the learners that would go or just even my own kids, right, you know, that that went to that winter, they didn't go to pre K on a school campus, they went to pre K, you know, at a community center, or, you know, and what difference that would have made if, if services were brought to them, right. So that it feels like a very unique way to kind of solve this issue.
We also have a critical shortage of bus drivers. So some of our children are on the bus for a ridiculous amount of time. It's it's not appropriate. So and parents don't want to put their little children on the bus. I completely get that, but it's not an option for some parents. Sure. So if it is an option, then we absolutely want to capitalize on that.
Right, right.
I know one of the questions that I get asked a lot is about the funding, how do we fund this? And the answer is that we we took a leap of faith the first year by by allocating a teacher to be able to do this. Not not funds itself because it is the FTE money that is generating our teachers We started with, I think seven students, we're up to over 100. Now in the community, wow. Wow. So we've doubled our staff to be able to do that. And just due to the nature of circumstance, we will probably continue to increase simply because we have such a backlog of students. Most of them are out in the community somewhere in childcare centers. What's Also new this year, which is super exciting, is that we've added two diagnostic teams to our pre K team, which means that the families don't have to leave their center to be evaluated. The Disability coordinators out in the community send the referrals directly to my team. We schedule the evaluations, we go to the center to do the evaluations, we hold the IEP meetings at the center. We do annual IEP s, we do transition IEP s at the center, which is most comfortable for the families, and convenient for the families to write. So we're very excited about that. Because it does take a long time to get through that child find process, but because of our agreement, and because Palm Beach County truly values the work that we're doing in preparation for the children that are coming into our kindergarten programs, let's expedite these evaluations and get them served as soon as possible. Yeah.
I'm glad you brought up funding. Because it so is it I'm probably going to get this wrong. There. There's a there's Part B, which is K through 12. Right? The IDA funding part B. And then there's Part C is that that's pre K. Part
C is early steps, or the birth to two system is okay. And B is everything forward. Okay.
Okay. So it is all the same sort of thing, because a lot of times you have maybe I'm not answering I don't think I'm asking the right question. Let me let me back up. So the, your department is it is it all together like pre K through 12 in Palm Beach County or are the pre K and K through 12 separate?
Pre K Special Education falls under the exceptional student education department. So pre K ESC is under, so it is pre K to 22. In the ESC department, then we have an early childhood department. It's different. I know, different counties, different states do it differently. in Palm Beach County, we have an early childhood department who we work very closely with. That's where our Headstart and our voluntary pre kindergarten programs lie there. Our pre K programs are on elementary school campuses. Does that make sense? Yep. We have diagnostic teams who facilitate that part C, transition at three into Part B, which is our school district. So we have teams that work with the Part C teams to help transition families from the Part C to part B. Okay, that makes okay.
Yeah, it makes it super kidney. It can be very confusing. If
you don't live it, it is confused. Yeah, it's
Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you're like, Well, why can't you just do this?
Why doesn't Pete be calm before? See?
That's a great question. Yeah,
it's a great question.
Oh, my goodness. What else? What else would you want? So a lot of educators listen to, you know, this, this podcast, and a lot of school leaders. So as as people are listening to our conversation, and you're thinking about, you know, who might be who might who might be listening. Is there anything else that's on top of mine that you want to share about? What's going on in Palm Beach County?
I would say whether you're a large county, a small county, a large state, a small state I think when you put children and families first, anything is possible. Nine times out of 10. It's the adults who are the barriers in the room. And we were just very, very fortunate to have the right people at the right time in the right seats to have these conversations. And it does take buy in from the people who are on the ground implementing, it won't go well. And we learned this, there's been a lot of learning for us along the way. But it does not go well when you have people making decisions, who are not boots on the ground, who are not representative of the community that they serve. And that's been huge for us. Our pre K team is very diverse. We look like the community we serve. We speak the language that the of the community we serve. We live in the communities we serve. And I think if I had one takeaway, it would be that to just be mindful of the communities that you serve.
Stay tuned for the mystery question right after this break.
The question is when you're feeling sick, what makes you feel better? Cookie dough? Cookie, you're you're you're a raw cookie dough eater.
I am. I am.
My wife does that.
I go right to the store, go get it from the grocery store. It's open before I even get to my car.
Oh my gosh. Oh, funny. That's great. That's great. You're like, you pay no attention to the warnings, right? No,
no, because you know, sometimes the adults in the room. They're the barriers. So I'm a risk taker. Sometimes cookie dough, cookie. Everything in moderation.
That's true. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Gosh, what do I well, you talked about food. So I really, I don't know if this is exactly something I eat when I'm sick. But a comfort food for me is popcorn. Like, and I don't like I make my own popcorn. And this was, gosh, it's it's been over a decade now. But somebody I don't even remember. My family. Well, my family, you know, we used to get like the microwave popcorn. And which was good. You know, I guess. Uh, but then somebody showed me how to how to make popcorn like on the stove with a big kettle and you know, you put the oil and you put, yeah, and so ever since that point, I'm like, I cannot get enough popcorn. And I like, make my pumpkin. So every so every so often. I'll be like, it's time to make popcorn. Y'all start to make popcorn. And they're just like roll. They roll their eyes because like dad's making popcorn.
That is so much healthier than my response. And I And unlike you, I don't share.
Well, I do put a lot of butter and salt on it. So there is that give you that? Okay, okay, that's good. Laurie Miranda, thank you so much for being on the think inclusive podcast. Thank
you so much for having me.
For more information about inclusive education or to learn how you can partner with MCIE on school transformation, or professional learning opportunities, visit MCIE.org Thanks again to the E CTA for their collaboration on this episode. Love think inclusive here are a few ways to let us know. Rate us on Spotify or leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Become a patron like these fun people and get extra stuff. thank you to Aaron P. Jarrett T Joyner a Kathy B, Mark C, Gabi M and Kathleen T. We appreciate your continued support of thinking cluesive For our bonus episode this week, I'm posting the audio of Attash talk I did a few years ago when the TAs conference This was completely virtual. Check it out. Think inclusive is written, edited, designed, mixed and mastered by me to Vegas. Original Music by miles credits, additional music from melody. Thanks for your time and attention and remember, inclusion always works
how long have you known Jenny?
I'm not like I don't really know her. Well, she saw a video that I had produced at a conference and then she contacted me and we started chatting. Okay,
