Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)
/ Inclusion Initiative
SERC’s Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) / Inclusion Initiative provides educators, other professionals, and families with coordinated training and technical assistance programs regarding the teaching and learning of students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment. The focus is to increase the number of placements of students with disabilities, especially students with significant disabilities, in general education classrooms and to promote access to general education curriculum for all students with disabilities regardless of setting.
Initiative/Project Goals
To develop and implement professional development designed to address the State Performance Plan indicators and the five Settlement Agreement (SA) Goals through an anti-racist lens.
Tenets:
- To serve as a model during planning, training, and technical assistance of the practices, philosophies, structures, and policies expected of our audience aligned with responsible inclusive practice. In particular, the initiative aims to serve as models for Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy;
- To develop systems and practices that maximize the effective use of data as part of the ongoing organizational and instructional decisions within SERC and with local districts;
- To ensure the initiative is consistently addressing and maintaining coherence of efforts among other initiatives within SERC and other educational agencies; and
- To build internal (within SERC) and external (within district) capacity and scaling-up practices for reaching the overarching goals of the LRE/Inclusion Initiative.
Significant Initiative Accomplishments
- Participating in a certification process for SERC consultants to become authorized trainers of A Step by Step Approach for Inclusive Schools
- Integrating the philosophy and practices needed to obtain educational benefit from IEPs for students with disabilities across various professional development activities
- Expanding the use of the Educational Benefit Review Process into CT’s Birth to Three System, preschool, and high school levels
- Promoting tools and practices that increase the quality of IEP development that provide access to general education/preschool activities
- Supporting the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) in its efforts to monitor the progress of districts on the SA goals
- Developing a new process for Participatory Evaluation for the targeted districts (43 in 2006-2007)
- Supporting the development of the CSDE Walk-Through Protocol used to observe the implementation of the IEP and quality instruction for students with an intellectual disability
- Facilitating the development of an Innovation Configuration Map on decision-making practices around increasing Time with Non-Disabled Peers (TWNDP)
- Participating in SPP/APR workgroups on the various indicators
Major Activities for the Upcoming Year
- Provide technical assistance to districts with 5-20 students with an intellectual disability
- Provide support to districts needing assistance with meeting the targeted SPP indicator targets
- Continue to collaborate with CSDE on the Annual Performance Report (APR)
- Expand SERC’s capacity to provide professional development on the Educational Benefit Review Process and IEP development
- Collaborate with CSDE on program development for schools that do not make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) for just the subgroup of students with disabilities
- Continue to promote increasing coherence among SERC initiatives
- Using educational benefit within transition planning
- Developing awareness of Universal Design for Learning
- Providing explicit connections between Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) and Behavior Intervention Plans (BIP) and IEPs
- Addressing barriers to LRE for students with Autism and Emotional Disturbance (ED)
- Developing the capacity of agencies supporting families to provide information on educational benefit and IEP development.
Contact Information
Contact Julia Case, Consultant, ext. 388, case@ctserc.org, Kim Mearman, Consultant, ext. 314, mearman@ctserc.org, or Catherine Wagner, Consultant, ext. 346, wagner@ctserc.org, for information about the content of the professional development opportunities offered by SERC’s Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)/Inclusion Initiative.
Contact Nikki Hendry, Education Services Specialist, ext. 255, hendry@ctserc.org, for information regarding registration.
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Initiatives
