By Suzanne Hodgson
Staff Writer

“The best place for kids to learn is in their community,” said Susan Joakim, a special education elementary school teacher at Kennebunk. “They can make social connections here.”
This philosophy is driving the school district that serves Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel to send its staff for training to minimize outsourcing special education services and keep related costs down.
While this effort has been ongoing for several years, likely cuts to education budgets have added new legitimacy to the effort, school officials say.
RSU 21 Finance Director Jim Barnes said the special services department receives federal grants that will help in the upcoming possible 10 percent curtailment in special services from Augusta, along with a projected $2 million budget shortfall in RSU 21.
“There are no easy answers anywhere in these curtailments,” Barnes said. “There will be an impact on programs and staffing but right now we just do not know where or who.”
As Augusta looks to cut both aid to special services as well as general purpose aid that makes up the bulk of the state’s contribution to local school districts, district officials say they have found a way to potentially save money by educating staff on the newest special education teaching programs.
Rather than send students out of district at a significant cost, the department sends its staff of 77 speech therapists, occupational therapists, social workers and teachers to learn how to teach the newest programs developed in special education.
“There’s very little a parent could ask for that we couldn’t provide,” said RSU 21 Special Services Director Susan Mulsow.
School officials believe keeping children in their home school is not only better for students; it helps keep costs down as well.
“It’s amazing what out-of-district tuition does to a school budget,” said RSU 21 Superintendent Andrew Dolloff.
Mulsow said sending children out of the district can start out at $38,000 per year for day services and run as high as $200,000 per year for residential care programs.
Four students of the 407 children in special services receive out-of-district special education care.
Each new teaching program the RSU special education staff attends costs around $60,000 to $70,000 for the certification. Once the staff is certified, that one teaching program can be used for as long as the staff feels the program is helping educate students.
Some years there may be only a few kids involved in certain learning programs, but the staff wants what Mulsow calls a “big bag of tricks” to give each student the best education to fit their needs.
Quantifying any cost savings derived from the effort is difficult for a number of reasons, especially since Arundel merged with Kennebunk and Kennebunkport’s former school district, Barnes said.
Dept. of Education spokesman David Connerty-Marin said statewide, 2,402 students are educated out of their home districts at an average cost of $13,000 per student. That number includes non-special education placements such as all of Arundel’s middle school and most of its high school students who can go to school at Thornton Academy in Saco.
The special education budget for RSU 21 is $6 million, but has routinely come under budget.
In the past year, Barnes said the department came in $245,000 under budget, which was used to help close the district budget deficit.
“We can use those budget lines to fill in the gaps,” said Barnes.
Another problem in comparing special education costs is the significant effect a single student can have on a district’s budget. With some placements costing as much as 20 times more than a typical student educated within a district, the net effect of RSU 21 efforts to educate more students in-house can be difficult to discern from year to year, Connerty-Marin said.
Still, school officials are confident the efforts are reaping rewards.
“The trainings pay for themselves,” said Dolloff. “The more of these situations we can handle in-house, the better. We can do it at a much more efficient cost in the district.”

State law guarantees all children with disabilities between the ages of ages of 3 and 21 “the right to a free, appropriate public education” designed to meet their individual needs.
Early Response To Intervention tries to identify students early so the district can correct a learning disability before it becomes an education handicap.
The RTI collects data and is not meant to be long term.
Parents, teachers or administrators can make a referral for a student who needs special education under 13 different state mandated categories.
Those categories include: autism, deaf-blindness,  emotional disturbance, hearing impairment, mental retardation, orthopedic impairment, speech or language impairment, specific learning disabilities, brain injury and other health issues such as asthma and Tourette’s syndrome
Increasing the different types of learning needs covered within the district reduces the need to send  students that the staff is not qualified to help to alternative special needs learning centers.
Special needs students in the district receive an individualized education plan that looks at the student’s strengths, weaknesses, IQ and how they take in information. Students also are observed in the classroom.
Special education staff makes a personalized learning plan once the strengths and weaknesses have been identified. A student’s plan could consist of learning how to read facial expressions to be more appropriate in social settings or a review of counting.
“Not a one size fits all plan,” said Mulsow.

Most of the 407 students in RSU 21 special education program don’t spend the whole day in a special needs classroom, but even if they do, their curriculum runs parallel to that of regular students.
Special education laws state students must be in the “least restrictive environment” for their education, which requires students be integrated with their peers as much as possible. Students generally stay in regular classrooms, but are pulled out for certain subjects where the student is having trouble.
Joakim, the special education elementary school teacher, spoke of the success of the tests.
She had a student who had trouble in reading and the test showed the student actually had a problem with rhyming, a base for reading.
The student’s reading improved dramatically after learning to rhyme.
New teaching techniques include the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program “LiPs”, which uses flash cards to show students the way their mouths look as they learn to pronounce certain sounds. Therapeutic Listening, another new program, uses specific audio CDs to relax students with behavioral problems.
So far only a few students are using the program, but teachers are already seeing results.
The CD audio helps students relax and focus better so they don’t need to be pulled out of the classroom to use the new technology. Students can sit in the Special Education Resource Room at the elementary school and listen to the CD while working on other projects.
“Different sounds bring different results,” saidr Kennebunk Elementary School special education teacher Kris Casey.
Mulsow said one teacher described the program as a “magic bullet,” able to instantly relax children who are hyperactive and have problems with concentration.
“One little boy puts headphones on and immediately his shoulders slump,” said Kennebunk Elementary School special education teacher Tracey Mason.
Middle School of the Kennebunks special education teacher Valerie Baker’s classroom usually includes the highest-need students who need skills not necessarily included in what most people consider regular education. She’s excited this year because she has a few children who can read; normally she does not.
In one class Baker is teaching students geography and measuring, using a ruler to figure out the distance between two cities using the map’s scale.
In another class, one student likes to draw but has a hard time with reading comprehension so Baker reads out loud as the student draws pictures representing what’s happening in the story line.
“We accommodate and modify and readily play to the strengths of the kids,” said Baker.

At Kennebunk High School, the focus is on social skills and preparing students for life after high school.
“Our goal is to have them blend in as well as they can in general mainstream,” said Mulsow.
Mulsow says the high school special education department helps students by teaching them how to go grocery shopping on a budget and renting an apartment or using public transportation.
“It’s whatever we can do to engage students,” she said.
Mulsow explained if a student is struggling everyday it’s hard to keep them coming back to school, so working creatively keeps the students in the classroom.
She and her team seem confident any cuts to the school budget in the upcoming year will not affect their programs.
“We don’t want to separate them from their peers,” said Kennebunk Elementary School social worker Bella Dow.

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.