Client: Suburban, selective, pre-K-6 independent school.
Client Type: Private School
Executive Summary: Worked with a Faculty Committee to confront difficult challenges about how the school addresses students with diverse learning styles; established a strategy, implemented policies, procedures, budget, and transition plan, and facilitated communications to the school's many constituencies.
Clear to the Bottom Line: The school is well-positioned to serve its student body's needs for many years to come.
Services: Needs Analysis, Strategy Consulting, Change Management, Academic Support Services/System Design, Learning Style Differences Training, Learning Styles Services/System Design, Leading Presentations and Facilitating Meetings with Key Constituents
Assignment: Our client was a selective, independent primary and lower school. The school's faculty felt overwhelmed by the challenges they faced managing classrooms with widely ranging learning needs. The existing system to support these students was fragmented and inadequately coordinated. The faculty was spending a disproportionate amount of time with challenging students and less time with more capable students. Moreover, the faculty was unevenly skilled at implementing accommodations for various student needs. The school's leadership recognized that this was a challenge and brought in Richard Dana Associates to facilitate teacher training sessions on best practices for teaching a broad range of learners and accommodating learning style differences. Tacitly, the school also suspected that the issue might be more pervasive and systematic - caused by issues that could not be simply addressed through better classroom management and teacher awareness. Given the school's policies which granted preferential treatment to siblings of current students and children of faculty and trustees, there were a large number of students enrolled who would not otherwise have met the current admissions criteria. The school lacked formal policies regarding accommodations for special needs, and had, on occasion, made extensive accommodations leaving the school vulnerable to future legal challenges.
The school did not want to alienate any of several important constituencies,nor disrupt the learning of current students. The school faced a delicate balancing act, pleasing the demanding parents of the current student body, while re-evaluating the school’s admission policies for the long term.
Construct a Picture: Richard Dana Associates was initially contracted to provide faculty training on teaching and accommodating a range of learning style differences Convert the Picture to High Definition: After the initial training, it became clear to both the client and us that the school's issues were more systemic. Richard Dana Associates was engaged by the Head of School to help diagnose the full impact of learning style differences on the school's day-to-day functioning, and to develop a sustainable process and action plan that was sensitive to the needs of current students, faculty, trustees, and parents.
Execute the Action Plan: We worked closely with a Faculty Committee to confront some challenging issues, and to research and develop a comprehensive approach for supporting students. Given the challenging, and potentially controversial nature of the issues the Committee faced, Richard Dana Associates played a key role throughout the process, helping the Committee take a stance and make some critical decisions leading to:
- Recognition that in order to provide the best service to the student body overall, the School would need to make some difficult tradeoffs in their admissions policy
- Improved faculty education on teaching students with different learning styles
- Acknowledgement that the School could not keep students enrolled who required extraordinary supports when they impinged on the rights of other students.
- A commitment to making necessary classroom modifications (teaching style, multi-modal teaching, etc.) but not curriculum modifications.
- Throughout the project, Richard Dana Associates also worked closely with the Committee Chair to keep the Board of Trustees apprised of progress on the project, and led presentations to the full faculty, and the Board of Trustees, culminating in interactive workshops and presentations to parent groups.
Results: The School developed and implemented several detailed policy and procedural changes that were formally incorporated into the School's operations. The transition plan outlined by the Committee incorporated:
- Revised general admission and re-enrollment criteria, incorporating better screening of incoming four-year-olds, new evaluation instruments, and longer periods of observation.
- A new policy for siblings and children of faculty and trustees: they would continue to receive preferential admissions treatment, but would now have to meet the same academic profile and admissions criteria as all other applicants.
- Language stating that the school would make "reasonable accommodations" for special needs students, explicitly discontinuing the use of full-time aides.
- A revised school Handbook, reviewed and approved by legal counsel.
- Selectively counseling out students where appropriate, with provisions to grandfather (until graduation) current students who might not meet revised admissions and re-enrollment criteria.
- Hiring of a full-time learning specialist, as soon as funding would allow.
- A requirement that families provide a neuropsychological evaluation (when needed) if requested by the school.
- A transition plan and budget for the current academic year along with a proposal for the following year's budget to support the policy and strategic recommendations.
- Co-ordination of internal and external support services and the development of individualized student learning plans. Although some families were concerned about the changes in the Admissions criteria, they ultimately recognized that the school was initiating change to create an optimal learning environment to enable the students to succeed.
As many of their peer schools continue to struggle with stretched resources and an inability to meet needs across the learning spectrum, our client is well-positioned to serve its student body's needs, and to continue admitting classes that will enjoy a comfortable classroom environment, required services, and teaching accommodations incorporating educational best practices.