Union School District

We are a developing site! As the year progresses we will be adding more parent, student, and teacher information to help you and your student while involved in any of our support programs. For immediate help, advise, or to answer your questions, please contact the special education secretary, Mrs. Emily Rush, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Our office is located in Rimersburg Elementary, and Mrs. Rush will direct your call to the appropriate recipient. We look forward to working with you! Union School District maintains a Child Study Team. The Child Study Team is convened for students who are having behavioral or academic difficulties. The team consists of the principal, school psychologist, classroom teacher, reading specialist, special education teacher, if necessary, and you. Interventions will be brainstormed at the first meeting. The strategies that are chosen by the team will be put into place for 30 school days to help your child reach his or her educational goal. Thirty school days after the initial meeting, the team will reconvene to celebrate your child's success, or make recommendations for future interventions. A final meeting will be held 30 days later to decide if the interventions are working and should continue or if your child should be considered for an evaluation by the school psychologist, with your permission, to determine need and eligibility for special education services. It is the policy of the Union School District that every child shall be provided with the opportunity for a free, public, and appropriate education. To the maximum extent possible, exceptional children shall be educated in the most appropriate physical, social, and academic environment available. Exceptional children shall be, as deemed individually appropriate, included in regular programs, placed in itinerant programs, and/or placed in part-time or full-time special classes as determined by the IEP Team. After all evaluations are completed, an Evaluation Report will be compiled with parent involvement. It will include specific recommendations for the types of intervention necessary to deal with the child's specified needs. An Individual Education Program (IEP) will be developed for specialized services for qualifying students. The IEP Team will may consist of the principal, the special education teacher, the regular education teacher(s), the district psychologist, district liaison, other teachers or specialists as needed, and other staff when appropriate. In compliance with state and federal law, the Union School District will provide to each protected handicapped student without discrimination or cost to the student or family, those related aids, services, or accommodations which are needed to provide equal opportunity to participate in and obtain the benefits of the school program and extracurricular activities to the maximum extent appropriate to the student's abilities. In order to qualify as a protected handicapped student, the child must be of school age with a physical or mental disability which substantially limits or prohibits participation in or access to any aspect of the school program. These are described in Chapter 14 and 15 of the state Board of Education regulations. Autism means a developmental disability significantly affecting verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction, generally evident before age 3, which adversely affects a child's educational performance. Other characteristics often associated with autism are engagement in repetitive activities and stereotyped movements, resistance to environmental change or change in daily routines and unusual responses to sensory experiences. Deaf-blindness means concomitant hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs solely for children with deafness or children with blindness. Orthopedic impairment means a severe orthopedic impairment that adversely affects educational performance. Other health impairment means having limited strength, vitality, or alertness, including heightened alertness to environmental stimuli. Specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations. Traumatic brain injury means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment or both. Visual impairment means an impairment in vision that, even with correction, adversely affects both partial sight and blindness. Deafness means a hearing impairment that is so severe that the child is impaired in processing linguistic information through hearing, with or without amplification, which adversely affects a child's educational performance.