This school year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and Shorewood School District partnered to develop more inclusive environments within Wisconsin schools. With funding from the SWIFT Education Center, based in the University of Kansas, the initiative is part of a grant focused on improving outcomes for students of marginalized groups across the country.
According to Emily Berry, school board president, observed disparities among disabled students made the partnership a focus for the district.
“The students with disabilities, students receiving special education services, students with IEPS, are one of the populations where we see consistent gaps in opportunities and growth, so we know we had some work to do there,” Berry said.
The DPI refers to these students as “dynamic learners.” While this label describes students who have learning disabilities, it also includes neurotypical students with different learning styles.
As a part of their research, the SWIFT Education Center has offered grants to various education agencies within states across the US, the Wisconsin DPI being one of them.
Since then, they have gone on to name three school districts in Wisconsin to be partners in this program. Shorewood, Monona Grove, and Altoona school districts have all begun work with the DPI to research and develop better ways to engage students who might not otherwise have the opportunity. In addition to Wisconsin, Delaware, California, and New Mexico all have education agencies working with the program.
Iris Jacobson, a special education consultant for the DPI, works in overseeing the state’s work with students in special education. As a part of her work, she helped collaborate with the SWIFT Education Center to implement their programming in Wisconsin.
“That grant is to [help] develop demonstration sites where students with significant and very unique needs have presence in the general education environment and classrooms,” Jacobson said. “Part of this is to make sure that student engagement is happening in those environments, as well as high-quality instruction for all students, especially with a focus on dynamic learners within that environment.”
Although the grant aims to support students of historically marginalized groups, it will focus on training staff members to better support students in the classroom.
“[The programming] includes things like coaching; it’s not anything direct with the students,” Harder said. “It’s more things that our administrators and [our central office] are doing that will ultimately help shape some of the practices as we work with teachers and then students more.”
According to Jacobson, the agency considered several things when selecting districts to collaborate with, including past work on equity efforts, existing frameworks, and the administration’s attitudes toward feedback.
“[Shorewood] already had some systems in place for us to help generate the work through and leverage the thinking through those existing structures,” Jacobson said. “Changing folks’ positions can be a big thing to do, but we don’t need to do that. We’re already there. Getting kids into the general environment is happening already. It may not be 100%, but the idea of that happening is happening already.”
According to the SWIFT Education Center and DPI, the initiative aims to improve the learning environment for all students. They say that developing better practices for helping students with different learning needs can optimize productivity and inclusion for the whole classroom.
“We know that when we focus on students who have the greatest needs, all students do better,” Harder said. “It’s more about focusing on that population of students and working on how to make our schools more inclusive to those students so that they really feel a sense of belonging and welcomeness in our schools.”
Additionally, these initiatives will be carried out at every grade level in the district, as Shorewood has opted to make the initiative a K–12 effort.
In addition to improving individual school districts, SWIFT hopes that their grants will provide examples for other school districts on how to improve their own equity models.
“The four [states involved] are all working to provide the nation with some demonstration on how this work can be done,” Jacobson said. “It may look different from state to state and school to school, but the whole underlying factor is that it can be done and here’s some things that helped make it successful.”