Special Education

The programs of the Special Education Department are broad based, located in every building and level of the Lansing School District.  The mandate for special education is birth through age 26.  We operate home-based programs for children and their families, work-based programs for adults, K-12 support, and special education classrooms for children with thirteen different disabilities.

The district employs around 230 professional and 105 non-professional special education staff.  There are over 2,200 special education students.  Programs and services are monitored for compliance with rules and regulations from Ingham ISD and Michigan Department of Education.

Evaluations

Over five hundred of the already eligible students require a comprehensive multi-disciplinary evaluation each year.  These are preformed in addition to evaluating students who are referred for special education services.

Department Programs 

Three-Five Program: The Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) program is a half-day classroom model for 3-5-year-olds.  ESCE programs are in the following schools: Averill, Cumberland, Forest View, Kendon, Reo and Willow.

Elementary: Each elementary school has a resource room.  A resource room is designed for students who need support in the general education curriculum.  The district also operates 20 basic classrooms for students that require a special education classroom.  There are also teacher-consultants, therapists, psychologists, and social workers to support these programs.

Middle Schools: The middle schools offer a combination of teaming with general education teachers, basic classrooms, and resource rooms.  This is done to allow for the greatest number of options in programming for the diverse needs of the students.  In addition, teacher-consultants, therapists, psychologists and social workers support these programs.

High Schools: Each high school operates a combination of resource rooms and basic classrooms.  The focus is to help students with skill development, high school graduation, and transition to the world beyond high school.  Teacher-consultants, therapists, psychologists and social workers support these programs.

Beekman Center: The Beekman Center is home to 160 severely and moderately impaired children and young adults.  In addition, the building hosts the service staff for 3-5-year-olds, area Special Olympics office, and Beekman Productions.  The staff consists of an administrator, secretaries, teachers, therapists, assistants and custodians.

Each local educational agency and public school academy in Michigan is required to publicly post the process used to determine the existence of a Specific Learning Disability (SLD). Consistent with this requirement, as well as Ingham ISD's commitment to implementation of Response to Intervention (RtI) practices, Ingham Intermediate School District will use the following procedures to determine a Specific Learning Disability.

1. Evaluation teams will primarily use the data from a Response to Intervention (RtI) process
2. In the event that RtI practices are not fully implemented in the area of concern or grade level, the evaluation team may use assessment results to determine whether a child exhibits an academic pattern of strengths and weaknesses in performance, achievement, or both, relative to age, state-approved grade-level standards, or intellectual development
3. The use of a severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability may not be used solely to determine eligibility, but may be used as a portion of the data to establish a pattern of strengths and weaknesses.
4. If a school in a district has a fully implemented response to scientific, research-based intervention process in select grades, the school must use data from that process to document interventions and student progress for the purpose of determining the existence of a SLD.  The other grades in that school, and the other schools in the district (i.e. secondary grade-level buildings) who have not fully implemented a response to scientific, research-based intervention process must use a pattern of strengths and weaknesses process until each grade is phased in to full implementation.