Strategies: Iron Horse Middle School

The multi–layered approach to providing support to a wide variety of special education students is an ongoing and sustainable part of our program. The program is designed to use collaboration and planning as a method to meet the needs of students rather than fitting students to a specific program. This allows for individual development of goals and objectives that are tied to the state and local standards and benchmarks.

The main means of providing support and the teaching of compensatory skills is through the curriculum rather than a pull-out approach using materials that do not match what is being taught in the classroom. The purpose of using core curriculum enables the student to access the rich and varied course work that lends itself to mastery of the specific skills.

The administrators at Iron Horse have a clear message to all staff and that is at our school, all staff members are equally responsible for all students. The administration works to make sure that staff members are exposed to current methods and procedures regarding the inclusive nature of instruction. The staff works collaboratively teaching each other strategies for best practices and for providing site- level staff development to assist new teachers in developing skills for accountability.