Can anyone please tell me your thoughts on this particular reading program? Our school system has been involved with this program for three years and will be asking special education teachers to get involved with this program after training this summer for the 2003-04 school year. As a speech pathologist, I am concerned that my duties in providing speech therapy may be weakened if I am to take part in this program rather than work with those severely-communicativly students who may not be suited for this reading format. If anyone is using this system,how is your special education population performing with communication disorders? Sincerely,Donna
Re: Success for All
This one on paper looks good and I suspect it’s a sound reading program but gosh, never underestimate the ability of certain administrators to take something that could work and screw it up. If you cruise to the LM_NET school librarians’ list serv and search for it, it does not get good comments from them. A lot of the conversation isn’t online but I’ve inferred that the SFA folks pull in personnel to do the teaching that aren’t the reading teachers — including librarians — and the same issues of “what happened to our *real* job duties?” come up. I don’t know how much of the reaction would be to not liking structured programs, th ough, since a fair number of librarians think structured systematic teaching would prevent students from learning to love books (sigh).
A librarian friend of mine has learned to respond to additional non-library duties with a list of her critical duties, and a request to be told which of these she will be relieved from so that she’ll have time for the other duties. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Are IEPs specific enough taht you could show that this was violating them?
I believe you mean Success for All. Here is a link:
http://www.schwablearning.org/Articles.asp?r=318&g=2&d=5
It’s listed with some other good programs, so that’s a good sign. I see nothing wrong with the special ed. staff being knowledgable about what is being used in the regular classroom, so that efforts can be supported when appropriate. But as a SLP I do not think you should compromise your goals at all. You are working on core speech and language deficits that will hopefully enable the child to succeed in the regular classroom eventually.
Janis