Supporting Students with Significant Needs in Distance Learning

The Katherine Thomas School (KTS) is a special education day school in the DC metro area that serves students with significant language-based disabilities and autism from preschool through the 12th grade. KTS is a program of The Treatment and Learning Centers of Rockville, Maryland. All of our students require full-time support and services outside of general education classrooms. Approximately half of the students at KTS are placed by their local jurisdictions in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. The rest are privately placed and tuition is paid by their families. KTS students are from diverse backgrounds—46 percent white, 17 percent Asian American, 15 percent African American, 9 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent multirace students.

Laying the Foundation With Access to Technology

Technology is a big part of who we are as a school. We use technology every day to meet the needs of our students with communication impairments and to support and scaffold students in learning. Walking into one of our face-to-face classrooms, you would have seen students using technology like Promethean Boards and SMART Boards, FM systems, Chromebooks, alternative communication devices, and iPads. They used platforms like Google Classroom and the multitude of Google Chrome extensions (e.g., Kami, which allows students to type on PDF docs posted on Google Classroom), and Flipgrid, which allows students to create short videos to respond to prompts posed by their teacher without the stress of being “live.” Because technology is so critical to how we support our students, our first goal when we closed was to make sure that every student had the technology they needed to participate in learning from home—and that every student had internet access.

We immediately sent a letter and a survey to parents to find out who had access to broadband internet and to assess whether the technology we sent home would meet their needs. We helped families who didn’t have internet access by arranging times for parents to pick up Chromebooks, iPads, and/or internet hotspots, or dropping them off at students’ homes. We also worked with some families to get them signed up for free or low-cost internet service. Our IT department worked hard to get everyone the technology they needed quickly and to address problems with hardware right away.

Once we had ensured that our students and families had access to the technology, we worked to support them in using it effectively in the new distance learning format. All of our students had used the technology at school, but still, we did run into some challenges. For example, some of our families found that simultaneously managing Zoom sessions for multiple children and their own work schedules was not possible. To support these families, we offered alternative times in the early morning or evening for related services or for individual academic sessions. Some students had difficulty using the Chromebooks or iPads all day because of attention issues or their need for constant 1:1 adult support. For these students, we made 1:1 support time blocks available during class time or at another time that was convenient for their families.

Communicating With Families and Establishing Routines

At the start of the closure, we wanted to give parents the opportunity to ask our staff questions, so we set up office hours and individual meeting times where parents could virtually connect with us. This helped us establish and expand our relationships with families in this new distance context early in our move to learning at home. We then cleared the schedule of our media and technology teacher so that her primary focus would be responding to and troubleshooting technology challenges with parents. Additionally, our entire staff has stuck by our policy of responding to family communication within 24 hours. We hold weekly classroom or grade-level team meetings to discuss student progress, as well as weekly all-staff meetings to make sure all staff members are in the loop on any challenges or changes for virtual learning.

Our students rely heavily on their schedules to feel a sense of comfort in routines, to understand expectations for their participation, and for support in executive functioning. Transitions and changes to routines can be disruptive to our students and can get them off track for significant periods of time. The closure presented a big challenge: How would we create a transition to distance learning that would lessen the burden of such a significant change to our students everyday life?

We immediately worked to create a plan to help families establish a home learning routine and work space. For example, we created a single, accessible, virtual document that would house each student’s daily schedule. The schedule included all of the information students and parents would need to navigate their day, including the name and a picture of each teacher/specialist associated with each session. We rendered the schedule so that students could click on each teacher’s name or face and be brought directly to their live session in Zoom. We also let families know that we would continue to use Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) to motivate students through issuing tokens when students showed that they were going above and beyond to display KTS values (Kind Thinking Student).

Many KTS students are on the autism spectrum and struggle with changes in schedule and routine. Distance learning schedules were created to be as similar as possible to their usual schedule. Student schedules generally include a daily morning meeting and announcements, followed by approximately three hours of academic instruction, pragmatic and social skills lessons, specials classes (art, music, PE, drama) with teachers, plus any related services at the elementary and middle school levels. Because early childhood students generally have shorter attention spans and need more flexibility, some lessons, music, PE, art, and drama are pre-recorded so that they can be done at a time that’s most supportive for the student and family. Morning announcements are read and recorded on Flipgrid by different students each day. The announcement also reminds students what to expect each day, and gives students opportunities to see and be seen by all staff and students. We have also held virtual birthday parties and other events over Zoom as a way to engage and motivate students and to highlight special events.

We also worked with families to create a consistent learning space for students at home. During the initial phase of virtual learning, we made recommendations to families for setting up students’ work spaces and materials. We also created and shared Social Stories to review with students, focusing on their new virtual learning schedule and routine, the norms and expectations of online classes, and how to be flexible and have a “Plan B” if their schedule doesn’t go as expected.