Bulletin Boards |Shopping & Classifieds |Calendar |About Us

Front page

Behavior Management

Conflict Resolution

Early Intervention

For Educators

For Families

Internet & Assistive Technology

Recreation & Sports

Specific Disabilities

State By State

Transition

Washington Watch

Site Map

VIRGINIA SPECIAL ED STUDENTS HAVE MAIL TO DELIVER.... WHO WANTS IT?

November 7, 1999

Can special education students in different states, even a continent away, help each other? Manassas, Va., teacher Fred Allard suspects they can, and is trying to launch an e-mail pen-pal program to find out. Allard, a teacher of high school age students classified as "trainable mentally retarded" at Osbourn Park High School, is putting his students on the web to help them communicate with others and learn useful career skills. To get other classes across the country involved, Allard is even offering technical guidance to other teachers.

A former inner city Connecticut school teacher who took a hiatus as an Internet applications developer, Allard returned to the classroom this year and is looking to lead his students into the information age. In technology-heavy Northern Virginia, Allard argues developing Internet and computing skills is necessity, not amusement, for his students. "The jobs that my students are going to be gearing up for are in the technology sector," he said. "They're not going to be janitors or the stereotypical jobs that people think the mentally retarded will hold."

Giving students access to others via the Internet will help them share ideas and develop social as well as computer skills, Allard believes. E-mail pen pals will enable students to get feedback from fellow students on the projects they are working on, experiences they have and things they are learning. "It will help them to be more in line with the way technology is going," he said. "We'd like to introduce that as a possible learning objective for our M.R. curriculum."

In addition to e-mail pen pals, Allard plans to help his class build its own web page, to be hosted on the Osbourn Park High School web page. The students will put on it stories they have written and artwork they have created.

With his computer background, Allard said he is prepared to answer questions from other teachers about how to create similar projects to connect to his students. If teachers need it, Allard says he will set up a model program at his school and describe the step-by-step process for teachers in other schools to follow. "A lot of other teachers might be intimidated, might have the same idea but not know how to accomplish it," he said.

For more information, e-mail Fred Allard or call him at Osbourn Park High School: 703-365-6500

Since starting the project at the beginning of the school year, Allard has become more familiar with the political and economic labyrinth that often separates special ed. classrooms from the Internet. As evidence of the challenge launching such a program can be, Allard is still in the development stage more than 10 weeks into the school year.

The students were the easiest group to bring on board, Allard says, noting some of his eight students already have some limited Internet experience. Parents, likewise, were fairly easy to recruit to support the plan. "Because I'm a tech-head," Allard said, many parents who have technical jobs, mostly for the government, could relate to him and understand the value of the project. Allard sent letters to the parents before school started to introduce himself and mention his overall goal of improving the students' computer literacy as part of their functional curriculum. Allard outlined the project again at a back-to-school open house and has since begun communicating with many parents regularly via e-mail.

Persuading the local school board and school officials to support the plan was another story. "Educating adults can sometimes be much tougher than educating these kids," he said. One of the biggest hurdles Allard has dealt with is what he called the school's "pre-P.L. 94-142 attitudes" about students with disabilities. "Their basic question was 'why do these kids need to use the Internet?'"

The project took an important step forward in late October when the school board approved Allard's plan. The board's principal concerns were maintaining student confidentiality, which is required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and getting students access to the Internet and personal e-mail accounts. Currently, schools in Manassas allow students to use the Internet under supervision, but they are not assigned their own e-mail addresses. The board approved Allard's proposal, however, as long as the e-mailing is used to facilitate the class' overall educational process.

Getting enough equipment to give the class plenty of computer time is also a challenge, but Osbourn Park is fortunate enough to have a PC learning lab with Internet access for the special ed. department, Allard said. He still needs to get an adaptive keyboard for one visually impaired student, and the class has already been using some of Allard's own scanners in place of school-funded equipment.

Allard said he is contacting community groups such as the Manassas Chamber of Commerce and local businesses to get contributions of equipment for the project. "I know what budgets are all about now," he said. "We don't have a lot of money. You just have to get creative."8