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SHAKLEE'S PAT ON THE BACK PUSHES 10 TEACHERS FORWARD

April 21, 2000

Ten special education teachers won recognition last month from the Shaklee Institute for Improving Special Education for striving to increase their own professional knowledge, developing effective teaching practices and, as a result, helping students with special needs get a quality education. Shaklee's reward, cash and a pewter sculpture, comes with a catch -- the teachers must not rest on their laurels. Instead, Shaklee will include them in an upcoming summer institute to collaborate with other special education teachers and further improve their teaching methods.

The Shaklee Institute, founded in 1995 by the Heartspring School in Wichita, Kan., has been honoring special ed teachers for three years. Winners receive $1,000, a sculpture by artist Michael Ricker, and a scholarship to a special four-day Shaklee Teacher Award Summer Session in June at the Institute. During the seminar, the teachers will meet with the scholars who selected them and with past Shaklee Award winners to discuss ways to further improve their teaching strategies and methods. The teachers explore philosophies of education, ethics in special education, systems of care and behavior issues.

"The purpose of this session is to establish a learning community of highly effective teachers and empower teachers to be positive change agents as they return to their respective schools," Shaklee says.

North Carolina and Minnesota were well represented among this year's award winners, each with two teachers in the group. Tezella Cline, of Charlotte, N.C., teaches sixth and seventh grade students with varying degrees of behavior and emotional disorders at Spaugh Middle School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. In nearby Asheboro, N.C., Susan Skinner teaches students in grades 6 through 8 with serious behavioral, emotional, mental and learning disabilities at North Asheboro Middle School. Some students come from psychiatric hospitals, residential programs, alternative schools or unstable home environments.

In Princeton, Minn., Dianna Herrmann won a Shaklee Award for her work in the Emotional Behavior Disorders Program at Princeton Middle School. She uses direct teaching and positive intervention strategies in working with 25 students ages 11 through 14. Lyn Pasik Johnson, of the Fergus Falls, Minn., Area Special Education Cooperative works at Eisenhower School as an inclusion teacher for children ages 3 through 7 and serves as an autism resource specialist to consult with educators in 42 school districts.

Angela Allen-McDonald, of Lindsborg, Kan., won an award for her work at Roosevelt Elementary School as a non-categorical special education teacher. Most of her 23 students in kindergarten through fifth grade are team-taught in general ed. classrooms. In San Antonio, Oralia Lara works as an educational specialist in the Special Education Department at Guerra Development Center, providing staff development training to special education and general education teachers and working in the classroom with students with mental retardation, physical impairments and autism.

At Berkmar High School, in Lilburn, Ga., Jessica Moreau won the award for her work with a high school level class for students with sensory impairments and moderate, severe and profound intellectual disabilities. Her self-contained class, the first of its kind in the United States, focuses on teaching students how to function as independently as possible in their homes and communities. Suzanne Perry, a teacher at Rose Lane Elementary in Phoenix, works in a cross-categorical, self-contained classroom with students from kindergarten through third grade with emotional disturbance and other disabilities.

In Chehalis, Wash., Kathryn Rotter works as a teacher with the VISIONS Program through the Chehalis/Centralia Student Support Cooperative. The community-based vocational and life skills training program, based in a local shopping mall, focuses on providing transition services for students approaching community employment and independent living in the community. Bonnie Wiseman, of Brea, Calif., teaches in a self-contained mild-to-moderate special education classroom at the Hermosa Drive School in Fullerton. She works with 13 full-time students whose disabilities include visual impairment, speech/language impairment, learning disabilities, autism, mental retardation and traumatic brain injury.

The winners were selected based on recommendations from supervisors and peers and the teachers' responses to several essay questions. Applicants were asked to describe their teaching practices and how they know they are effective, explain how they keep current on new teaching developments and best practices and show how they have collaborated with general education, mental health and developmental disability systems to help children. The teachers also had to show that they support parents, families and communities interested in special education and incorporate and respect diversity in their teaching methods.8