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Collaborative Empowerment Project Description

Aligned with research by Thomas R Guskey

Participant Quotes

Project Goals

Participant Quotations

Elementary School Principal: This process works for ALL IEP decisions and with kids of ALL abilities.

Special Education Director: This process is saving us money. It is well worth the time and expense to release teachers to learn this process because of the money we save in the long run.

General educator: Every school brings in some workshop and everybody’s gung-ho on it and 2 months later it’s forgotten. I don’t think it’s going to happen with this. I truly don’t. When I do my lesson plans, one of the first things I think about is how am I going to include my students with disabilities?

Student: Isn’t that a no-brainer? (Response when he was told that his IEP team was learning a process that considers the needs of the student first before buying AT)

Occupational Therapist: I’ve gone through a lot of phases in my experience with AT. First, all I ever did was call Terry, the outside, AT “expert”, then, I was a gadget junkie and I’ve been an “expert” which I’ve never been so that was kind of a joke, to where I just ended up sitting quietly on the sidelines in IEP’s because I wasn’t comfortable with being that “expert” and I just didn’t want to be the person everyone turned to at the table. So what the MCEP has given me is hope. First of all it has reinvigorated my involvement in AT; it’s given me hope that we’ll be able to actually do something… do the right thing for kids.

Parent of student with a disability: I want this team to know how grateful I am for them. I feel like the luckiest mom in the world. My son has received unbelievable services and my heart is truly grateful and full and I hope that these people will be blessed throughout their lives for the things that they have done for our family.

I’m thankful they have had the opportunity to be part of this project. It has had such a positive impact on my son. The team has come back excited to try what they learned and share this information with others. They learned how to modify and change his regular coursework to help him be more successful.

My son truly loves school. And every day he asks me “do I get to go to school today?” I think that’s the greatest complement this team can ever be given is that he truly loves to be there. I want to thank all those who made the MCEP possible. I feel it was a very successful and worthwhile project and I hope that this opportunity will be offered to others in the future.

Elementary School Principal: I’ve learned a wonderful new term that will last me forever…low-tech. I find myself saying to people as they come in to ask me for things “have you tried the low-tech yet”? There’s nothing more frustrating as an administrator to have very dedicated staff members approach you who want to do their very best and asking you “what can we do for this child?” This process has allowed us to look for resources as a team so it doesn’t all fall on one person’s shoulders and I’m very excited about that.

Speech Language Pathologist: This whole project has been very, very interesting from my perspective. The process has given me one more tool to put in my bag of tricks. I am for the most part a pretty concrete analytical person but I’ve got to confess that I like probably a lot of you, have been hooked in by some kind of technology item that I wound up buying in the sequence of ready, fire, aim. What I will take away from this whole operation and carry with me for the rest of the time when I am dealing with kids is the logical framework that this whole process allows you to work with; under ANY environment with ANY kids under ANY kind of conditions of disability or abilities.

Special Educator: This has been a paradigm shift for me. In the past we always looked for the experts and when we had a question about AT. So now we have these tools to work with that are really awesome. And its exciting because we’ve worked on this one case study which opens up the door for our student but I’m just thinking about all the other students, parents and teachers now that this will affect in our district as we do some in-service on what we’ve learned. We’ve been talking about how we’ll be doing that. So I’m excited.

Its been really awesome and lots of fun. We’re really glad we’re a low-tech group and that we’re able to rely on some of the low tech that we didn’t even realize was available. This whole project has helped us think about that low-tech stuff that we need to have. Right now, our student’s laptop is broken so we certainly don’t want to be relying on that for anything. So it’s been a good experience.

Elementary School Principal: One thing that I think has been valuable about this project from my point of view is enhanced teamwork. This process has allowed us to have a systematic, logical way of looking at all issues and come up with a solution. I’ve learned also about our state AT lending library what a wonderful resource.
You don’t have to purchase all these things right off the bat. Once you get an idea you can actually get them on loan. It’s easy for me to go to my boss and say that we need to order some AT. I can explain what has been going on and its not just we ‘think’ this might work. We’ve tried these things we know they work and we would like to order them and its so much easier to have a boss, a superintendent say yes, I’ll support those things.

Students are making progress. That to me is so fun to watch. These kids work in the classrooms alongside the other students. They are making great progress. They are becoming part of the school atmosphere. They are students just like everybody else. That’s what we want, that’s our dream, that’s our goal.

The other thing I learned was happy parents. As an administrator any time you can get happy parents especially Special Ed happy parents, it makes my job a whole lot easier and we have been able to do that. It’s obvious. That has really warmed my heart because their goals are very basic. As an administrator I always worry that parents want to have their child in a fancy school in another state that costs $40,000 a year but its very simple their needs are very basic.

We’ve already got some people that would like to be a part of this project the next time. So the seed’s planted it’s starting to cultivate and I think it’s going to bloom so we’re excited about that. Thank you. I thank the parents who have trusted us to deal with their children and allowed us to say, “we’re going to try this” and allowed us to do that so thank you.

General educator: This process is just what you do. The only way the parents and other team members will get excited about it is if I’m excited about it. It reinforces using teamwork.