Special Needs at SOTA: Article

Special Needs in SOTA

School of the Arts has the most special needs and 504 students in the Rochester City School District. With that being said, it is obvious that SOTA must accommodate all of the students various needs.

Ms. Samantha Brody is the new administrator for the special needs department here at SOTA. She graduated last May from the University of Rochester with her administrative certification. Although this is her first year at SOTA, she previously taught special education at School Without Walls for 20 years.

Ms. Brody, along with 25 other faculty members at SOTA, work daily to accommodate the 100 students as part of the special needs department here at SOTA. Brody says, “We try to create an individualized plan for our students to ensure that they have enough support to meet the academic, artistic and social needs at SOTA”.

The special needs department creates an IEP for each student as part of the special needs program. This is an Individual Educational Plan where students receive a personal plan that accommodates his or her needs in order to perform to the best of their ability at school. This IEP includes special alerts a student might have as well as their disability, test results, test and classroom modifications and most importantly, their strengths and weaknesses. This IEP ensures that students get the personal and appropriate needs that they deserve. This includes extra help in classes, academic remediation, along with many more resources available to students.

Brody says SOTA has “a strong supportive and accommodating faculty” which is what makes School of the Arts unique and helpful.

Another substantial part of the SOTA the special needs department is Peter Bailargeon who has been working here for 50 years.

Bailargeon says that SOTA is unique because of the ICOT classes that they offer. ICOT are inclusion classes which are regular education classes that are integrated with another teacher from the special needs department that offer extra help. This is unique because the teacher that is added is considered a co-teacher to the class, not just subjected to one student in particular.

These teachers are called push INS and pull outs. Push INS offer services to students such as test modifications and extra support. Pull outs help students who feel that the classroom is “too distracting” and they need help outside of it.

The teachers that are added are a part of the special needs department and they each have “specialties”.  Although that teacher can go into classrooms of various subjects, they specialize in one subject. Mr. Bailargeon for example, specializes in math.

Overall, faculty members like Ms. Brody and Mr. Bailargeon help to create the supportive special needs department that we have here at SOTA.