Educators from across West Virginia were talking about school capacity Thursday in Morgantown. Just not the infrastructure kind.
The discourse didn’t have a thing to do with classroom sizes.
Or, how the students who drive to school always want to snag a space in the faculty lot.
“Capacity,” in this case, means the garnering of intellectual potential: The West Virginia Capacity Building Institute, held at the Morgantown Marriott at Waterfront Place, was tasked to do just that for Mountain State students with special needs.
It was hosted by the West Virginia Department of Education and the state Division of Rehabilitation Services.
About 500 school psychologists and counselors sat in a variety of workshops during the institute, which wrapped up Thursday afternoon.
“Collaboration Between VR and Special Education in the Provision of Pre-Employment Transition Services, Part I,” was one of many specialized seminars that took deep dives into practice and policy.
The idea, Division of Rehabilitation Services Director Marijane Waldron said, is to get students on a job pathway early.
“We can’t wait until 11th or 12th grade to start talking about post-secondary and career goals,” she said.
Students with autism, the sensory and developmental disorder that affects as many as 1 in 59 children nationwide, were a particular focus.
The gathering followed complaints filed in June against Kanawha County Schools by the Arc and Disability Rights of West Virginia, two advocacy groups.
Both are charging that the state’s largest school district failed to provide adequate services to three students with varying degrees of autism.
In February, a trio teacher aides in Berkeley County Schools resigned after being heard on secretly recorded audio berating students with autism and other special needs in their classrooms.
State Department of Education official Susan Beck, meanwhile, championed a group of students in Greenbrier County who collaborated with counselors in a unique way last spring to combat that county’s burgeoning opioid epidemic.
The students, said Beck, who is the executive director of the Office of Special Education, created a Milton Bradley-styled board game to illustrate the lethal impact of addiction.
“And now, a lot of other counties are looking at it,” she said.
“They want to utilize it for their schools.”
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