LAURINBURG — The Scotland County Board of Education got a better look inside the Exceptional Children’s Services in the district this week.
Executive Director Nicole Sinclair spoke with the board on Monday during the Committee of the Whole meeting explaining the different departments and who that includes in the EC department.
“I just want to go over how all the pieces go together in the exceptional children’s department,” Sinclair said. “I’ve broken it down into each department.”
The departments include the instructional team, compliance department, diagnostic center and related services personnel. The instructional team includes all the program specialists for pre-school to 12th grade.
“Their main goal is to provide direct services to the teachers so the teachers can help the students,” Sinclair said. “They do observations on students to provide intervention strategies to teachers, they review folders so they can come up with new ideas and new techniques for working with students in the classroom. They work with the teachers all the time.”
Sinclair added that the instructional team is her eyes and ears inside the school and they bring the issues they are seeing in the schools to her.
In the compliance department, there is a lead compliance monitor who has three compliance monitors under her.
“Their role is to look at the folders and compliance information to make sure we’re serving the students correctly,” Sinclair said. “They also are responsible for providing staff development to the EC facilitators at the school. My EC facilitators are more focused on right in the school building making sure all teachers are compliant.”
The four school psychologists, a family assistant and an educational diagnostician are all under the diagnostic center who has been working with CARES Act money and running testing for students.
Related services personnel includes the speech therapists, occupational therapists, audiologist and physical therapists.
“They are also another team that are working very hard because they are providing direct services to students,” Sinclair explained. “They’re bringing students in face to face once a week but they’re also doing teletherapy. Parents have been so appreciative because as you know the way it services it’s hard to teach a student to do something with physical therapy or speech when you don’t have them face to face.”
Sinclair did add that the therapists are wearing clear facemasks, face shields and are separated from students by Plexiglas so that everyone is staying safe.
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