Civil Municipal - Feb 2024

progress throughout the school year.) “In all of our areas, we make sure the children are engaged and ready, that they are modeling, that they are collaborating, and that they’re going through interdisciplinary units with performance-based learning tests,” Palmer adds. “Finally, we’re making sure that they are flowing through our new STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) labs, which show howmath, science, and all those subject matters come together. This way, we educate the whole child.” SPECIAL PROGRAMS FOR SPECIAL NEEDS Poverty attacks a child’s health – physical, mental, and emotional. In Hancock County, many students with various disabilities have special needs. Mathis says that the district’s special education teachers support and co-teach alongside its regular classroom teachers. “They follow around a caseload of students with disabilities to provide those supports within the class,” she notes. “In addition to that, we also have some students that we service through small group settings. In those situations, the teachers pull those kids out of class to work on those foundational skills that will help them be successful in obtaining access to the general curriculum. “We have also integrated what we call a ‘sensory classroom’ for our neural-sensitive students who have issues with their sensory processing. This classroom allows an opportunity for them to go in and cool down. It’s a calming place where they can de-stress themselves so they can be successful within the classroom.” HOW EDUCATION IS CHANGING In Hancock County, as elsewhere in the country, public education has changed recently in two profound ways: there is a severe teacher shortage in the U.S., and every year, fewer and fewer college graduates are choosing to make teaching their career; and because of COVID, there has been a rapid acceleration in the use of virtual instruction technologies in the classroom. And while the first phenomenon cannot be ameliorated with tools of 182 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 5, ISSUE 02