By Christopher Robinson, executive director, SESA
The Alaska Legislature formed SESA in 1986, and assigned to the agency one
core mission: to provide a Low Incidence Disability Outreach Program to
help school districts with very low enrollments of students with significant
disabilities. Since 1986, SESA and that mandate have been reaffirmed in
four legislative reauthorizations.
What are the “fundamentals” of SESA and its Low Incidence Outreach
Program that still win the support of schools, parents, advocates, and legislators?
What purposes and expectations are being met that may account for high satisfaction
ratings and continued support?
I would cite five purposes and expectations embedded into SESA upon its
creation:
1. Educational Benefit
“No Child Left Behind” is a recent and crystalline articulation
of this shared ideal. Every child, regardless of severity of disability
or location in the state, is entitled to educational benefit. But students
with significant disabilities are in fact left behind if their local school
personnel do not have knowledge of their disability, or of effective educational
approaches. SESA’s outreach program uses onsite and distance supports
to build local capacity to provide effective schooling for their students
with low incidence disabilities. At its best, the outreach model creates
micro-environments of local competence around local kids. The SESA outreach
model has proven that when school personnel know what to do and how to do
it, all kids win. Kids, and their equal access to education, are the first
and last reasons the state has created and maintained the SESA model.
2. Community Benefit
Communities cannot be whole if their families are not whole. In creating
SESA and its outreach program, Alaska was saying, “We will centralize
and transport knowledge, not children.” Children, perhaps especially
children with significant needs, belong in their families and home communities,
not in state residential facilities. Building local capacity to help schools
meet the needs of children with “hardest to serve” disabilities
serves both the children with those disabilities and their non-disabled
peers and communities. Just as all children benefit from their home schools
and communities, so too do all communities and schools benefit from the
presence of all children.
3. Fiscal Benefit
In light of Alaska’s current fiscal pressures, it is noteworthy that
SESA was created during an earlier legislative session of severe budget
cutting. Despite the fiscal imperatives of 1986, or perhaps because of those
imperatives, bipartisan partnerships between schools and parents and across
the legislative aisle agreed that the cost to the state of not having a
stable and effective outreach program would be many times greater than the
cost of sustaining that program. The annual costs of the SESA model, which
helps schools serve between two and three hundred individual students in
local schools across the state each year, would support perhaps twenty (probably
fewer) students in state residential programs. Why such a difference? The
SESA outreach model mobilizes and assists local school personnel who are
already employed by the local district. The model allows students to be
housed and maintained with their families rather than in a costly state
facility. Another economic benefit accrues to the state when its schools
stay “out of trouble” by offering sound special education programs.
If residential programs are costly, so are legal entanglements. Litigation
defense can be very costly, but even administrative hearings now can cost
as much as one hundred thousand dollars. Add the saved costs of unneeded
hearings and litigations to the saved costs of unneeded state residential
programs, and the economic foundations of SESA’s sustaining partnerships
quickly become apparent.
4. Personnel Efficiency
Economics aside, there has always been a severe national shortage of specialized
personnel in low incidence disability education. In SESA, the state has
created a unique nexus of specialized employment that is attractive to specialists.
By centralizing their employment and fully utilizing specialists in their
areas of specialization, the SESA model gets great return on the state’s
investment. A SESA specialist may serve as the specialized professional
“knowledge base” for twenty or more students scattered across
the state. The same specialist, if employed in a district served by SESA,
might serve one to eight students. In addition, the centralization of disability
specialists puts them in a position to make broader contributions to the
state through articles, conference presentations, and workshops. These contributions
become available to every Alaskan school district, not just those with low
enrollments. Over the past ten years, SESA has greatly expanded on these
efforts through its library, web site, and topical Newsletter inserts. Local
district personnel rarely are able to offer these kinds of broader contributions
outside their district boundaries.
5. Quality
Though quality is not mentioned in the SESA statute, it is an essential
expectation of the agency. An outreach service model will fall apart without
it. But quality is more than an ephemeral state of being, and it is more
than sloganeering. Quality is explicit standards and practices. It is consistency,
relevance, and sound judgment. Quality is the discipline needed to avoid “mission creep,” both as an agency and as specialists. It is clarity
in defining the agency’s clients, service recipients, and service beneficiaries.
In an outreach system, quality begins and ends with personnel – first
at SESA and then in the school district. SESA continues to seek feedback
from constituents, service recipients, and observers to help us monitor
our quality at the end-user level.
The above fundamental intentions and expectations for SESA have for the
most part proven to be realistic. But our work toward fulfilling these purposes
and expectations has led to a sixth SESA fundamental that has also now become
embedded into the agency:
6. Synergy
Synergy is the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It is fifteen
specialists influencing low incidence disability education in fifty or more
school districts. It is professional dialogue and consultations across disability
specializations that moved one legislative auditor to label SESA “like
a Mayo clinic for special education in Alaska.” It is a specialized
library developed to support SESA specialists, but which has become a user-initiated
service of its own for parents, college students, and large school district
personnel. It is using the agency as the vehicle for other well-selected
grant services in special education. It is a governing board that may be
unique in the nation, in representing parents, advocates, school district
personnel, and the state education agency. It is using technology to increase
access to the agency’s human and material resources, without degrading
our core services to our core recipients.
This is a time in which educators in Alaska and across the nation find themselves
working through chaos. In such times, it can be hard to perceive forward
progress. For me, reminding myself of the fundamentals of what we are doing,
and why, often help me regain perspective.
It is also true that a glance back rather than forward sometimes best reveals
our true course and progress. Like a helmsman reading his wake, or a skier
the meanders of her tracks, we too can take a look back to better know where
we are headed.
Re-visit your fundamentals. Take a moment to look back. You may find you
are doing better than you thought.
