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Secretary of Education swings by Willie Ross School

Date: 2/14/2011

Feb. 14, 2011

By Chris Maza

Reminder Assistant Editor

LONGMEADOW — Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville made a stop at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf as part of a Western Mass. swing on Feb. 10.

Reville, a Longmeadow native who attended the Norway Street School that the Willie Ross School now calls its main campus, was there to tour the school facility and talk to administrators before visiting the Willie Ross high school program in East Longmeadow.

The collaboration between the Willie Ross School and local public schools was of particular interest to Reville.

"What I hear and what the leadership here has told me about is a very impressive collaboration between a mainstream school system and one of our Chapter 766 schools. I'm interested to see how that works out," Reville said.

The Web site for the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services defines Chapter 766 as a law "which guarantees the rights of all young people with special needs (age 3 to 22) to an educational program best suited to their needs."

According to Reville, the state's Department of Education is continually exploring ways to integrate programs in order to serve the educational needs of students throughout districts statewide, regardless of their situation.

"Under these current budgetary circumstances, which are strained and likely to be strained for some while to come, we're looking for instances of innovative collaboration between various kinds of educators," Reville said. "We're looking for a school system that has a variety of ways of delivering services, not necessarily just one generic, one-size-fits-all model."

"We know our students are different and have different needs and we need a system that's nimble and flexible and innovative to meet those needs. This is an example of that kind of collaboration," he added.

Issues surrounding students with special needs are ones that Reville finds particularly important to address, especially with rapidly changing technology and techniques with which educators teach children with special needs.

"When we say we want our students to achieve at high levels, we mean all. I'm a special needs parent myself, so I'm particularly attuned to this and concerned about it," Reville said, "We want to have schools and educators be right up to speed and using state-of-the-art equipment to meet the needs of our children, so all children have the opportunity to be as successful as they possibly can [be] educationally ... and therefore to be ready for success in career or in college as they go on into their future."

In order to ensure those needs are met, those with the responsibility of forming legislation must know exactly what those needs are, which is why trips like the one to the Willie Ross School are so important for Reville.

"We're all the time reaching out to educators to gain their perspective. We don't like to develop policy in a vacuum up on Beacon Hill," Reville said. "We try and contract with organizations like Willie Ross that know the field. They're experts in the field. They know the students, the families, they know the needs, they know the changing technology. We're trying to hire world-class educators to tend to the needs of our students."



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