1st Letter from Jackson School District..2/1/08, 6:55pm

[lmel...@optonline.net]

-----Original Message-----
From: Erwin, Allison <AEr...@jacksonsd.k12.nj.us>
Bcc: mystic...@aol.com
Sent: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 6:55 pm
Subject: Special Education Occupational Therapy Update from the
Jackson School District

February 1, 2008



Dear Parents and Guardians,



In an effort to better communicate with our parent community, this is
the first in a series of updates from the Special Education Department
of the Jackson School District. It is our hope that these updates, as
well as better communication from all members of the special education
staff and administration, will help keep you informed about the status
and future of services for your children.



This week we held three meetings to discuss the impact the departure
of five occupational therapists was having on the service we can
provide for our students. We held the meetings in three different
locations for different groups of schools so that each person who
wished to be heard would have an opportunity to speak.



Below is some information on what we have done so far, what we are
continuing to do and how we intend to proceed. Some of this "update''
may seem redundant to those of you who attended the meetings this
week, but in the interest of making sure the people who joined our
distribution list from the website are also informed, some of the
information from those meetings will also be repeated here.



Our overall goal is to do everything we can to provide FULL service to
ALL of our students. In order to do that, we need to hire occupational
therapists to replace those who have resigned or who are out on
maternity leave. As we work toward that goal, we are faced with the
challenge of providing partial services to as many students as we can.



We are continually updating our log to document each hour of service
provided (or not provided) to each student so we can know what
services need to be made up. We have contacted several agencies and
professionals to ask for therapy services and we will continue to be
aggressive in seeking their help. Two agencies are able to provide us
evaluation services, which frees the therapists who work for us to
focus solely on providing service, but the remaining agencies have no
additional therapists to offer us at this time. The agencies and
professionals we contacted include: Advance Educational Advisement,
Oxford, Tender Touch, Beta Inc., Cumberland Therapy Services Inc.,
Therapeutic Outreach, Kaleidoscope, Therapy Pros, AllCare Therapy,
Jennifer Perillo, Lori Starkman/Simon and Alexis Goldberg.



We also contacted area hospitals to let them know of our immediate
need for therapists and are awaiting information from them. We will
contact these facilities again next week and as often as necessary
until we hear from them. These hospitals include Health South,
Community Medical Center, Centra State Rehabilitation Center, Douglass
Developmental Disabilities Center, Kimball Medical Center, Children's
Specialized Hospital, Shore Rehabilitation, Jersey Shore Medical
Center and Ocean Medical Center.



One agency we contacted (Advanced Health and Wellness Center in
Lakewood) agreed on Friday (Feb. 1) to take on some additional
students who have missed therapy. Our case managers are contacting
parents of those students who missed the most therapy within the
district in order to offer these services.

Our efforts to bring on additional therapy services also include:

· Asking the therapists who work for us part time to consider
increasing the number of days they work and offering an hourly
financial incentive to those therapists who work at least four days
for our district. So far, one of our therapists is offering us an
additional two days of service starting the week of Feb. 4.

· Offering hourly incentives to encourage therapists to work
additional days in our district.

· Offering full-time, salaried-with-benefits status to
interested therapists. This will help us attract not only the
therapist who prefers to work as an "independent contractor'' but also
the therapist who would perhaps prefer to have a more stable, salaried
position with benefits.

· Aggressively pursuing replacements by:

o Advertising the openings online and in newspapers

o Contacting former applicants from resumes on file

o Contacting an area college to solicit applicants from among their
recent graduates;

o Surveying other school districts

o Contacting the Ocean County certification office to see if they
have any leads and to put the word out that we are in dire need of
therapists.

· Asking the therapists who left the district to return (to
date, they have declined)

· Preparing to ask therapists to come in on nights and/or
weekends to provide therapy to students. We are working out the
logistics of this initiative and will be asking our staff - as well as
outside, qualified therapists we can interview and approve - to
consider offering this service to our families in order to accelerate
the speed with which we make up services.

So far, our efforts have resulted in:

· The hiring of one part-time certified occupational therapy
assistant (COTA) at the January Board of Education meeting;

· A part-time occupational therapist slated to begin work Feb.
11

· We have two candidates coming in for interviews the week of
Feb. 4

· As stated above, finding one agency to take on additional
students starting the week of Feb. 4

· One of our therapists agreeing to offer us an additional two
days of service starting next week



So where are we now in terms of missing services? As of Feb. 1, we
have approximately 23 partial days' worth of therapy services we are
not able to provide in a given week throughout the district. This
means we need enough therapists to work enough days to equal 23 days'
worth of coverage in a given week in order to get to "full service''
status. (For example, to help clarify what this means, if we were to
find four therapists willing to work five days each, we would cover 20
days' worth of therapy services.)



Starting next week, this number of absent services is reduced by
approximately four days due to the additional days being offered by
one of our current therapist (2), and the days of service being
offered by the Lakewood agency (at least 2 days). Starting the week of
Feb. 11, we will be adding an additional two days of service as well,
bringing our total down to 17 days' worth of services we need to fill.



Please know that there is no greater priority within the special
education department than making sure we do this as quickly as
possible. We realize how important this therapy is to our students and
we are committed to making sure we are doing all we can to give them
what they need.







In the meantime, we will continue to update you weekly and to answer
your questions as they arise. We are also planning a follow-up group
meeting of all parents and guardians of students who receive
occupational therapy within the next month. We will be sure to inform
you of this meeting at least two weeks in advance.



For your information, this update will also be sent to parents and
guardians of students who receive occupational therapy services who
did not yet join our e-mail list to be sure that all members of the
affected community are informed.





Sincerely,



Dr. Jeanne Pollock

Director of Special Education





Sent by:

Allison Erwin

Communications Specialist

Jackson School District

151 Don Connor Blvd.

Jackson, NJ 08527

(732) 833-4618

fax (732) 833-4608

aer...@jacksonsd.org

www.jacksonsd.org