In the News

In Case You Missed Them: Notable Reads (March 3–9, 2025)

In case you missed them, here are a few notable reads from March 3–9, 2025:

Readers respond: A moral obligation to fund special ed

By Christy Splitt and Lisa Ledson, The Oregonian

The federal government has never funded special education as promised. The result? Struggling schools throughout the United States. This opinion piece criticizes Oregon, stating it “disincentivizes the identification of students who need special education services by capping extra funding for such services at 11% of the student population.”

While you might not live in Oregon, consider looking into your own state’s funding of special education.

Windsor parents express concern over post-COVID suspension rates for special education students

Adriana Gutierrez, The Press Democrat

Students, parents, and educators throughout the U.S. went through COVID. How they’ve emerged on the other side has varied.

Windsor Unified School District is under fire for disciplining students who have disabilities at a higher rate than the state-wide average. The article reports the state’s average suspension rate is 5.9%, while WUSD’s is 9.2%.

District officials cite post-COVID behavior issues, but does this reflect lack of training and/or support, failures to create IEPs that address functional needs in addition to academic needs, and/or something else?

Blaming COVID isn’t an option. What’s really behind the numbers? What are you seeing in your own school districts?

The Power of Multimodal Learning (in 5 Charts)

By Youki Terada, Stephen Merrill, Edutopia

The subtitle for this article is: “When students engage multiple senses to learn—drawing or acting out a concept, for example—they’re more likely to remember and develop a deeper understanding of the material, a large body of research shows.”

Yep.

Read the article to learn about research supporting “multimodal learning” and for examples educators can use in the classroom and parents can use at home.