Special Education

Since you’ve found us, we hope that you will find this site of help to you.

Special education services are about just that: Services to students with “special”, “exceptional,” or “additional” needs. Our staff members work as part of educational teams in each building, and/or across the district, to ensure that all students, school staff, and families have the assistance and accommodation needed to support learning and make progress in the curriculum.

We are not a separate part of the school system. We are full, collaborating partners and team members working together to address the needs of students with or without “labels.”

We are proud to serve the vast majority of our students with disabilities and/or other needs within our local buildings and programs. We believe in “services” and, therefore, work to provide for individual needs in the most inclusive, least restrictive environments possible. By providing support staff, adaptive school structuring, age-appropriate materials, and prevention of learning failure services, our district’s “default” is service and placement here, in our home community.

While we do, on occasion, find the need to “reach out” to access services/programs outside our local school district, this is rare, and becoming more so, as we continue to build our local capacity to meet the range of student needs.

If we find the need to access out-of-district services, we work to maintain connections with those providers and to monitor the progress of our students. Whenever possible, we re-evaluate, adjust our service system and we “bring ‘em back” to the local district.

The Chelsea School District strives to be inclusive.