April 13, 2016 at 3:00 PM - Special Population Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Call to order at 3:02 PM. Staff: Deb Hericks, Mike Danahy, Wade Fruhling. Guest: Steve Milliken, Jeanne Heaston

Discussion:  Jeanne Heaston, NDE shared the changing monitor visits process. Changing to make more consistent across the state. Monitoring team from NDE will work with regional person. Regional meetings/workshops across the state. Requested issues in regions and received the information back and in the process of reviewing information to be used for meeting/workshop. Dates for meetings are: Scottsbluff - September 15 , North Platte - September 16, Kearney - September 19, Norfolk - September 20, Omaha - September 21, Beatrice - September 22, Metro September 23. Steve Milliken shared with committee his plans: improving instructions/scores/academic scores. TIPS (improvement plan) grants went out and committee of 5 worked together to go through submissions. Majority of grants will be sent back to ask for more specifics (ie: signatures, time lines, goals, etc)

Discussion:  Committee Chair discussed the statewide behavioral health services and committee updates. Discussion with Senator Campbell on how to make Children's Health Services a priority. The committee is gathering information (needs and services) within each region across the state. The Beacon Group has partnered with some ESUs to provide some training for staff.

Discussion:  The Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska (BHECN, pronounced “beacon”) is hosting its Annual School Mental Health Conference, “Trauma in Our Schools”, on June 10 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Embassy Suites La Vista Conference Center. The keynote speaker will be Marleen Wong.

Discussion:  PEP Grant has been received and the Parents Encouraging Parents Conference has finished and finalizing that budget. The next part of that grant is the IEP Facilitation training in June.

Discussion:  Working with Michelle Borg to create a new project plan for the next steps for AAP development

Discussion:  The following editing projects have been in progress: The summary reports for the Project PARA Advisory Committee. Editing of pretests, activities and post tests for more security and efficiency. Checking pages, links and files to clean up from the upgrade editing. The following work has been ongoing for the server: Upgrading the backup system. Planning for the next upgrade to the server and database software. The conference planning is underway. Speakers are currently being invited. The Para of the Year nomination is open and can be submitted online

Discussion:  SRS Advisory board meeting was held March. Board was pleased with NSSRS improvements and new Generic Prior Written Notice form. Identified a few minor bugs to repair. Top priority is Zend Conversion and connection to State data system. Still trying to help Bellevue Public Schools address speed problems. Scott Isaacson placed traffic monitoring software on Special Education Secretary’s computer to get a better picture of what is happening when SRS freezes up. Secretary is also documenting all of the problems she encounters. Wade is learning HTML and CSS to help assist Mike with development. This will allow Mike to focus on the more challenging database and system logic and Wade can focus on how it looks on screen. Addressing May Speed problems. Server Upgrades: SRS database has been moved to a brand new server. SRS will soon move the web server over to where the database was. This will double our CPUs and triple our memory on the web server. Overall this should provide us with a nice performance boost. Addressing slow queries: Mike discovered several extremely long and ponderous database queries. We have been investigating ways to improve the speed of these queries.

Discussion:  SRS continue to maintain the ILCD Staff Survey site. The SRS office emails the data (along with a summary) to school districts upon request.

Discussion:  Mike discussed his work with programming but having issues with the code being pieced together over the years. Continue to work through the issues and will continue to convert to Zend 1 and then update to Zend 3 by August at which point they will be able to start updating the software. Hardware is being updated. The K-12 Federation has a contact that owns Zend. Working on a ticketing systems (Jira) that will include code in trouble tickets. Mike will continue to work with Michael Harris on Zend and has been very invaluable.

Discussion:  Assistive Tech.