September 7, 2016 at 2:00 PM - Special Population Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Call to order at 2:00 PM.

Discussion:  SRS hired Mindshine to help complete the Zend conversion.  Work to attach to the ADVISER data store sometime early 2017. 

Discussion:  The Behavioral Health Committee has not met since May.  Committee Chair reviewed the survey that will be sent out in September.  DHHS has sent out a needs assessment regarding services available.   Final results should have been compiled in July and Committee should be receiving the results sometime soon.  Does Nebraska has a certification for Mental Health?  Who would get the certification in Mental Health?  School Psychologists, Social Workers and/or Counselors?

Discussion:  Are there other options for the employment of Speech Pathologists?  Can we create our own statewide online SLP services?  Continue to discuss at future meetings.  There is a shortage statewide for Speech Language Pathologists.  ESU 16 shared their recruiting program for SLPs. (college forgiveness, tuition reimbursements, etc) They begin to recruit high school students and work with them through their masters degree using Applegate Foundation funds. 

Discussion:  SRS Director discussed AAP Project, some things they are working on are:  They created a tutorial for the site, developing a new Student Team page. incorporating multiple privilege levels for greater confidentiality control,created system of development servers which feed into a staging server which feeds into the live server.  These various systems will allow the team, and other programmers to push their changes to their own version of the site and them combine them onto the staging server for testing before going live.  They updated the code to correct spelling and typos, and to make sure we were using consistent terminology. Some next steps:  Work through remaining bugs and system upgrade, Install a security certificate on the site, Open site up to two or three pilot sites and open site up to all Interim Program Sites.

Discussion: 

Project Para are editing the Paraeducator Self Study Program. Over the summer we continued the editing of site to update the code for more security and efficiency. The content pages of the training program have been done but the District Admin and Instructor Resources are still underway.  The Instructor Alert system, which was added a few years ago has been revised to allow the instructor to choose an option to be notified when any unit has been completed as well as the current option which is to be notified after any activity.

Discussion: 

SRS Staff didn’t receive a single speed complaints in May.  Thanks to new server equipment, database fine-tuning, data caching, and many other tasks that Mike and Scott performed we resolved our annual May speed problem (at least for this year).  The following forms were converted to the Zend Framework:  Notice of Discontinuation, Change of Placement, Notice and Consent for Reevaluation, Notice of School District Decision, Notice and Consent for Initial Placement, District Tab, Added a generic Prior Written Notice Form, Created an online New User training (Bit.ly/SRS_Training.com), Provided New User and Update trainings at most ESUs, Help Desk staff have been preparing training materials to be used when we convert the Help Tab to Zend Framework, Lots of Import/Export work.  Boystown has joined SRS.  Working with Mindshine Technologies on the following: School Tab is currently being developed.  The goal is to have the entire Zend Framework Conversion done by the end of October.  We will then need to modify our code to make it compatible with Zend 3.  Then we will focus on working through our long list of user suggestions

 

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

Discussion: 

Speech Pathologists

Grants??  Titles, ATP,

Circle of Friends - Ken Bird. 

Medicaid Expansion - Steve Milliken

Bus Drivers - ??