Saugerties Central School District (SCSD) Director of Pupil Personnel Services Lisajane Kappler gave an extensive presentation before the Board of Education last week, discussing many of the issues facing students in the district, and how school officials work to help.
During the meeting held on Tuesday, October 10, Kappler detailed the district’s partnership with Rockland County Psychiatric Center, providing day treatment with two leveled courses at Cahill Elementary School serving a total of ten students, and one at Saugerties Junior High serving nine students.
“We do not have it at the high school, and sadly Rockland County Psychiatric Center (RCPC) can’t get approval from the state to increase the amount, and I’m not sure why that is,” said Kappler, adding that not currently having a high school option isn’t ideal.
“There is a little disconnect if the kids don’t get to a point where they can be mainstream in eighth grade,” she said. “Sometimes we have to find other placements for them. We have had students that started to mainstream in fifth and sixth grade and then were ready by ninth grade, but it is a concern that we’re still looking at because there is that gap of students that just still are not making it out of the self-contained classroom.”
The RCPC also runs a clinic at Cahill for students who don’t need the level of support found in a self-contained classroom, but have yet to find a local therapist to help them fully acclimate.
The program also works with a psychiatrist from NYU who works virtually.
“The kids seem to really like it,” Kappler said. “They do work with the parents so sometimes they have the parents come in (to school) and they all sit on this couch and it’s done on a large-screen TV. It seems to be very effective right now.”
The district also has three sensory needs classrooms at Cahill, with eight students each in the K-1, 2-3, and 4-6 courses.
“What we’re finding now is a lot of students that are in this classroom do not have an autism diagnosis, but they do have sensory needs,” Kappler said. Each of the classes has one teacher and two assistants.”
Each of those classrooms are at capacity based upon state requirements, but the district could seek a variance, which Kappler said isn’t always honored if the request doesn’t identify plans to meet the enrollment limit the following school year.
At Morse Elementary, the district has three learning community classrooms, with opportunities for subject-specific cohorts, some of whom have cognitive difficulties in areas like math, social studies, or science, but not in others.
“They maybe have to be in a special class for some of theinstruction, but by the time they get to the intermediate learning community a lot of them are mainstreaming out,” Kappler said.
In all, the SCSD works with 3.5 full-time occupational therapists, a physical therapist, four school-specific speech therapists, five social workers (not including the three working in the RCPC clinic at Cahill), and five school psychologists. Of the latter, Riccardi shares a school psychologist with Woodstock Day School and Morse shares one with Middleway.
Kappler said the need for occupational therapy has increased in the past few years, with the number of students in need currently 133, including Saugerties residents attending either Woodstock Day School or Middleway. Kappler said enrollment has grown since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kappler said the same was true of the need for counseling services, which currently includes 140 students, including Woodstock Day School and Middleway.
“We will expect that to jump um because people can’t find outside services, and when they can’t find any outside services…we will start picking up,” she said. “It’s not the same as getting a psychiatric service but at least you have where the children can go talk to somebody.”
Kappler said the need outweighing local professional services is a worrying trend.
“We have a lot of students who have not been able to have any speech services for all of last year and they couldn’t get it over the summer because the county doesn’t have enough speech and language therapists,” she said. “There’s definitely a need in Ulster County for a lot of these services, so if you know any children that are looking to what they want to go into after high school, I would say study any of these things. They could probably get a job right away (after college.)”
While COVID did lead to a jump in homeschooling, Kappler said it was partially temporary, and many students have returned to the classroom. Others have not, she said, because of the state’s vaccination requirements.
“The vaccination requirement really has stuck in our area,” she said. “There are a large number of people who truly believe that they don’t want it, and the state is not budging on that.”
Kappler added that there is a “very good” group of homeschooling parents in Saugerties who help each other.
Kappler also identified another worrying trend with students participating in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. At not quite two months into the 2023-24 school year, there are a total of 71 students in the program, with 47 in homes with multiple families, 17 in hotels, six camping and one in transitional housing. The total number during the 2022-23 school year was 35.
While these students are aided by Family of Woodstock, along with the Saugerties High School Key Club’s backpack program, the increase in unhoused students along with the often temporary solutions can make regular school attendance difficult.
“The biggest issue with a lot of this, even with the hotels, is transportation, because it can change literally weekly for these people,” Kappler said. “It seems like DSS will tell them they’re out of this hotel this week and they’re going to be in a different one now, and we have to set up transportation for that, and then following week they could be back at the other hotel. This is an ongoing thing for the (district) transportation department, and I don’t know how they’re keeping up with it, but they’re doing pretty well. We’ve been able to get kids into school within a day or two, which is a big feat.”
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