Students & Families Adult Education
Adult and Community Learning Services (ACLS)

Special Mailings - New Data Requirement in SMARTT

February 12, 2009

Dear Program Directors,

As the ABE Strategic Plan was being developed, practitioners voiced concerns about the need to better serve students with learning and other disabilities.

Although a great deal of data about ABE students is collected, we have little information about the group of students that has received support from Special Education in the k-12 system, or support from other sources. In order to increase our knowledge about the need for services, a new required field has been added to SMARTT. The new "yes/no" field is located in the Education section on the student intake form and is called "Received Special Education Support". The intake form on the ACLS website has been updated to reflect this new field.

Adding this field will give ACLS the means to more accurately report the numbers of students who have received special education support, not always fully captured by the current student "Disabilities" section. We are hoping 1) to take advantage of any future funding opportunities targeted to serve students with learning disabilities and 2) to better guide the use of professional development resources.

For the purpose of collecting this new information, the term "special education support" is defined broadly so that we can capture all students who have received support including those who had Individual Education Plans (IEP), those with specific physical or developmental disabilities, those with learning disabilities, those who are provided services by agencies including but not limited to the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, the Mass. Commission for the Blind, etc. The following list from the ESE 2007 "Students with Disabilities Annual Report"    provides examples of the types of disabilities for which students would receive special education services:

• Intellectual
• Sensory/Hard of Hearing
• Communication
• Sensory/Vision Impairment
• Emotional/Social
• Physical
• Health
• Specifics learning Disabilities
• Sensory/Deaf

To make the data entry process easier for staff, the SMARTT team has developed an update screen that lists all current students allowing you to check off either "Yes" or "No" for each student indicating if the student received special education support. Once the student information has been entered in the update screen, the information will be transferred to the student information screen and the name will no longer appear on the update list. This information will be required for all new students entering your program.

I know that this is a time consuming process and may take a couple of months to collect this information and record it in SMARTT. I am asking programs to complete this by April 1st. It is so important in the event we are able to access additional funds to help our students.

Thanks for your efforts.
With Literacy in Mind.

Anne Serino
State Director
Adult and Community Learning Services
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education