Navigating early childhood special education: 7 questions, answered

Footnotes is a new messaging club for parents and caregivers of young children to provide early childhood news updates and essential information about children from birth to age 5.

MPR News early childhood reporter Kyra Miles will periodically take questions from Footnotes subscribers and pose them to early childhood experts.

This week, Carol Gibson-Miller took questions about early childhood special education and development. Gibson-Miller is the managing director at Lindgren Early Learning Center at St. Cloud State University and spent 20 years in early childhood special education including educating parents on the state’s Help Me Grow system for child development.

Here are questions from Footnotes subscribers and answers from Gibson-Miller, edited for clarity:

1) Why doesn’t Help Me Grow promote more inclusion in under-3 child care settings? It seems like children with special needs are only accommodated once they reach 3 and are in the school district's early childhood special education programming. — Amanda in Minneapolis

Children who are either in evaluation or are in programming, birth to three, actually should have access to that. But, that actually can happen.

What I would give parents is the resource that’s PACER MN and that’s the Parent Advocacy Resource Center for Educational Rights. PACER Center in Minnesota is a great way to have somebody walk with that parent back to the school to say, ‘Here’s what I really need.’ And then PACER looks at what does the law say, and what is the practice that's happening.

2) How are child care providers preparing for the wave of need in multicultural communities? — Maren Christenson Hofer in Minneapolis, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network

In terms of who we have teaching in Minnesota, we are really trying here at St Cloud State and other university systems to recruit teachers of color.

For example, we just had two weeks at two different camps here at St Cloud State University that were called Future Teachers Academy, and those are high school students coming on campus, they are being embedded in early learning settings to see what this is like.

We need more teachers in early childhood special education, and we need more teachers of color in early childhood special education.

When I was a home visitor, families that I visited — I am a white woman, and I would say to them, I’m coming to your home — this is a really vulnerable place for you as a family. And you’re right, I might not understand your culture, and so I might be putting things out there that are uncomfortable, and I want to be able to understand better.

We also are training our teachers that look like me to have better cultural understanding and because they’re in the field, and that’s who’s working.

3) The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students with disabilities receive education in the least restrictive setting, meaning they spend as much time with their nondisabled peers as possible. Yet this is not the way many students with disabilities experience their classrooms. Why is there this discrepancy between the law and what is actually happening in classrooms? — Maren in Minneapolis

We absolutely, as educators, look at each child’s individual needs, and sometimes, when children are first coming into an early learning setting, whether it be a child care setting or a specialized early childhood special education classroom, those children might need an environment with fewer children.

And so sometimes it’s hard for parents to understand “Why is my child in a smaller setting?” It’s usually about funding and about what that child needs in order to get the skills to move into that bigger classroom setting.

There’s state funding, federal funding and school districts make a determination as to how they’re going to use that. I think we are beginning to have more conversations about braiding funding together.

Our state is trying to make that happen in different ways, but it’s going to be a shift, because how our funding is set up, people's hands get tied by funding, by money, every day. I just said to a parent, “Your voice is much stronger, or more powerful than mine is. I’m going to help you know where to go to talk about this.” We have to have parent voices in the conversation.

4) Many young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Minnesota are often being directed toward Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Interventions and away from schools. But once they get on this track, it’s difficult for them to get off. Why don’t these systems work together in supporting children with disabilities? — Maren in Minneapolis

I think that that system is using insurance pay sources and that's the piece that’s qualifying children to go into that track. I worked with a parent here recently, where their child, by getting some evaluations, met the qualifications to go down that path, so he could have left here [Lindgren] and for 40 hours a week, been in that pathway. He would have started that right when he turned three.

What I said to the parent is my belief that his brain development needs to be with typical kids in an early learning setting. If you have him go to that track, I worry he’s not going to have the same foundational learning that he would in an early learning setting.

I worry about that happening in Minnesota. And so once they’re in that track, I don’t have the answer for how they get out of that track.

You’re hearing my bias, after years of experience seeing really little kids in a lot of different settings, and I feel like, again, the most typical developing setting we can get kids in early and bring in people who can support that development, braiding funding. That’s what shifts what happens in kindergarten.

5) What do you do when you have 5-year-old preschool boys who have lost respect for guidelines and feel like they’ve outgrown your program, but it's only March/April of the school year? And all of our staff are AFAB (assigned female at birth). — Alyson Quinn in Minneapolis

We have some of those every year in our program, and it isn’t always just boys. The underlying piece that I hear there is do we treat kids of different genders, in different ways? Are boys pushing boundaries quicker than girls? Is that a cultural thing? Possibly.

Here at Lindgren, that’s been my experience in terms of having kids in a child care setting ready for kindergarten who are still in pre-K. We know we have to shift our curriculum to provide a more challenging curriculum.

When kids are challenging rules, when kids aren’t listening, oftentimes it’s because we have set up a situation where they don’t know where the boundaries are, and we have to give kids choices when they have choices, and give them direction when they don’t have a choice.

We can create very simple choices, but as kids go to kindergarten, we try to build in opportunities to participate enthusiastically.

6) What are some good fine motor skill ideas for 3-year-olds that aren’t Play-Doh or coloring? — Joni in St. Anthony Village

Well, in the summer, I feel like being outside in a sandbox or being outside on the grass, and just finding things is one of the ways. Hiding things in the sand and giving kids tools to pick them up.

I would say, anytime parents are cooking, if there are steps that children can learn. To balance carrying their own cup of milk, I would advise to only put the amount of milk in there that you want to clean up but giving them those daily tasks of walking from the refrigerator to the table with their own milk glass. When they’re done eating, being able to carry that plate.

Adding those responsibilities in as kids get older, that fine motor skill of balancing, it takes longer to do dinner. It takes longer to do snacks when they're involved, but they are learning fine motor skills.

7) I have a boy, 2 going on 3, with an end-of- August birthday. We are starting to consider if he will be ready to start kindergarten when he is 5, he’d likely be the youngest in his class, or waiting a year and starting when he’s 6. In addition to milestone readiness, are there other factors, especially social-emotional, to consider? — Maria E. in Minneapolis

Our kindergarten teachers would say that the social emotional skills are the foundation of being successful in kindergarten. So I think looking at developmental skills is one pathway, and yes, they should be doing the milestones that's typical for their age.

I’ll shift over to say that our kindergarten system in the state of Minnesota — for sure in the St. Cloud school district — what they say is our kindergarten system needs to be ready for 5-year-olds. The children shouldn’t take the responsibility to be ready to be a kindergartner.

The system should be ready for 5-year-olds, and they should be able to come to kindergarten in whatever developmental space they’re in. That’s when kindergarten starts in the state of Minnesota, if you are 5 before Sept. 1, you are kindergarten eligible. And I would say to parents, that’s when I would send my child.

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