Special Education

Special Education – The Avon Grove Charter School is committed to high-quality inclusion-based special education instruction. This year, AGCS was reviewed for the first time by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through a yearly cyclical audit. AGCS received three commendations from the visiting auditors in the following areas: classroom inclusion, autistic support, and parental involvement.

AGCS has been experiencing growing numbers of families with children on the PDD spectrum choosing AGCS as an alternative to the public or private schools. We are dedicated to serving these children by providing intensive support, instruction, and therapeutic services. AGCS has also sought to craft and modify the learning environment of the school to accommodate students struggling with Sensory Integration Disorder as part of their PDD diagnosis. The school has also initiated a series of meetings and information sessions for parents led by Dr. Christine Loveland, the AGCS School Psychologist designed to give parents of special needs students a greater voice and to insure that the needs of all students are being properly met.

Academically Accelerated / Gifted Enrichment – As a charter school, AGCS receives no Chapter 16 funding. However, due to a significant percentage of the AGCS population entering with the GIEP or similar documentation, it became immediately apparent that AGCS would need to develop a program for academically accelerated students. This program would need to address the unique needs of our gifted and talented population as well as high achieving students who might not receive gifted services in a traditional IQ-based gifted enrichment setting.

At AGCS, the gifted program is known as CAAP (Cooperative Academically Accelerated Program) and includes students who may have entered the school with a GIEP as well as high-ability students who have been identified through the AGCS CAAP screening process. The CAAP program includes a number of high-level middle school seminars, partnerships with Colleges and Universities, as well as intensive small group and individualized projects designed to challenge and motivate. Children in the CAAP program receive pull-out and inclusion based enrichment each day.

Therapeutic Support Services – Therapeutic support services: Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech Therapy are currently provided by Pediatric Therapeutic Services, Inc (PTS).The PTS team is currently quite large, and provides excellent support for students in need of PT, OT or Speech services. The presence of PTS enables AGCS to keep its Special Education teacher/student ratio low, and makes it possible for students to meet with therapists as often as three times per week (depending on the student’s level of need). Through its Occupational Therapist, AGCS also provides extensive support for students struggling with Sensory Integration Disorder, and a school-wide program to increase teacher and parent awareness of SI issues was initiated at the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year.