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City Charter High School: Balancing Structure and Flexibility for Students with Disabilities

City Charter High School: Balancing Structure and Flexibility for Students with Disabilities

A school that runs on student-teacher relationships seeks a balance between strong structures and flexible student support to sustain instruction during closures.

Key Lessons:

Remote learning disrupts the seamless collaboration that allows schools to blur the lines between special and general education, but norms and practices—like a tendency for general education teachers to drop in on special educators‘ office hours, and both types of teachers producing video lessons so students would continue to see them as teachers—helps mitigate the disruption.
Individualized problem-solving—ranging from home visits to office hours where teachers would drop in on a student, rather than the reverse—is necessary to sustain engagement with some students during remote learning.
Practices such as clear communication, engagement tracking, and routines designed to support teacher collaboration helps schools sustain their core principles.