Capstone Plan of Action

Ayla Herman, Jenna Conners, and Meredith Jamail

Collaborators
Life Skills Department at AHS
We have spoken to Mr. Griffin in the Life Skills Department about tutoring students with special needs. Mr. Griffin instructs math and English Language Arts to the Life Skills Students. We have also met with Ms. Arty, who educates students with special needs appropriate social skills and self sufficiency. Since our capstone project focuses on preparing students with special needs for post high school life, we see it vital to collaborate heavily with Mr. Griffin and Ms. Arty in the Life Skills Department in order to effectively achieve the goal of our project.

PALs and Link Crew

Both of these classes work with students with special needs both in Austin High and at Rosedale School. Link Crew already works with the Life Skills classes one day per week, so by collaborating with this program, we hope to structure a program that incorporates both our idea of preparing students for post high school, and the Link Crew program. We would like to speak to Mrs. Griffith about how Link Crew interacts with the Life Skills program, and tailor our approach to what would be most effective. Ms. Kelley and PALs also work with students with special needs, so we hope to collaborate with her on appropriate ways to reach out to students in Life Skills.

Options
When the idea of a capstone project was first introduced, we all knew that we wanted to work with people with special needs since over the summer all of us were given the opportunity to work with people with special needs. We took interest in how the school system caters to special needs students, and through various interviews including Mr. Griffin, a teacher in Life Skills, and Sharon DeBeaumont, a personal nurse for a child with special needs, we gathered that No Child Left Behind doesnt adequately tailor to the needs of students with special needs. Knowing that a student can only be in school until the age of 22, we initially wanted to focus on students with special needs above the age of 18. Our idea was to prepare them for whatever life entailed after high school. However, after speaking to Mr. Griffin, we learned that the Life Skills program only has 15 students that are in it all day. Since this is a relatively small number of students, we decided that the number of students above age 18 would be an extremely limited, so we wanted to expand our focus in order to serve a larger population. With such as small population, we adapted our idea to serve all 15 students in the Life Skills program. Through tailoring our plan many times, we have determined the final plan is to work with all of the full time Life Skills students on reading, writing, and math skills as well as basic self sufficiency skills such as creating a garden and cooking with easy to follow recipes in order to prepare students for once they graduate or exit high school.

Partners
Because we are working with students with special needs, it is vital to possess a certain level of maturity in order to act responsibly and cater to the needs of the Life Skills students. We aim to reach out to only juniors and seniors, because we feel that a majority of underclassmen have not developed the appropriate social instincts and skills. The groups that we would like to reach out to come from various extracurricular groups, clubs, and sports including National Honor Society, AGS juniors and seniors, Link Crew, PALs, Volunteer Club, Fellowship Of Christian Athletes, soccer, football, baseball, and volleyball. Since we are only including juniors and seniors most of us share the same maturity, therefore when discussing our proposition, we can speak on a peer level and our mission will be communicated clearly.

Methods for Reaching When reaching out to specific groups: Out

Sports- meet with them at the beginning of their athletic period, clearing it with their coaches first NHS- email Mr. Duarte to request permission for NHS student involvement and if yes, if he could forward the email on to his students Student Council- email or personally ask Mr. Kiker and Ms. Windham for their students participation and again if they could forward the email

FCA/Volunteer Club- discuss with leaders and see if they will talk to their clubs about our idea
Link Crew/PALS- talk to Ms. Kelley and Ms. Griffith about student involvement and see if we could set aside a time to personally discuss our idea AGS Juniors & Seniors- request an email list from Ms. Huffman and/or Ms. McCorquodale