May 3, 2016 at 10:00 AM - Special Population Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Committee Chair reviewed the goals of the Statewide Behavior Health. Training is concern. Need to get someone form NDE on the committee. The committee will meet to create some surveys. They will gain their direction from this survey. Schools are having problems having the personnel to deliver behavior health services. There is a need improve screening processes and other areas of improvement. The committee need to define the Tier 1 (school wide), 2 (kids that need some services), 3 (kids with more severe needs) and need to find a common language.

Discussion:  Assistive Technology grants to possibly go through the ESUCC.

Discussion:  Statewide training needs/topics to have with KSB ie: Sped Law (Fall), Student Discipline (Spring), including bullying, Title IX (Fall), Business practices (Spring), Board ethics (February). Vet through appropriate committee.

Discussion:  Wade Fruhling and Michelle Borg completed a priority list of AAP upgrades. Dave Ludwig will meet with Dean Folkers to discuss funding options.

Discussion:  Highlights from Project Para Advisory Board Meeting on April 30: 820 new users in 2015. Majority of the site has been upgraded to HTML 5. Benefits are improved reliability, more readable and structured code, improved efficiency, better user experience. New Participant Management Screens: very nice looking design, allows instructors to easily organized trainees into groups and evaluate their progress. Discussed using Project Para in career academy settings. Project Para Conference will be held in Kearney on October 26, 2016. Discussed holding a separate training over the summer near Omaha area.

Discussion:  The focus has been on server performance and speed. We have been trying to mitigate/prevent the speed problems we run into every May due to increased user traffic by: moved our database to a brand new server; moved our primary web server to where our database used to be and this has doubled the CPU and tippled our memory; improved the efficiency of our database queries to make them less resource intensive; identified/fixed a problem with our cache, this change alone reduced a two minute query search down to 15 seconds; fine-tuned the database for better performance. Still trying to help Bellevue Public Schools address speed problems. Scott Issacson identified two types of problems: delayed Responses that eventually respond and spinning circle that never returns. Wade will spend a day at Bellevue on their network to try to gather more information on this problem. Wade is learning HTML and CSS to help assist Mike with development. This will allow Mike to focus on the more challenging database and system logic and Wade can focus on how it looks on screen. Invoices will be going out within the month.

Discussion:  SRS staff continue to maintain the ILCD Staff Survey site. Our office emails the data (along with a summary) to school districts upon request.