The Virginia Department of Education will start a new program this fall to identify students with learning disabilities.

"We are concerned that a lot of young people, especially those with reading difficulties, end up in special education when we know lots of reading problems can be remedied within the general education environment," said H. Douglas Cox, assistant superintendent in the division of special education.

The pilot program will use universal screening, multiple layers of instruction intervention and support, and progress monitoring before a child can be labeled as special education.

"The goal really is to properly identify those students that are indeed in a disability category," said Department of Education spokeswoman Julie Grimes. "If a child does not have a disability, the hope is that with this program the child will not be identified as having a disability."

In December 2006, the state served about 172,700 special-education students. Of those, 63,208 had a learning disability.

The Department of Education will select 16 school districts across the state from 37 applicants for the program. Goochland County is the only school division in the Richmond area that has applied. Goochland Superintendent Linda A. Underwood said the county's elementary and the middle schools have successfully implemented an identification program called Goochland Instructional Support Team, but they need more.

"We need something structured, clearly defined, complementary to [Goochland Instructional Support Team], flexible enough to address the range of students' needs, and that includes ongoing teacher development so that what we learn with one child or situation can be appropriately generalized," she said.

She said she is hoping her district is selected.

With the new program, Cox said, "Over the next couple of years, the school divisions will try to identify those components that work and don't work and look at what kind of lessons we can learn. We're hoping that we will see a reduction in referrals."
Contact Juan Antonio Lizama at (804) 649-6513 or jlizama@timesdispatch.com.