Missouri Board of Education meeting on June 3, 2025 in Jefferson City (Photo by Alisa Nelson)
The Missouri Board of Education is considering recommendations that aim to better provide services to students with disabilities.
The state has 34 schools for the severely disabled with about 600 students enrolled.
The Missouri Schools for the Severely Disabled is a state operated program established by state law in 1957 and serves children and youth between the ages of five and 21. According to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Missouri is the only state that still uses a system of separate state-operated schools for students with extensive support needs.
A recommendation the board is debating is whether to permanently close 12 state-operated school buildings. During Tuesday’s State Board of Education meeting, Mark Wheatley, Assistant Commissioner with the department, said about 115 students would be impacted by the closures.
“The third thing that we are going to seek approval on is the opportunity to initiate budget and planning to establish and build one new school in the general Kansas City region,” said Wheatley.
Meanwhile, the State Board of Education is one step closer to approving a new teacher certification in computer science. Assistant Commissioner Paul Katnik said there is not a current opportunity for an individual to gain initial certification in computer science.
“You’ve never before been able to be a computer science teacher only. You always had to be something else and that always impacted how many we had available and the way schools taught computer science to their students. So, this will be a big shift. It has a lot of support behind it because people have wanted this for a long time,” Katnik told the board.
A proposal to create the certification will be posted for public comment and will then come back to the State Board of Education for a final vote, likely in August.
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