How Our Learning Support Services are Transforming Education
The Learning Support Services (LSS) consists of two branches: Safe Schools and Inclusive Education.
The Inclusive Education branch comprises a variety of departments, including speech and language pathologists (SLPs), Teachers of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDHH), Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments (TSVI), School Psychologists, EA Mentorship, Intensive Intervention for Inclusion (Triple I Helping Teacher), Work Study/Work Experience Youth Care Worker, and LSS Helping Teachers. The role of our LSS Helping Teachers consists of coming alongside school teams to support them with the development of safety plans, co-planning for students with diverse abilities, leading in-services for LSS teachers, mentoring LSS teachers, working with community partners and provincial resource programs to support inclusive education practices across our District.
Our LSS Helping Teacher team has four teachers supporting 46 sites across our District. This year, one of our Helping Teachers will have a secondary school focus to support inclusive education practices and transitions and support the work of the Safe Schools branch of the LSS team.
The work of the LSS Helping Teachers is vital to supporting the complex needs of our diverse learners in schools across our District. This year, our team has created an LSS residency model of support. This model will allow school teams to reflect on needs in their building and work collaboratively with our LSS Helping Teachers to implement an area(s) of inquiry related to inclusion.
Collectively, our LSS Helping Teachers have 90 years of combined experience teaching and are passionate about supporting inclusive education practices. We are excited about developing this framework and partnering with school teams to support the ongoing work of inclusion in our school district.
For LSS teachers interested in learning more about LSS resources in schools, we invite you to check out the LSS Sharepoint page. Parents and community members who want to learn more about our LSS Department, please visit the LSS Department website.