Closing Date for Referrals

It's that time of the year again - closing date for referrals. Our maximum target date for completing assessments is 30 days. We suggest that any referrals for assessments that need to be completed by Co-op staff before the end of the school year reach us by April 11.

We will not establish an absolute cut off date. We will make every attempt to complete all referrals we receive. However, we need your cooperation in preventing chaos the latter part of May.

Six Scholarships for Charting the Cs Available

We have six scholarships available for the 16th Annual Charting the Cs Assistive Technology Conference scheduled for April 23–24, 2007 at St. Cloud Civic Center in St. Cloud, MN. The scholarships cover the registration fee only. Let Margaret Knebel or myself know if you are interested!

Click here for the brochure.

I'll be there as I'll be doing two sessions on Podcasting! See you there!

Universal Design for Learning Workshop

Pacer is offering a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) workshop on Tuesday, April 3, 2007, 6:00-9:00pm at Washington Educational Services Building in Brainerd. This is a great opportunity to learn about UDL!
To register, click here.
To see the flyer, click here.

Show Students in 'Other' Districts

When a student is transfered to you from a case manager in another school district, the student will not automatically appear on your list. Use the 'Show' drop down list box to show students in 'Other' districts or 'All' districts. You can then edit the student setup and change the 'Serving District' to your district.
Here's a short movie showing how.

Special Education Data Sheet

Want to save yourself some work? Instead of printing page 1 and page 4 and sending it to the coop, print the Special Education Data Sheet and send that instead.
This is a new form that summarizes all the data we need from pages 1 and 4. It can be found at the bottom of the left column in the 'Additional Forms' section of the student's Forms page.
Life is Good!

Problem MARSS Numbers

MARSS numbers are 13 digit numbers. The new update of SpEd Forms requires that the MARSS number be exactly 13 digits with no spaces, alphabet characters or special characters. Special characters are things like underscores (_), asterisks (*) or tildes(~). Some reports will not run if the MARSS number does not meet the standard.
If you have a non-standard MARSS number for a student, please change it. Here is a short movie showing how to change it.

Printing the MARSS Page

If you encounter an error when trying to print the MARSS page, you need to set the 'School Year of Data' drop down list box to the appropriate reporting year.
Here's a short movie demonstrating how to fix the error.