Last year, the Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District closed down Cottonwood Elementary School and realigned its student body into Dr. Daniel Bright and the newly renamed Cottonwood Community School, both of which switched to become K-8 schools.
The realignment left the school district with an empty campus where CES used to be, which has since been renamed Cottonwood Educational Services, and serves as the home for numerous special education programs at the district, including Bright Bears, Menta and Bridgeway.
The district hopes that a consolidated space for all of these programs will allow for greater integration among them and the district’s main schools.
“It really allows greater flexibility to increase the supports that we needed for the children we serve,” COCSD Superintendent Steve King said. “We concentrate therapy services — occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech pathologists, school psychologists — they’re all housed there now. So there’s a concentration of those services as well as providing more efficiencies in how we provide those services.”
In addition to bringing all these programs together, this year COCSD welcomed a whole new program focused on autistic students to the CES campus. The brand new RISE program, a private school that partners with COCSD, took over the former CES space.
Rise was founded by Emily Holly, formerly of the Cupertino Power Learning Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities, who reached out to the Arizona Department of Education after leaving Cupertino to create her own program. Holly brought nearly all of the former Cupertino students, as well as some new additions, onto the CES campus.
In its first year, Rise has 29 students aged 6 through 22, brought in from all the local school districts in the area, including COCSD, Mingus Union High School District, Camp Verde Unified School District, Sedona- Oak Creek School District and Clarkdale-Jerome School District. Most of the children’s education is being paid for by state-allocated funding for students with disabilities through the relevant school districts, while some receive scholarships.
Rise has nearly as many staff members as students, with two certified special education teachers and 10 of the students assigned a 1-on-1 staff member to handle their high level of individual needs, and the remaining students assigned to a caregiver in groups of 2-to-1 or 3-to-1. Holly said she hires staff from diverse backgrounds, ranging from some who come with only a high school diploma to others who are certified former teachers. She said that the main requirement for staff, above all else, is patience.
“If you think that your job is to get the student to output or to deliver a specific thing, that can feel like a lot of pressure,” Holly said. “But if you know that the job is to help them be as independent as possible getting to that goal, then you’re able to be patient. You know that your job is to be patient.”
“I’m a very calm person,” staff member Betty Robertson said. Robertson is a former pre-school teacher who found that she hada real affinity for students with disabilities, and has been working with Holly for four years. “I treat them very much like I would treat my own children. I definitely have respect for them. I don’t know if I can say I relate to them. I don’t know if I can say that, but I definitely try to understand what they need from me to support them.”
The individual support needs of students in Rise can vary greatly, with some of the students being almost completely nonverbal, and others that could pass for neuro-typical. For some of the students, staff have to work hard to keep them calm in moments of overstimulation, keeping lights off, helping with needs for physical contact, and sometimes providing earmuffs to limit sound overstimulation.
Ryder Williams is an energetic and talkative 12-year-old at Rise, on the highly social end of the autism spectrum. He enjoys running from place to place, not bothered by his shoes being untied, and will eagerly tell you that he is among the fastest children of the group. He announces to those he meets that he is “a hugger” and eagerly seeks human contact whenever he can. Williams transferred into the program after having a difficult time at Beaver Creek School.
“It helps more, because the teachers actually care about me, and whenever something goes wrong they actually decide to help,” Williams said of the Rise program. He pointed to an example of his jacket ending up in the trash can, which led to him becoming very upset, but being glad to have staff who could help him deal with it. “This school is way better. I have actual friends here, I feel comfort- able, and they actually help me feel comfortable by letting me do things the way I feel like it.”
Each student has goals defined by their Individual Educational Plan that the state mandates each student with disabilities to have. Students’ goals vary from attempts to reintegrate them with the mainstream student population to trying to learn the alphabet, and staff focus on making sure that each student is able to achieve the goals they are able to. The whole program has a high emphasis on “presumption of competence” among students, expecting that they will be able to do more than they might seem to be able to at first. The long-term goal for all students is to find a way to allow them to find a place in society when they leave the program so that they can function independently.
“With the physical location of CES, the goal of all that we’re doing here, the bigger picture, is the reintegration of these kids as much as possible into general population,” King said. The school district is working on ways that students can spend time within the other schools, instead of keeping them purely separate. “We want to integrate them as much as we can because that’s life. We have that ability more now because CES is connected to CCS.”
Holly said that one of her goals with the new location on the CES campus is to take advantage of the proximity to Old Town Cottonwood, and to bring students on trips to local stores. She mentioned a trip to Jim and Ellen’s Rock Shop in Old Town, tied to a geology lesson, as an example of how the program has been able to bring Rise students off campus to interact with the community.
COCSD Student Support Services Director Dr. Trish Alley, who handles special education for the whole district, said that one of her greatest joys is to be able to see the students living normal lives in the local community.
“My vision and dream for a lot of these students is that we see them grow,” Alley said.
Correction: A previous version of this article falsely stated that Rise was part of the Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District. It is its own private corporation, not part of the public school.
