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09/12/2018 08:30 AMThe start of a new school year always brings a little bit of excitement, no matter how many years you have been going to school. That is certainly the case for Madison Public Schools special education teacher Linda Wade as this September marked the start of her 36th year serving students in the Madison Public Schools.
“Even though I have taught for 35 years, I love change and learning and waking up each day feeling like I have something new to add to the lives of others,” she says. “I am always continuing to grow and learn right along with my students.”
Linda graduated from Trumbull High School and then went to Southern Connecticut State University where she received her teaching degree in special education. She got a job in Madison right out of college, teaching at the former Academy School.
Over the years she has worked in Academy, Jeffrey Elementary School, and now in Brown Middle School, but what makes her time in the district worthy of note isn’t just that she has worked here for nearly four decades—it’s the programs she has been able to develop and implement to ensure all students have the best educational experience possible.
When Linda moved to Jeffrey Elementary School from Academy back in the early 1990s, she and some colleagues got together and created what is known as the special education inclusion model and the students support team model in the district.
Under Linda’s leadership, the new program was developed and accepted by the administration to transform the previously used self-contained model. The self-contained model generally meant students were pulled out of the classroom or separated for extra help rather than finding a way to, as Linda says, “educate the child to the greatest extent possible in the child’s general education classroom. That is the goal of inclusion.”
“If a student was being pulled out of their classroom to receive service, then they might have been pulled out of the exact same thing you were trying to improve in,” she says. “For example, if they are having reading and you are pulling them out to have reading, then they are missing their regular reading. This way you can have the service and the specialty of a special education teacher in the classroom co-teaching so that a lot of the strategies and interventions and things like that can be done within the general education setting. So their peers also benefit because there is a specialist in their classroom.”
The inclusion model was eventually spread throughout the district and other towns started to take note as well.
“Initially it was started at Jeffrey School and then it became replicated throughout the district, and then we had in fact other schools who would come in to look to see how we developed our model,” she says. “The inclusion ‘movement,’ if you will, came right after we started.”
In more recent years, Linda has been working on developing programing for students within a newly developed program called the Functional Academic Skills Education program. Laura said the goal of the program is to bring a functional education for the most disabled students into the various schools in the district. She is starting the program up at Brown this year.
“Those students require more of a functional academic program, so having them create their own snack is a function skill that would be appropriate at the 5th grade level to teach or pre-work skills like categorizing or assembling or something like that, so it is just developing a program to meet the needs of those students,” she says. “All of the programing is designed to meet the needs of the various types of students.”
Linda’s knowledge and dedication to teaching and developing new methods of teaching benefits students, but is also recognized and appreciated by staff and administrators.
“Linda is a true pro,” says Superintendent of Schools Tom Scarice. “She has an incredibly broad knowledge base and a profoundly gifted talent in helping students and colleagues alike. Her impact reaches well beyond the boundaries of our classroom walls.”
Sound Foundations
In addition to all of the work she already does in district and raising four of her own kids, Linda serves as the Dyslexia Committee lead within the district and has dedicated more than two decades of her life to helping kids all along the shoreline learn to read.
“My brother was severely dyslexic and that is how I became interested in teaching children with special needs,” she says. “Growing up, I sort of helped him learn how to read and that sparked my interest.”
Linda went on to develop a program called Sound Foundations, which is designed to help prevent reading failure.
“I created a program based on the national reading panel and developed it in the community...Sound Foundations...is a program for early literacy to prevent reading failure,” she says. “Basically the reading panel looked at all of the different reading research and found commonalities for students who had difficultly with reading, and I took those markers if you will and developed a program to address those markers.”
Apart from her day job in the Madison Public Schools, Linda tutors students with dyslexia and has a number of success stories with local students.
“I have a student now that I am working with and I taught him how to read when he was nine,” she says. “He is now 20 and he wants me to help him pass the test to get into the military.”
After 35 years of teaching, Linda says she isn’t looking to slow down or take a step back anytime soon.
“As a lifelong learner, I am always seeking to do better,” she says. “Whether it is a better way to reach my students, a better way to serve my community, a better way to communicate with others, or a better way to deliver instruction, I am always seeking to improve.”