Curriculum

Special education, separate facility

All Roadrunner students have been identified and evaluated through the district’s multidisciplinary evaluation team, prior to coming to our school, as having some kind of special need. 

Program for students with an emotional disability

Each Roadrunner student has an individual program specially designed to help him or her succeed emotionally and academically.

Self-contained multiage classrooms 

Our classrooms are organized to adapt to the needs of each student. Students are grouped based on their skills, as opposed to their age, allowing high achieving younger students to work on more challenging tasks and struggling students to review difficult material. Each classroom has one teacher and one education support professional (ESP).

Individual and cooperative instruction

Lectures allow the instructor to gather material from a variety of sources that might not be readily available to students, present material in a condensed format, and attempt to quickly move students from one point of understanding to another. Students who learn the most from lectures seem to be auditory learners. 

Gardner (1999) tells us that we are intelligent in various ways, auditory being one of those ways. This suggests that students can learn from a variety of teaching styles or by various modalities. 

Cooperative learning offers enticements for those who participate in the group endeavors. It requires that students work together to achieve goals which they could not achieve individually. Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups through which students work together to maximize their own and each others learning. (David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, Edythe Johnson Holubec, 1994)

Roadrunner teachers utilize both methods of individual and cooperative instructions to engage students with different learning abilities.

Social skills training 

The Social Skills Curriculum provides the foundation for a structured educational approach to the socialization of school-aged children. The curriculum offers a manageable yet well defined set of sixteen basic social behaviors encompassing adult relations, peer relations, school rules, and classroom behaviors. This set of skills assists teachers to go beyond merely labeling problem behaviors that should be promoted, reinforced, strengthened, or taught.

A task analysis of what people do in everyday settings (Gresham, 1982) specifies the behavioral components for these prosocial skills. Such an analysis allows for each step to be directly observed, assessed and taught. Feedback to students then becomes specific rather than vague, behavioral rather than abstract. The sixteen basic skills are related to socially important outcomes, i.e., peer acceptance, teacher acceptance and assistance, academic growth, and eventually toward job acquisition and retention. 

The curriculum identifies skills that can and should be taught to all children no matter what their educational placement, level, or program. They represent skills that will not only promote school success, but also lead to success on the job and in lifelong interpersonal relations. 

Roadrunner teaches social skills through The Boys Town Education Model®.

Multi-sensory approach for reading and math

Our teachers use techniques and strategies to stimulate learning through the use of some or all of our students’ senses. 

Students learn how to:

• gather information

• associate information to ideas they already know and understand

• the importance of solving problems

• how to use problem-solving steps

• nonverbal reasoning skills

• relationships between concepts

• and how to store information for later recall

Homework

Students at Roadrunner School will receive homework at all grade levels on a regular basis. Homework may include practicing social skills. Parents can support these efforts by assuring that their child has a suitable distraction free environment to work in and by reinforcing the importance of homework. Point sheets will be sent home daily and will have more specific information.