KU researchers receive $6.24 million special-education grant

LAWRENCE -- The U.S. Department of Education awarded a five-year, $6.24 million grant to Juniper Gardens Children's Project researchers. The money is intended to establish the Center for Early Intervention in Reading and Behavior to Improve the Performance of Young Children.

Juniper Gardens is a research center in Kansas City, Kan., affiliated with the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Studies at the University of Kansas.

The new center will be one of nine projects nationwide funded by a special education initiative to study issues related to reading, behavior and learning disabilities.

The grant's ambitious goal is to help close the gap between research and practice in special education, according to Debra Kamps, senior scientist, who will head the project.

"We need to know what it is going to take to not have 25 percent of K-3 students unable to read, many with serious behavioral problems that interfere with learning," Kamps said. "We also need to know what is financially feasible for school districts to implement."

The center will train professional and paraprofessional educators to work with approximately 2,500 Kansas City area students.

"Children who are not progressing as expected can learn in very intense one-on-one or small group sessions using a highly structured language arts curriculum," Kamps explained.

Eight Kansas City area schools that represent a cross-section of the nation's schools will be selected to participate in the project.

Participating schools will be asked to implement schoolwide discipline programs that emphasize rewarding appropriate behavior and preventing situations that lead to behavior problems. Timothy Lewis, professor of special education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, will lead this effort, according to Kamps.

Several approaches to both educational and behavioral problems will be used, largely based on research from more than 35 years of Juniper Gardens' work in urban Kansas City, Kan., schools.

"What we expect to come out of this are more children reading, reductions in discipline problems and more collaboration between general and special education teachers," Kamps predicted.

The other Juniper Gardens researchers who will staff the new center are Charles Greenwood, Juniper Gardens director, and Mary Abbott, research assistant professor, along with Carmen Arreaga-Mayer and Cheryl Utley, both associate scientists with the Life Span Institute.

Two other LSI researchers participating in one of the other special education grants through a subproject on preventing and reducing behavior problems in preschool children are Ann Turnbull, co-director of the Beach Center on Disability, and Judith Carta, senior scientist at Juniper Gardens.

The Juniper Gardens Children's Project has been in continuous operation since 1964 as a partnership between residents of the Northeast neighborhood in Kansas City, Kan., the Life Span Institute and the departments of human development and family life and special education.

Juniper Gardens is one of the 14 centers and more than 100 programs of KU's Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies that serve both rural and urban Kansans through research-based solutions to the problems of human and community development, disabilities and aging.

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