Students at Riverside Brookfield High School now have constant access to a survey tool that enables them to tell teachers how they best learn and communicate and explain what accommodations they may need.
Aubrey Kaczmarek, a graduating senior, created the tool to achieve her Gold Award, the highest award in Girl Scouts, she told the Landmark.
“It’s for girls to identify a problem in their community, and they will have to create a sustainable solution for the problem that could be controlled without the girl being there,” she said.
Teachers can add the survey to their digital classroom pages for students to fill out and submit at any point, Kaczmarek said. She said the survey has room for students to describe how they learn best in terms of each of the five senses and to explain sensory issues they may experience or accommodations they’ve been granted as part of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or a 504 plan.
“There are a handful of questions. For the first question, it’s hearing. ‘I hear best when I have,’ and there are a bunch of checkboxes. You could check off, ‘I work best when I have’ audio, no audio, music, headphones, stuff like that,” she said. “For seeing, ‘I work best when I have’ bright lights, dim lights, bigger text, smaller text. It goes for each of the five senses.”
Kaczmarek, who will attend Pikes Peak State College in Colorado Springs to study interior design, said she conceived of the survey due to her own experiences of having a learning disability and an associated IEP that went ignored or unaccommodated in the classroom.
“I was diagnosed with a learning disability in sixth grade once I transferred to a public school. Ever since then, I’ve had to advocate for myself and tell teachers, ‘Hey, I need help reading. I can’t read this on my own. I need audio for this.’ In my experience, some teachers don’t know that I have an IEP, or they just forget, or they don’t accommodate me. It becomes really frustrating over the years to constantly remind them, ‘Hey, I can’t read. Can you help me read?’” she said.
“The survey was inspired by several classes I’ve been in that did not make self-advocacy feel welcomed or safe, because teachers would make me feel like me speaking up for myself wasn’t OK to do,” Kaczmarek added. “I don’t want any other kid to be frustrated in classrooms because of their differences and selves. This survey would help get open, safe communication between students and teachers, so nobody gets frustrated.”
Even when teachers don’t discourage self-advocacy, Kaczmarek said the survey will allow students to discreetly communicate their needs if they don’t want classmates to overhear sensitive information.
After developing the tool, Kaczmarek said she brought it to Kylie Lindquist, the assistant principal of curriculum and instruction at RB, who organized a plan for the student to present her creation to the school faculty during a teacher institute day.
“I honestly wasn’t nervous at all. The only thing I was nervous about was reading my own speech that I wrote because, obviously, I have a reading disability,” she said. “Lots of [teachers] were really excited. I had one teacher come up to me, and she said, ‘You don’t know who I am, but your speech made me cry’ … She said her son has dyslexia, and she understands how hard it is for him to read on his own, so me saying my story was really powerful, and it really impacted her.”
Lindquist and Kevin Baldus, RB’s director of special education services, did not respond to an interview request about the implementation of Kaczmarek’s tool.
Using data shared by teachers, Kaczmarek said about 170 students had filled out the survey in the first three weeks after it was implemented at RB, though she attributed some of that volume to the approach of finals week, which is now underway.
She said teachers and parents have reached out to her to get their own copies of the survey to use outside RB, such as in their own classrooms in local middle schools.
“They want that survey in their classrooms. They told me that they absolutely love this. They want to be better teachers, and they want this to help their students,” she said. “They also told me that middle schoolers having the survey now and learning how to self-advocate now will be way better learning it then than in high school.”
While the tool is based on Kaczmarek’s own experiences of not being accommodated, she said she created it to help other students like her.
“I know that I would definitely have thrived from [having] this tool in classrooms, but I’m more glad that other kids get to have it as well. I’m graduating next week, so I won’t have this tool anymore to use, but I’m really glad other kids will have this tool to use in their classrooms. I feel like this will really impact their lives and make a difference in how they self-advocate,” she said.
