Recognizing the importance of the development of fine motor skills, social skills, attention skills and visual perception in young children, Rocky View Schools (RVS) employs eight full-time occupational therapists (OT) who work primarily with the Preschool Intervention Program (PIP) and kindergarten children.
Staff from the RVS OT team presented information about how they are involved in the schools at the Board of Trustees regular meeting Nov. 3.
“Evidence shows that intervention is a lot more likely to be effective when it’s provided early,” OT Heather Zinkhofer said. “We support the functional development of those children with…severe needs but we’re not just focusing on them. We also want to provide services to those kids who need a little bit of support right at the onset of their school career to get started…so their future is more successful.”
According to OT Shelley Armitage, therapy can help to “remove barriers between students and learning.”
The team works with the five PIP programs and all of the kindergarten to Grade 7 classes across the divisions. Two OTs are also part of multi-disciplinary teams, which work with students with complex needs.
In RVS, the OTs focus on improving students’ fine motor skills through cutting, colouring and printing, visual perception and sensory processing – how students are able to see and interpret what they see around them – self-care, including the ability to put on their own coats and boots and use the washroom by themselves.
“A big part of our role in the classroom is to chat with the teacher and discuss how we adapt that classroom to support those kids that are struggling to regulate all of that information coming in from their senses,” Zinkhofer said. “These are the kids you’ll see covering their ears, or they’re finding the lights a little too bright, or they’re really having trouble sitting still because they’re seeking that body movement all the time.”
Ward 6 Trustee Fiona Gilbert asked whether the OTs feel they are able to meet the needs of all the students.
“Are there still kids that aren’t getting the support that they need in our schools?” she asked.
OT Janet Gibb said she felt there would always be children whose needs couldn’t be fully met.
“There’s just too many needs,” Gibb said. “I think it’s really important that we try to focus on meeting the needs in the big picture in the classroom as much as we can and on building capacity in all of the staff so they can get better at meeting those needs.
“The more we teach that baseline stuff, the more we can focus on the kids who have the higher level needs. We could have 700 OTs and I’m sure we wouldn’t have enough.”
Ward 3 Trustee Todd Brand said he has experienced the importance and impact of the OTs himself with his son, who has special needs.
“The PIP program was just life-changing for what he was able to accomplish,” Brand said. “When you have a child with special needs, there is a lot of different practitioners and a lot of different people that you’re working with and so that communication and connection parents can have (with the OTs) is fantastic.”
