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District expands special-education vocational training with PACE lab
Summary
The board heard that a PACE (Practical Application Exploration) lab purchased with district funds provides structured job-simulation stations, clock-in systems and data tracking for special-education students; staff plan to expand the lab to additional classes and explore real pay/checking systems.
Miss Wheeler briefed the board on the district's PACE lab, a practical, in-school workspace purchased after a board investment of roughly $40,000. The system is designed to give structured special-education students authentic job experience within school walls and to collect data for transition goals in Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).
Wheeler described how students clock in, select tasks from over 300 job templates across five industry categories, work at color-coded stations and receive real-time feedback from teachers who function as supervisors. The lab records prompting levels so teachers can document progress from more-intensive prompting toward independence; staff said data captured can translate into measurable IEP goals (for example, independence targets moving from 60 seconds to five minutes).
The district trained three structured classrooms this year and plans to expand to additional classes, explore adding payment and banking simulations for students, and send staff to observe established programs in other districts (including a storefront example). Wheeler said the program increases vocational opportunities beyond what community placements alone provide.
"The real world exposure that we're able to give our students within the GHS walls within the PACE lab is incredible," a quoted teacher, Tristan Duffy, said in the presentation. The board thanked Wheeler for the update and noted potential future resource requests as the program scales.
