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Parent and educator urges board to fix middle‑school co‑located rooms that disrupt special‑education students
Summary
Parent and educator Melissa Castone told the board that co‑located middle‑school classrooms (Rooms B8A and B8B) with flimsy, wheeled partitions and adjoining rooms create noise and distraction that impede students with IEPs; she asked the board, specifically Vice President Quayam, to commit to fixing the longstanding problem.
Melissa Castone, a Hamilton resident and educator, used the public‑comment period to press the board to address what she described as a long‑running problem in the middle school: adjoining co‑located classrooms separated by flimsy, wheeled partition walls that allow noise and other distractions to intrude into special‑education and resource classes.
"These rooms are reserved for co‑taught and resource room classes," Castone told the board. "Those classes have more special education students than any other classes in the building… These classrooms for 20 years… We need to do better." She recounted a specific incident when her son’s class had to be moved to the media center because movies were playing in the adjoining room and he could not attend to instruction.
Castone named the rooms she said were affected (she identified them as B8A and B8B) and emphasized the disabilities affected — ADHD, auditory‑processing disorders, anxiety — asking the board to commit to a remedy for vulnerable learners. She also appealed directly to Vice President Quayam as someone who had campaigned on helping students with special needs.
No formal action or timetable to repair or reconfigure the rooms was recorded during the meeting. The board acknowledged the concern and thanked Castone for raising it; there was no immediate staff report or motion tied to the comment.
Status: Board heard the complaint; the issue remains an unresolved facility/acoustics access concern pending further administrative follow‑up.
