Scituate CORSE Foundation (Community of Resources for Special Education)

Help integrate children with special needs and their families into their community; Strengthen student, parent and educator skills; Build student confidence and engagement in social, academic and recreational areas; Build peer mentor models; Provide these opportunities at an affordable rate despite the special education instructor support and high staffing ratios.

• Integrated social development programs
• Integrated academic support programs
• Sports programs
• Socially-based summer camps
• Unique camps: iCan Bike, Maritime Adventures, Therapeutic Riding
• Customized peer mentor models
• Student work-skills development initiatives
• Let’s Go Community Events
• SibShop programs
• Music therapy and yoga, band consultant
• Professional development programs for educators and staff
• Parent education and resources

Our programs provide students with special needs the additional support they require within their own community by providing higher staff ratios and expert instructors with special education background. CORSE wants to offer an accessible and familiar environment where the greatest impact can occur. Our goal is to have our special needs students integrated with peers, which is critical for these children to prosper within their community. Depending on the type of integrated program, 30-70% of student registrations are typically developing children. Parents are grateful to have appropriately staffed community programming to allow their child to access and successfully participate alongside peers; they often stress how important these classes are to their child's socialization. Usually, children with special needs cannot access regular community programs, making their options limited. Otherwise, these children might just be sitting at home.To measure and monitor program quality, CORSE requires specific follow-up reports for every program. We request instructor reports on program quality, enrollment, costs and improvement needs as well as parent evaluations on quality and benefit to student. Feedback from staff and parents has been overwhelmingly positive, with an overall average of parent evaluation scores of 4.8-4.9 on a scale of 5 excellent - 1 poor.

We conduct periodic parent and faculty assessments to gain input on the greatest supplemental needs within this student population by grade level. This data has allowed us to prioritize funds to provide the most beneficial impact.

CORSE, Scituate Public Schools, Scituate Recreation and our community affiliations all participate in coordinating an evaluation process for each program. This collaboration allows the foundation to produce such a high quality product for student programming.CORSE is very proud of these innovative community programs and continually strives to enhance quality and expand offerings, allowing our programs to become more and more successful and popular. CORSE has programming coordinators who oversee curriculum development, program quality as well as annual instructor and aide training. Supplemental social development and behavioral management training resources for our social and recreation instructors, aides and parents. Design of web-based resource materials for our programs are being provided to parents on the CORSE website to assure follow-through in learning and generalization at home. When the foundation receives philanthropic grant monies specifically targeted for these successful programs, the CORSE Board is able to redirect our internal funds for program expansion or new proposals for unmet supplemental needs. Utilizing this funding strategy, CORSE is committed to funding these core student programs and will continue to primarily target our fundraiser monies for them, since they are so beneficial to our students and valued by the community. CORSE has three major fundraisers every year raising @$85,000 a year through these community-based fundraisers, which does not provide an extensive base of funds to work with, given that we provide @$140,000 a year supplementing these student programs. CORSE supplements over 70% to make it more affordable for families. Because of the high cost of funding our specialized programs, it is very important to secure outside philanthropic monies to continue their impact and continually strengthen these valuable programs.We earnestly try to keep parent registration fees as low as possible, since families have so many other costs associated with raising a child with special needs and provide financial assistance where needed.. We are very active in writing grants to a variety of philanthropic organizations with an interest in helping children with special needs. We understand that the scope of our work is not as large as some of your grant applicants. However, the nature of the work and the demonstrated quality and success of this type of programming is just as important. Considering our size and ""community philosophy"", we purposely ask for only $2500-$5,000 from larger organizations. Because of the high demand for grants from many remarkable non-profits, especially those serving low income populations, we realize the most successful strategy for CORSE is to request moderate amounts from multiple sources, truly exemplifying our ""Community of Resources"". Multiple sources allow us to keep growing and expanding rather than reliance on one single large source to fund our programming.

Our annual goals are met each year; we provide approximately 60 programs a year with 1,000 registrations.