Paraeducator Professional Learning

See Attachments for entire Request For Information Overview The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) seeks capability and pricing information in order to craft our requirement for systemwide paraeducator professional learning. Depending on FY17 funding, DoDEA hopes to issue a solicitation in the fall of 2016 and make an award in the first quarter of 2017. Suspense October 12, 2017 Responses Send responses to David Johansen, Special Education Program Manager and Brian Pritchard, Business Acquisition Program Manager at the following addresses: [email protected] and [email protected], respectively. Introduction DoDEA serves the dependents of military and civilian employees by providing PK-12 instruction to approximately 72,000 students. DoDEA's eight districts have 167 brick-and-mortar schools located in seven states, eleven countries, Guam and Puerto Rico. In addition, DoDEA operates a fully accredited Virtual High School with its main office in Virginia and with teaching hubs in Germany and Okinawa. DoDEA's curriculum, resources and achievement scores on standardized assessments compare favorably to high-performing US public schools. Background Although DoDEA paraeducators have received professional learning from the district or regional levels, no systemic paraeducator professional learning has occurred in at least 20 years. The military does not allow service members with children who have extremely severe disabilities to be stationed overseas. Therefore, DoDEA schools in Europe and the Pacific have relatively lower numbers of paraeducators compared to our stateside schools. Summary DoDEA requires asynchronous, web-based professional learning to meet the needs of our novice and experienced paraeducators working with a wide variety special education students systemwide. DoDEA requires novice professional learning to cover topics in such areas as student behavior, classroom instruction, and understanding of disabilities. Each paraeducator is required to complete a basic course of professional learning equivalent to four undergraduate semester credits and to have additional professional learning equivalent to two undergraduate semester credits during each year of employment. Paraeducators must be able to do their coursework at their own pace. DoDEA currently employs 1,296 educators worldwide-US, 561; Europe, 415; and Pacific, 320. Based on student enrollment trends, those numbers may decline slightly during the life of the contract. DoDEA expects to award one contract for a period of one 12-month base year and four 12-month option years. See Attachments for entire Request For Information