Inside Our Partnership with the Academy of Collaborative Education: What Happens When Belief Meets Practice

When our team started working with the Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE) this school year, the first thing we did was an instructional audit. ACE is a K-5 charter school in Monroe, Louisiana, that serves students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and the audit was focused on one question: how are students being supported across classrooms, and what's getting in the way of high-quality instruction?

Upon entering the school, what we saw was a staff that cared. Teachers and paraprofessionals were invested in students' behavioral, sensory, and communication needs; and most important, students felt safe. But a lot of instructional time was organized around routines and individual tasks that weren't connected to what grade-level peers were learning. The supports were there, but academic content wasn't always reaching students in the same way.

That gap is what the rest of our work with ACE has been about.

Our History with ACE

ACE isn't new to our team. They participated in a yearlong incubator we ran through New Schools Louisiana before they opened. They came into their founding year with strong systems and a clear commitment to their students. This year's partnership is about building on that, refining instructional practices, strengthening consistency, and deepening staff skill.

Our Senior Director of Implementation, Brittney Robins has been leading this work. When they reflect on what made ACE ready for this kind of partnership, they're clear that readiness doesn't mean having everything figured out.

"In a young school, readiness usually means the opposite of having it all figured out," Brittney said. "The school is still flexible enough to rethink systems before they get locked in."

Where the Work Went After the Audit

After the audit, the work shifted to professional learning and coaching for teachers and paraprofessionals aimed at challenging assumptions.

One assumption was that high academic expectations and strong behavioral support cannot coexist in the same classroom. The reality is that students engage more consistently when instruction is meaningful and connected to real content, minimizing the need for additional behavior support. Behavior and rigor aren't in opposition.

Another was that a paraprofessional's main function is to keep students on task. In the most successful classrooms, paraprofessionals function as instructional partners. They help scaffold content and support students in accessing the same learning as their peers. Paraprofessionals are an untapped resource.

Connecting each of our activities to the audit findings helped the ACE team understand their value and feel invested in turning them into reality.

Why Expectations Matter

It's easy to frame access to grade-level content as a legal requirement. But the more important question is what a school believes about its students, and whether that belief shows up in instruction. When schools lower expectations for students with significant support needs, those decisions add up over time. A student who spends years on isolated tasks falls further behind the learning their peers are getting. The intention might be supportive, but the result often isn't.

Providing access to grade-level content doesn't mean pulling supports away or ignoring individual needs. It means designing instruction so both things are true at once: students are getting the accommodations, communication supports, and behavioral structures they need, and they're engaging with rigorous academic content.

The shift Brittney keeps pointing to in the ongoing coaching activities is simple in theory but harder in practice: helping schools move from asking, "Can this student do this?" to "What does this student need to access it?"

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