- December 20, 2024
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Flagler Schools lead Behavioral Specialist Mindy Morris poses in Flagler Palm Coast High School's sensory room after training staff on Jan. 16. Photo by Brent Woronoff
Rymfire Elementary School's sensory room. Courtesy photo
Flagler Schools Coordinator of Innovation Joey DiPuma, Lead District Behavioral Specialist Mindy Morris and Flagler Palm Coast Principal Bobby Bossardet in FPC's new sensory room. Photo by Brent Woronoff
District and school administrators tour Rymfire Elementary School's sensory room on Dec. 21. Courtesy photo.
Texture and colored lights are featured in Rymfire's sensory room. Courtesy photo
Students can climb, touch and listen in one of FPC's adjoining sensory rooms. Photo by Brent Woronoff
Paul Pedro, Flagler Schools site supervisor of technology, poses in one of the rooms in FPC's sensory suite. Photo by Brent Woronoff
When the door to Flagler Palm Coast High School’s new sensory room is open, sounds trickle in from the outside. As the door closes you are encompassed by a different world of soothing light and colors, sounds, vibrations and an array of different textures.
Some students with disabilities are not able to filter out the outside noises. The rooms help them regulate themselves, said Mindy Morris, Flagler Schools' lead behavioral specialist.
“Sensory rooms are becoming more popular now, because the research has shown that there has been an improvement in behaviors across different environments,” Morris said. “We’re able to allow our students to come in here and get those needs met and then go back to the classroom and have more focus or be more regulated with their behaviors.”
The school district is in the process of installing a sensory room — or in the case of FPC, a suite of three rooms — in every school. Each room is unique to the students’ needs of that school, said Joey DiPuma, the district’s coordinator of innovation, who leads the district's design team.
Rymfire Elementary School’s sensory room was the first to be finished last month. Matanzas High and FPC are done. The team is now finishing the sensory room at Bunnell Elementary School. Old Kings Elementary School’s room is nearly complete, but DiPuma’s team has to repair a couple of pieces that arrived damaged, he said.
“I appreciate the collaboration,” FPC Principal Bobby Bossardet said. “These people are very passionate about supporting our students with disabilities.”
Tammy Yorke, the district’s coordinator of federal programs, secured nearly $500,000 in federal COVID funds to supply and build all of the rooms.
As the rooms are completed, faculty and staff at the schools are trained in how to utilize the rooms to support the students with disabilities, said Kim Halliday, the district’s director of Exceptional Student Education. Morris put the protocol together for the training, Halliday said.
“My hope and expectation is that it's going to help our kids to be more engaged,” Halliday said.
If you’ve never seen a student react to a sensory room before, it’s just unbelievable. Data cannot show you that.”
— JOE DIPUMA, Flagler Schools' coordinator of innovation
The students go into the rooms in small groups with a teacher or paraprofessional, Halliday said. As the students move around the room there are different sensory inputs to engage them.
“There’s touch sensory, there's light sensory,” Halliday said. “You’ve got a couple of trampolines in (Rymfire’s room) to have a little bit of movement. If you run your hand across this wall, you hear music and the lights change colors.”
DiPuma said the district has been planning to build the rooms for nearly two years.
“The thing with sensory rooms is they're very expensive and they're hard to build,” he said. “From the time we wrote the grant we began the planning phase. Once we got the grant we started to figure out which vendors we were going to use. We were constantly connecting with sensory folks, because I think we have a pretty good grip on classroom design, but sensory design was something that's really specific. So we had to figure out how to do that correctly and responsibly.”
DiPuma said after watching some students try out the rooms, he knew the expense, labor and attention to detail was all worth it.
“The response is amazing,” he said. “If you’ve never seen a student react to a sensory room before, it’s just unbelievable. Data cannot show you that. It's just a really good feeling to see them.”
Morris and DiPuma said each room has different solutions that support different needs with an influx of calming tools.
“What I've seen so far is they will gravitate to the items that they feel will help them get regulated,” Morris said. “It's really cool to see our students utilize a specific item and how you physically can see the difference in them from when they walk in the room to where they go directly to their item and then how they just calm down. Just their whole body changes, and to see that is really phenomenal. And to be able to have that for all of our students to be able to utilize is fantastic.”
Indeed, a few minutes in the rooms can also be beneficial to the school’s general population of students as well as staff, the district’s administrators say.
“This has been a long time coming,” DiPuma said. “This room, I think, supports everybody. These spaces I feel really good about. I get pumped about classroom design and media centers, but the sensory rooms are amazing.”
