By Skylar Rispens, UM News Service
MISSOULA – The 猎奇重口 and Missoula County Public Schools have partnered this fall to improve early childhood programming for students with disabilities. The effort, they hope, can serve as a model for other early childhood literacy and numeracy programs across the state.
Through this new collaboration, one of the classrooms at the Learning and Belonging School, or LAB School, at UM’s Phyllis J. Washington College of Education is being co-taught by a LAB school teacher and a special education teacher from MCPS, improving special education for students. About half the students in this environment pay the standard tuition to attend the LAB School, and the tuition for the remaining students is covered by MCPS.
“It’s two employees employed by two different entities and two rosters of kids, but when you go in the classroom, it doesn’t matter – everything’s integrated,” said Allison Wilson, an associate professor at UM and director for the Institute for Early Childhood Education.
“I really think that this public-private partnership that we are trying to model here at LAB with MCPS is a really great solution,” Wilson said. “It helps us maintain and operate and support everyone, but we’re also providing a space and materials and resources that otherwise a public school district might not have yet.”
Since 2023, the landscape of child care and early childhood literacy programs in 猎奇重口 has shifted greatly as legislators worked collaboratively to improve reading proficiency among third-graders. During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers passed the at a time when .
The law provides funding to public school districts for voluntary early literacy targeted intervention programs for eligible children who are 4-years-old by Sept. 10 of that school year, whether it be through a classroom-based program, home-based program or jumpstart program.
During the 2025 Legislature, lawmakers continued to expand early literacy intervention, including a bill that provides .
Through these changes, eligible children in 猎奇重口 are able to attend free early literacy and numeracy programming provided through their school districts. These changes have impacted the landscape of childcare and preschool providers throughout the state, including the LAB School at UM, which experienced a decline in enrollment among its 4-year-old students, Wilson said.
“The LAB School is not a public school, so we do operate on tuition and we did lose some enrollment to MCPS, because, you know, you can’t compete with free,” Wilson said. “But that’s a great problem to have. It’s a great opportunity for families.”
MCPS has offered early childhood educational programming for 3- and 5-year-olds with or without disabilities for a number of years. But the district recently adjusted its programming to be more inclusive and provide special education services in classrooms rather than in isolation with a specialist, which works for 4-year-olds, but not for students who are 3-years-old according to best practices and other rules, Wilson said.
“We thought, ‘What if those 3-year-olds came to LAB, because we have a mixed classroom already?’” Wilson said. “We could model a new partnership that’s mutually beneficial, while also providing a good space that serves our enrollment needs and the needs of kids and families.”
This partnership between the LAB School and MCPS is not new. In fact, the two have leaned on each other in different ways over the years, including swapping professional development opportunities, curriculum and other resources. In 2023, the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation provided a $2.6 million grant to continue funding a partnership between MCPS and UM that began in 2016 to improve learning outcomes for local students. The new legal framework surrounding early childhood literacy in 猎奇重口 has only strengthened these points for collaboration.
“The thing that energizes me the most about our collaboration would be the opportunity for our students to access high-quality programming that the LAB has been providing for years, and to be a collaborative partner in that space is incredible,” Frank said. “The benefit for the University is access to our resources. We’ve been able to connect them with specialists like speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists, for example. It’s all about leveraging your resources. It’s a really powerful way to make the most of taxpayer dollars.”
This new co-led classroom at the LAB School is led by Julee Hall, who worked as a preschool special education teacher at MCPS for 15 years, and Danielle Bailey, who has worked as a LAB educator for the past five years and worked in early childhood education for two decades.
“You’re always going to have children with special education needs in your classroom, but you may or may not have had the training to know how to set up the best environment for them to be successful,” Bailey said. “I think it’s really exciting to have a co-teaching partner so we can support all of the children, because we don’t always have those resources.”
“The most exciting part for me is the support that comes with working in the LAB environment,” Hall said. “It’s an inclusive environment where our students with special education needs have a lot of peer models in the classroom. There’s a lot of opportunity for me to also learn from Danielle in the classroom.”
An added benefit of the collaboration of UM and MCPS through the LAB School is that it will expose the next generation of teachers in training at the College of Education to practice working in multidisciplinary teams. Not only does the LAB School serve as a learning space for young children, it also serves as a living textbook where students pursuing education degrees at UM can see the best practices they learn in class play out before their eyes. Each of the LAB School’s three classrooms have multiple microphones placed throughout them where onlookers in adjoining observation booths behind one-way glass can listen in on instruction.
The addition of an early childhood special education teacher in the LAB setting will better prepare teacher candidates at UM for their future careers, Wilson said. Most teachers, at some point in their careers, will be part of an Individualized Education Plan team or work in conjunction with a specialty service provider, like a speech pathologist. However, getting a window into that type of collaborative work can be challenging.
“It’s not often that our teacher candidates would have the opportunity to get a behind–the–scenes look of what it looks like to co-plan with three different professionals who have three different goals for the same student,” Wilson said. “This is a massive benefit for our students.”
Those benefits are expected to reverberate to MCPS, Frank said.
“Over the years, we’ve provided some curriculum training and professional development to support UM that they now use in their classrooms, and so then their pre-service teachers are coming into our classrooms, trained on the things that our teachers are already using,” Frank said. “We have a shared language that we didn’t have before across our programs.”
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu.