The Maine Department of Education Office of Special Services is pleased to announce that Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) and Seeing Stars workshops and materials are being offered free of charge for up to 400 Maine special educators across the state.

Training will be held online from 8:30 am – 4:30am each day and materials will be shipped directly to participants’ school addresses. For additional information about these programs please go to https://lindamoodbell.com/workshops.

Registration links and information about each of these programs is below.

If you have any questions please contact Anne-Marie Adamson at anne-marie.adamson@maine.gov or Tracy Whitlock at tracy.w.whitlock@maine.gov.

Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS)

Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) develops phoneme awareness. Students learn to recognize how their mouths produce the sounds of language. This kinesthetic feedback enables reading, spelling, and speech. The three-day LiPS workshop focuses on helping students develop phoneme awareness. Through a series of steps, LiPS students learn to recognize how their mouths produce the sounds of language. This kinesthetic feedback enables them to verify sounds within words and to become self-correcting in reading, spelling, and speech. All steps of the program are introduced, practiced, and modeled.

Educators in the training will learn instructional approaches for phoneme awareness, pronunciation, word attack, and spelling.

Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars program develops symbol imagery: the ability to visualize sounds and letters in words for both phonological and orthographic processing. Students move through a series of steps from single consonants/vowels to multisyllabic and contextual reading to develop the imagery-language connection for competency in written language. The two-day Seeing Stars workshop focuses on helping students develop symbol imagery for written language. Through a series of steps, students learn to visualize sounds and letters in words, thereby improving phonological and orthographic processing in both receptive and expressive written language. All steps of the program are introduced, practiced, and modeled.

Educators in the training will learn instructional approaches for phonics/phoneme awareness, orthographic awareness, reading fluency, word attack, word recognition and spelling.

The Maine Department of Education Data Team is holding a Data Reporting Webinar for Superintendents on Tuesday, October 5^th at 10am.

We will be discussing state required data certifications, focusing primarily on Fall data collections and related procedures for validating and clearing up any issues on the certification reports. Please follow the “Join Live” link at the time of the training to join us. Thank you. Join Live

If you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding this webinar please contact the MEDMS Helpdesk at MEDMS.Helpdesk@Maine.gov or (207) 624-6896.

The recovery of Q4’21 MaineCare Seed will occur in the October 2021 subsidy payment. The Maine DOE is asking School Administrative Units (SAUs) to review their reports by October 15, 2021 to ensure accurate adjustments to subsidy. SAU staff must review, and submit disputes, student by student claims on both the public and private MaineCare reports for Q4’21 by October 15, 2021.

 To access the MaineCare Seed reports, please follow the instructions below.

1. Log into NEO using the link below

https://neo.maine.gov/DOE/neo/Dashboard

2. Click on the Student Data tab
3. Click on the Student Report tab
4. Select MaineCare in the Reporting Area drop-down
5. Choose the quarterly Seed report and the report type (private/public)
6. Click view report button
7. Once the report appears on the screen, choose the export button.

You may export the reports to Excel but, please be aware that there may be multiple worksheet tabs within the workbook. Save the file to your computer.

To dispute a claim: If you disagree that a particular student or time period should not be on the report, please send an email with the following information for each State Student ID to stephanie.clark@maine.gov.

• State Student ID
• The reason that you disagree
• Identify the type of report: public or private
• Quarter in which the claims are located
• Service provided dates (From and To)
• Total amount of Seed being disputed

Summer services:  Students must be enrolled for the time period they are receiving educational services. This means that students that are receiving extended school year services in district or extended school year services in an out of district placement must have a primary enrollment for that time period in order for the MDOE to have the most accurate enrollment data to determine SAU responsibility for MaineCare Seed.

If you have difficulty logging into NEO: Anyone who currently has Special Education Director permissions to the Special Education module, will automatically have permissions to access MaineCare reports.

As in the past, if a new staff member needs permission to access this module, a request from the Superintendent to the Maine DOE helpdesk will be necessary. The helpdesk contact information is medms.helpdesk@maine.gov or 207-624-6896.

Please contact stephanie.clark@maine.gov for more information or technical assistance related to MaineCare Seed.