More than 90,000 people live in the North Penn community. NPSD spans approxi- mately 42 square miles and includes the boroughs of Hatfield, Lansdale and North Wales, the townships of Hatfield, Montgom- ery, Towamencin and Upper Gwynedd, and the village of Line Lexington.
•
During the 2010-2011 school year, more than 2,000 staff members worked in NPSD’s 21 buildings, which include 13 elementary schools, three middle schools, one high school, one alternative school, the Educational Services Center (ESC), the Transportation Center and the Support Services Center.
Diverse Students, Diverse Needs
In particular, our special education students continued to increase their academic success and, once again, the PSSA results in this area improved as shown in the chart below.
For the 2010-2011 school year, approximately 17% of our student population received special education services. This is up from 16.5% from the previous year. In addi- tion, we take great pride in our inclusionary practices. In NPSD last year, the percentage of students with disabilities that were included in the general education environment for more than 80% of the school day was 60.6%, which exceeds the state percentage of 57.7%.
NPSD also made great efforts to meet the needs of our special education students within our schools instead of sending students to placements outside of our boundaries. Last year, only 2.1% of our students with disabilities were educated outside of NPSD. This percentage is below the state average of 4.3%.
Approximately 12,700 students attended North Penn’s 18 schools last year. Demographically, nearly 5.4% of NPSD’s students were enrolled in gifted and talented programs while over 15% of our student body claimed 69 different languages as their home language. The top five languages (excluding English) were Bengali (373 students), Korean (357 students), Gujarati (284 students), Vietnamese (164 students) and Chinese (95 students).
Below is the ethnic composition of NPSD students from the 2010-2011 school year.
• NPSD provided 965 professional development opportunities to staff with a total of 2,891 hours of professional development delivered.