At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, volunteers from Georgia United Foundation crowded into a bare room at Burnette Elementary in Suwanee, surrounded by buckets of navy and mint green paint. Part of the School Crashers program, the volunteers spent the morning remodeling the empty space into the beginnings of a hybrid sensory room for Burnette’s more than 130 special education students.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of School Crashers, which is run by the Georgia United Foundation in partnership with Georgia United Credit Union to award grants to accredited K-12 schools across the state. A remodeling program, School Crashers is upgrading interior spaces at seven schools in Georgia this summer, including Burnette Elementary.
School Crashers typically prioritizes Title 1 schools, with Burnette being a rare exception due to its large population of special education students. The makeover at Burnette will take a few days.
Georgia United Foundation is giving each of this year’s recipients approximately $20,000 for the interior makeover, Kim Wall, the foundation’s director of community development, explained. Educators and administrators at each school determine how to use the money in partnership with the Georgia United Foundation, whose personnel assesses the space’s efficacy a few years after the makeover.
Burnette’s sensory room will include an optic waterfall, vibrating ball pit, hanging lights, and crash pads, among other features, Assistant Principal Melissa Dienhart said. The hybrid room will have an active and calming side, which are mint green and navy respectively.
“It will help (students) regulate emotions, offer them time to socialize, and it’ll help with their fine and gross motor skills,” Dienhart said. “The benefits are huge.” Younger special education students will primarily use the room, but some older and general education students will have access to the space as well.
Anna Mobley, a special education teacher at Burnette, anticipates that the room will benefit students both academically and socially.
“They don’t have, a lot of times, the endurance that (you and I) have and the stamina, because they are processing so much beyond what you’re giving them academically,” Mobley explained. “They sometimes need an outlet that the sensory room will provide, whether it’s to get that built-up energy out or to decompress from what they’ve learned. That will help them process the information a lot better when they come back.”
Dienhart saw a significant shift in students’ behavior and academic performance after COVID-19, particularly with current third graders, who were in kindergarten during the pandemic.
“Those are the kids that have the hardest time regulating emotions,” she said. “They get frustrated, they don’t know what to do. A lot of them are angry, sad — some of them don’t even know what they are feeling.”
Through its School Crashers program, the Georgia United Foundation has worked with 63 schools and donated upward of $1.8 million. Judges assess applications based on a rubric that heavily weights demonstrated need, Wall said.
Schools across the state vied for a grant from School Crashers. This year, 247 submitted applications, indicating the need for special education support systems. Students with disabilities comprised 13% of Georgia’s public school enrollment as of the 2021-22 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
A 2021 study from a team at Georgia Tech indicated that four counties in Georgia contain 49% of the state’s autism service providers, and 111 counties do not have a single provider. Rural Georgians have a particularly difficult time accessing supplemental support services, the study found.
Dienhart noted that parents struggle to access resources even in Burnette’s own Gwinnett County, which she said has relatively robust support systems for special education students. Gwinnett is Georgia’s largest school system.
“As far as autism centers, what I’m hearing is parents are really struggling to even get appointments for anything,” she said. “(Centers) are booked out for literally a year, six months to a year.”
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