Pied Piper, run by the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District, serves students with special needs.

“We always want what’s best for the kids,” said Lauren Grulke, the principal of Pied Piper. “If we can find new practices or better practices for them, then we are always on the lookout.”

According to Grulke, each month’s class features a new activity. January featured hockey and February features soccer.

Students from each class are paired together based on their ability and they partake in structured activities for 30 minutes every day.

News Photo by Temi Fadayomi Students from Pied Piper School’s Transition class dribble a soccer ball through some cones in their adaptive physical education class in the gymnasium of the school in Alpena on Thursday. Each month features a different sport in the class. For January, the sport was hockey. For February, the sport was soccer.

“Each class has a half-hour gym slot,” said Grulke. “It is structured so that they have warmups and then they start their basic skills that they’re working on that week.”

Prior to the adaptive physical education course, gym class was optional for students but less organized.

Grulke said the class was developed with the intention of providing a better structure for physical activities for students.

According to Grulke, through the combined efforts of Steve Barbeau, physical therapy assistant, Dr. Jamie McClintic, occupational therapist, Geri Samp, teacher consultant, and Janelle Werda, paraprofessional, the school designed a class that worked.

“All of our students have always had the opportunity to participate in the gym, but we didn’t have any structure to it,” said Grulke, “Basically, we wanted to make the gym more purposeful for the kids. We had tons of things to play with in there, but not really any structure, so we wanted to provide that for the kids to be more similar to what they might experience at an elementary school, middle school, high school class.”

The course started in January.

According to Grukle, the class has been a big success with the students and, at the end of the school year, there will be some physical assessments that will determine the progress that the class has made with students.

“Just looking at the gym, at any given time, the kids are active, they’re happy, they’re engaged,” Grulke said. “The team will do a post-assessment towards the end of the year, just so that they can measure growth in the basic mobility skills that they were assessed on.”