Teaching Exceptional Children

To train Catholic school teachers for working with children with mild to moderate disabilities in an inclusionary classroom, ACE’s Teachers of Exceptional Children (TEC) was created in 2010. The one-year certification program grants a licensed Catholic school teacher an additional license from the State of Indiana as a Teacher of Students with Exceptional Needs: Mild Interventions.

The TEC program aims to help teachers better meet the needs of all students in Catholic schools across the country. After two weeks of summer coursework at Notre Dame, participants in the program complete additional credit hours online during the following school year. In addition, they complete a practicum in which they work with a child with a mild to moderate disability. Finally, they are seek to positively impact entire school communities by sitting on or establishing a pre-referral team for students with exceptional needs at their schools.