The University of Montana (UM) and Missoula County Public Schools (MCPS) have launched a new partnership aimed at improving early childhood education for students with disabilities. This collaboration involves a classroom at UM’s Phyllis J. Washington College of Education’s Learning and Belonging (LAB) School, which is now co-taught by a LAB school teacher and an MCPS special education teacher. The goal is to provide integrated support for students, regardless of whether they pay tuition or have it covered by MCPS.
“It’s two employees employed by two different entities and two rosters of kids, but when you go in the classroom, it doesn’t matter – everything’s integrated,” said Allison Wilson, associate professor at UM and director for the Institute for Early Childhood Education.
“I really think that this public-private partnership that we are trying to model here at LAB with MCPS is a really great solution,” Wilson added. “It helps us maintain and operate and support everyone, but we’re also providing a space and materials and resources that otherwise a public school district might not have yet.”
Montana lawmakers have recently made significant changes to early childhood literacy programs in the state. In 2023, they passed the Early Literacy Targeted Intervention Act in response to concerns about reading proficiency among third-graders. The law funds voluntary intervention programs for eligible four-year-olds through public school districts via various formats such as classroom-based or home-based programs.
Further legislative efforts in 2025 expanded funding to include preschool children with disabilities, enabling more families across Montana to access free early literacy and numeracy programming through their local districts. These policy shifts led to decreased enrollment of four-year-olds at UM’s LAB School as some families opted for free options offered by MCPS.
“The LAB School is not a public school, so we do operate on tuition and we did lose some enrollment to MCPS, because, you know, you can’t compete with free,” Wilson said. “But that’s a great problem to have. It’s a great opportunity for families.”
MCPS has traditionally provided early childhood programming for three- and five-year-olds with or without disabilities. Recent changes now focus on inclusive classrooms where special education services are delivered alongside general instruction—a model that fits well with four-year-olds but presents challenges for younger students under current rules.
“We thought, ‘What if those 3-year-olds came to LAB, because we have a mixed classroom already?’” Wilson explained. “We could model a new partnership that’s mutually beneficial, while also providing a good space that serves our enrollment needs and the needs of kids and families.”
The relationship between UM’s LAB School and MCPS has developed over several years through shared professional development opportunities, curriculum exchanges, and other resources. A $2.6 million grant from the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation in 2023 supported ongoing collaborations between the two organizations dating back to 2016.
“The thing that energizes me the most about our collaboration would be the opportunity for our students to access high-quality programming that the LAB has been providing for years, and to be a collaborative partner in that space is incredible,” Frank said. “The benefit for the University is access to our resources. We’ve been able to connect them with specialists like speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists, for example. It’s all about leveraging your resources. It’s a really powerful way to make the most of taxpayer dollars.”
Julee Hall from MCPS now co-teaches at UM alongside Danielle Bailey from the LAB School as part of this effort focused on children with disabilities.
“You’re always going to have children with special education needs in your classroom, but you may or may not have had the training to know how to set up the best environment for them to be successful,” Bailey said. “I think it’s really exciting to have a co-teaching partner so we can support all of the children, because we don’t always have those resources.”
“The most exciting part for me is the support that comes with working in the LAB environment,” Hall noted. “It’s an inclusive environment where our students with special education needs have a lot of peer models in the classroom. There’s a lot of opportunity for me to also learn from Danielle in the classroom.”
The collaboration offers practical training opportunities for future teachers enrolled at UM by allowing them firsthand observation of multidisciplinary teaching teams within classrooms equipped with observation booths.
“It’s not often that our teacher candidates would have the opportunity to get a behind–the–scenes look of what it looks like to co-plan with three different professionals who have three different goals for the same student,” Wilson said. “This is a massive benefit for our students.”
Frank added: “Over the years, we’ve provided some curriculum training and professional development to support UM that they now use in their classrooms, and so then their pre-service teachers are coming into our classrooms trained on the things that our teachers are already using,” Frank said. “We have a shared language that we didn’t have before across our programs.”
