Shelly Fagen

In March 2020, when New Hampshire schools closed due to COVID-19, students with autism and other disabilities were suddenly separated from their teachers, therapists, and support staff. Parents struggled to keep their children safe and learning at home while also meeting work obligations. Nonverbal students used picture symbols to tell their parents they wanted to go back to school–and overwhelmed parents tried to explain why school was closed. That’s when Shelly Fagen stepped up to help lead our state through this particularly challenging time for students with disabilities. As Director of Student Services at The Birchtree Center (a nonprofit autism agency), Shelly helped ensure that Birchtree’s day-school students with autism continued learning at school and at home–in spite of the pandemic.

As Chairperson of the New Hampshire Private Special Education Association, Shelly was a key leader in mobilizing New Hampshire nonprofits to collaborate and advocate on behalf of students with disabilities during COVID-19. In March 2020, Shelly was a key leader in the launch of The Birchtree Center’s first-ever remote learning program. She helped Birchtree’s staff find ingenious ways to meet students’ educational and therapeutic needs through individualized home-learning kits, online coursework, video conferencing, and phone consultation. As COVID-19 enters its fourteenth month in New Hampshire, Shelly continues to go above and beyond to help students with disabilities in our state. She truly is a pandemic ‘Shero’!

Shelly also developed a new secure, online reporting system so that students’ local school districts could be kept informed of students’ activities during remote learning. Shelly ensured that districts understood Birchtree’s plans, had the ongoing documentation they needed, and could continue working in close partnership with Birchtree. Shelly also helped to promote communication with parents during this challenging time, volunteering to participate in evening parent/staff Zoom sessions to keep parents informed. Shelly also played a key role in developing the procedures needed to safely return students to Birchtree in the summer of 2020. On July 6, Birchtree resumed in-person instruction for small student cohorts at Birchtree’s day school. At the same time, Birchtree launched home-based in-person instruction and continued offering remote learning for families that preferred to have their child remain at home. Shelly displayed an extraordinary ability to synthesize health and safety guidelines from multiple federal and state agencies and to develop a vision for how these guidelines could be successfully and ethically implemented in Birchtree’s autism programs.

Shelly also did extraordinary work to help other agencies in New Hampshire to survive the COVID-19 crisis. As chairperson of the New Hampshire Private Special Education Association, Shelly hunted down resources for PPE and financial support for its members. She mobilized the group to advocate for continued support from their partner districts and to get the word out about studentsí successes during remote learning. And she encouraged members to share information on how they were promoting student and staff safety while providing services during the pandemic. As a workgroup member of New Hampshire’s School Transition Reopening and Redesign Taskforce, Shelly also helped increase awareness at the state level about the special challenges facing New Hampshire’s students with disabilities as they return to school.