Educating FLDS children

Come Monday, a team of administrators and educators from the Midland Independent School District will begin evaluating FLDS children at the High Sky Children's Ranch.

Woodrow Bailey, MISD communications director, said the school district has been in contact with officials at the ranch and will observe the children before adapting a curriculum to meet their needs.

"As soon as we get word that they're going to be integrated, our approach is going to be to begin to the transition," Bailey said.

Bailey said he doesn't know how long the transition will take and when the actual teaching will begin.

"We don't know timelines yet - it's very preliminary," he said.

MISD's "homebound teachers" will be the educators assisting with the program at the ranch, Bailey said.

"We're definitely prepared to deal with, or trained to deal with, issues of this kind," he said. "We're not going to say we have all the answers, but we're going to meet the needs of the students and understand their emotional state."

Meanwhile, the director of the Midland facility is still keeping a tight lip about the details surrounding the FLDS children. However, she did express gratitude for the community support the ranch has received.

"The community has been very reaching out to do what they can," said Jackie Carter, High Sky's executive director.

She wouldn't release the number of FLDS children staying at the Midland County facility, but she said everything's going well despite the added responsibilities.

"The state told us because of legal issues not to say one word ... and we could even lose our kids if we did," Carter said. "I think it's pretty (obvious) when CNN follows the buses, where the kids are."

Two charter buses arrived at the ranch on Tuesday, with an undisclosed number of the FLDS children who'd been staying at the San Angelo Coliseum for more than two weeks.

Carter said High Sky normally has about 50 children living on the ranch on a day-to-day basis, and it works with about 1,600 kids annually in all of its community programs. The high-profile situation with the newly arrived children is a sensitive one that it's managing well, she said.

"We're using resources that we have - we're handling it fine," she said. "It's real quiet - we're just getting into a routine, trying to duplicate the routine of their everyday lives."

Judge-ordered hearings await more than 400 children taken from the Eldorado FLDS ranch to be transferred throughout the state, so Carter said she doesn't know how long some of them will be in Midland.

"I don't know how long it will take for the individual hearings for the children," she said. "This is such an interesting situation."

OA staff writers Veronica Sandate and Daniel Skolfield contributed to this report.