Having taught for more than two decades in the Cleveland Municipal School District, Melody Fawcett-Leech is currently the math specialist for the OH/OHI (Orthopedic/Other Health Impaired) Department at Lincoln-West High School in Cleveland. She was previously a districtwide intervention specialist with the OH/OHI Department, working with students, families and teachers on service delivery and IEP (individualized education program) implementation issues. Before that, she taught for three years at John Hay High School in Cleveland, where she spent half the day teaching students in a community-based program for developing job skills at The Cleveland Clinic, followed by classroom instruction for the second half of the day. Earlier in her career, Fawcett-Leach distinguished herself as a special education teacher at Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School in Cleveland, where she began extra-curricular clubs, authored grants to fund special education programs and co-authored a "Daily Living Skills" curriculum. She also taught parents how to become proactive advocates for their children. Innovations by Fawcett-Leech included the development of a "Daily Living Skills" curriculum for cognitively low-functioning middle school classes, in which students learned life skills in an actual apartment setting. Her goals included making it possible that all of her students feel "safe enough to try new things and safe enough to ask for help."
1984 Cleveland State University, B.A.
