What strategies have you used to support children with special needs in your classroom?

Something that I have found to be very interesting in the high school is that there are very few students with learning disabilities because parents dont feel the need to pay for their students to go to school if they are not going to "get anything out of it".  The biggest issue I have noticed is that lack of focus with a lot of the students.  My strategy with those students is to constantly walk to room and tap their shoulder or have them work in pairs with students who are more focused.  I also try to mix up the activities so that students dont have the chance to get bored.  It is much easier to do that here because they only have 45 minutes classes. 

I have also noticed that there are students in my classes who still dont know how to read or they are not very comfortable with reading.  When I notice this I try to use pictures a lot to help represent any word problems and to circle the parts that we are focusing on.  

Another issue in the schools here is that some of the students dont speak English, and that is something that I dont know how to help especially since Spanish is spoken in most of the homes and even sometimes in the classroom by the teachers.  The teachers very rarely speak Spanish in the classrooms, but sometime they have to with certain students because they would not understand otherwise.