Tag: assessment

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Trauma-Informed Special Education Evaluations & Programming

Photo credit Kelly Short (colorized photo from circa 1936)

Attention is finally being given to the effects of childhood trauma on childhood development and learning, but it’s still not fully incorporated into the mainstream as common knowledge. Only when trauma-informed education becomes the norm can childhood trauma be prevented and responded-to with greater efficacy.

Because trauma often begets mental health issues, not the least of which being Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and can also result in permanent physical disabilities, depending on the nature of the trauma, individuals with such impairments can become eligible for protections under disability-related laws. This includes Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

For this reason, one would think that the special education community is conducting trauma-informed assessments and considering the trauma-related needs of its students with IEPs. One would be thinking incorrectly, however. I’ve lost count of the number of special education assessments I’ve seen that are entirely silent regarding the unique traumatizing events of a student’s past, like they just didn’t happen or are entirely irrelevant to the assessment process, including in mental health evaluations.

I’m dealing with one of those, right now, as a matter of fact. The very signs of trauma and the historical events that likely contributed to them were described in detail to the mental health assessor, and none of those details appeared anywhere in her report. So, basically, what I took from the situation was that some ding-dong baby doll who fell out of the lap of luxury and into a master’s degree in social work was dispatched to assess a student with some pretty significant symptoms who had previously lived for 11 months with her mother in their car and who had also witnessed her mother getting mowed down in the street by a car while they were crossing the street together at a protected cross-walk, leaving this student as a young child to scream for help in the middle of the street. None of these past traumatic events were discussed in the assessment report, nor were any of the symptoms that had been brought to the assessor’s attention. She interviewed the student once via Zoom and noted that the student wasn’t very forthcoming, and relied on classroom observations conducted by a school psychologist, who is not a mental health clinician.

Thankfully, once it was brought to his attention, the involved school district’s special education director was just as taken aback as I was and immediately agreed to fund an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) in mental health at public expense, which is basically a second opinion conducted by an outside, uninvolved provider, that is funded by the District. We’re in the process of finding an outside assessor to conduct it, but we expect the situation for this student to be resolved once it’s done. However, this was just the latest of several cases we’ve worked in this same District over the last 15 years in which trauma and mental health issues are not being properly considered, and it’s a problem that is not unique to this particular district. It seems to be a fairly systemic problem in cases we encounter from around the country.

So, I want to focus on what trauma-informed special education assessments and programming look like in actual practice, and how the applicable science and law come together around trauma-related special needs that require 504/ADA accommodations and/or IEPs. I first want to direct you to the peer-reviewed research, starting with the article, “Considerations for Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care Content within Special Education Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Programs,” which appeared in Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021) of the Journal of Special Education Preparation, the full text of which is available for free online.

I think this article does a good job of explaining what it means to incorporate Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) into special education, so I’m not going to do a lot of rehashing, here. One of the things I like about this article is that it doesn’t just speak to special education as a stand-alone entity; it discusses the application of trauma-informed care within an evidence-based Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), such as that found with Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which are meant to catch students before they fall too far behind and provide them with whatever types of supports they need to be successful, whether through special or general education. This naturally lends it to speak to the related “child find” issues.

This article cites other researchers by saying: “… adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; Felitti et al., 1998) … are all common experiences for students with emotional/behavioral disorders (Cavanaugh, 2016).” Certainly, one way to identify children who may need special education as per “child find” is to look at those already known to have experienced ACEs to determine if they are showing any signs of emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The moment it is known that a general education student has survived a traumatic event, a special education assessment referral should be made and it should include sufficiently comprehensive mental health evaluations to accurately capture any impact the traumatic event has had on the child’s ability to access and participate in education. Even if the child ultimately does not qualify for special education, Section 504 relies on the special education process to gather its own assessment data to inform appropriate 504/ADA accommodations for children with disabilities who do not require special education.

If the child is unavailable for learning due to extreme trauma, then the interventions have to restore the child to the point of being available for learning again, unless the child is medically incapacitated. If medical interventions are first necessary, those obviously come before any special education or 504/ADA accommodations. A child has to be physically medically stabilized before they are available to participate in education and anyone can know what to do for them at school. New assessments will have to be done to determine the student’s new baselines once physical medical stability is achieved.

If the child is psychiatrically incapacitated, it may be necessary for that child to be placed in a residential psychiatric treatment facility with an onsite school in order for the child to become available for learning. I’m not a huge fan of residential placement, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I’ve had a number of students benefit tremendously from a special education residential placement for these kinds of severe mental health needs, though I’ve also had students on my caseload molested and assaulted in some of the residential programs, so this model of intervention is hardly a monolith or panacea.

The above-cited article makes the following recommendations: “Considerations for special education professional development includes teachers undergoing an extensive training that addresses the following components:

Understanding Trauma and ACEs: School site staff who do not have a professional understanding of what trauma is, what ACEs are, and how they affect student performance are at a gross disadvantage when it comes to actually serving the public good. The pervasiveness of trauma in everyday life, anymore, is something we all have to consider when dealing with each other. We should certainly be able to expect our professionals who encounter it in the field daily to have an intelligent plan of action for how to respond to it appropriately in their professional capacities. We shouldn’t be ending up with privileged ding-dongs with fancy degrees who can’t recognize what they’re looking at when they encounter childhood trauma in the field.

Challenging current thought processes vs. TIC attributions: Long-entrenched policies and practices that fail to meet the needs of certain populations are effectively institutionalized biases against them. In professional settings in which no policies and procedures exist to appropriately respond to the needs of students who have experienced ACEs and trauma, there is no institutionalized response to proactively address the situation, which becomes an institutionalized proactive effort to ignore it. When people feel powerless to help someone being hurt by something, it’s a natural psychological defense mechanism for them to blame the victim for deserving mistreatment rather than live with feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, cowardice, or whatever else feels bad that goes along with not helping. Victim-blaming is meant to offset feelings of guilt for not helping.

Too often, adults in the public school setting become angry at children for manifesting the symptoms of trauma and ACEs, punishing them instead of helping them and making a bad situation worse. There is no excuse for this kind of conduct in a professional educational setting, and certainly not in this day and age when there is plenty of peer-reviewed research capturing strategies and approaches that actually work. As I’ve said in other posts, however, there are no real mechanisms in place in public education at this time for the consistent promulgation of the peer-reviewed research among the educators to equip them with the resources to translate the research into actual, practical classroom applications.

Where parents really need to get vocal at their school board meetings is in advocating for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of public education. It’s not like we don’t have evidence of what works. Education research continues to compile and accrue over time into an ever-enriching body of knowledge that can be used to solve so many of the world’s ills that it should be a crime that it’s not already being actively applied by competent professionals throughout the public education system on the regular.

Identifying ways educators may be trauma-informed: It seems that using logic models has been the most effective way to communicate concepts around identifying ways that educators can become trauma-informed. The School District of Philadelphia has created a logic model that serves as a useful example, which is illustrated below.

You can look at this logic model more closely by clicking on the images or the link in this post. What you can see once you look at it is that the District’s MTSS incorporates TIC into its design. I can’t speak to the fidelity with which The School District of Philadelphia actually abides by this design or the degree to which it works. I can only show it to you as an example of how to create this kind of a design, which requires staff to be trained on how to implement it in order for it to actually work. By creating this kind of operational framework and training everyone within the school site on how to carry it out, staff become informed on what to look for and what to do when they see it, when it comes to trauma and its potential for undermining student learning.

Direct overview of MTSS: The above example shows how TICs are woven into an existing MTSS. Very often, special education personnel don’t understand where they fit into the overall tiers of intervention, and usually because the rest of their co-workers and superiors have no idea, either. None of these MTSS designs will work if staff don’t recognize themselves in all of the pieces of the design for which they are each actually responsible. It’s not enough to create a pretty logic model on paper. The logic model has to actually be executed according to its design or it’s worthless. To that end, it is imperative that both general and special education staff understand where the lines are drawn between their two universes and a child needs to be referred for special education assessment.

I actually have a case from my past that I can refer to as an example. In this case, the district had some kind of MTSS but it had failed to work in special education and the “child find” process in any kind of meaningful way. As such, staff didn’t know their roles when it came to “child find” and made mistakes all over the place. This was a case of multiple ding-dongs who had no idea what they were doing, trying to fake their ways through the MTSS design process and botching it royally. What’s worse is that the involved student in this example was being raised by his grandmother, who had been a teacher for this same school district for over 30 years at the time of this hearing, and her daughter, the student’s mother, had gone on to become a teacher of the same district, as well. The employees of this district were doing this to each other’s families, and purely out of ignorance and a grotesque leadership failure.

When done correctly, a school- or district-wide MTSS that incorporates TIC will naturally lend itself to helping those children who need special education mental health supports for any reason. Investing in developing a high-quality MTSS that incorporates TIC will appropriately funnel the children who need special education mental health services into the appropriate levels of intervention relative to their unique, individual needs.

That said, it’s not enough to simply refer children suffering from mental health issues related to trauma for assessment. The quality of the assessments conducted matter and leaving out critical information about the trauma a child has already experienced and how it is affecting that child’s learning is a fatal flaw that compromises the validity of the assessment and gives the parents a legitimate reason to disagree and request IEEs at public expense.

Administrators looking to cut corners will often try to minimize costs by having school psychologists do some basic social/emotional assessments instead of having proper mental health evaluations done by licensed mental health providers. This is no place to be cutting corners. First, it saves no money in the long run. Pretending the problem isn’t as bad as it actually is will blow up in your face, eventually. The longer the problem goes untreated, the harder and more costly it will become to address later on. Secondly, it’s heinously unethical. What kind of a person do you have to be to deny necessary mental health services because you don’t want to spend the money? Any school district administrators who think their budgets are more important than the lives of their students shouldn’t be employed in public education. The budget exists for the benefit of the students, not the administration. For that matter, school district administrators exist for the benefit of students; students do not exist for the purpose of lining administrators’ pockets with unearned tax dollars.

I know the technical issues of how to integrate TIC into a schoolwide system of successful interventions is a topic worthy of a full-day workshop and I’m not doing justice to the entire issue, here. But, I’m hoping that I’ve given you enough to think about TIC in special education and some pointers towards some resources that can help you as a parent, educator, and/or concerned taxpayer to address these kinds of challenges. We need to appreciate the degree to which special education can be a tool to protect our local communities and national security from unstable individuals responding to their personal traumas in ways that can hurt many other people in addition to themselves. In this day and age of mass shootings by people suffering from significant mental health issues, we can’t neglect to preempt these behaviors where we can by intervening in the lives of children who experience trauma and/or have mental and emotional health needs that affect their access to learning and behaviors. It takes a village to raise a child, and this is how it’s done when the child has experienced trauma.

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Technology and the Intersectionality of Larry P.

Image credit: Fibonacci Blue, Flickr (https://flic.kr/p/q3PXEY)

Based on the professional peer-reviewed research, intersectionality can be understood as the phenomenon in which an individual person’s social position relative to more than one socially defining characteristic, such as race, language, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, etc., come together to simultaneously impact a person’s status in and access to society at large. Where a person fits into the world is a matter of multidimensional considerations.

When looking at the question of whether the current mechanisms of our system of government, and the behavioral rewards inherently built into them, truly serve the good of the people according to the will of the people and the rule of law, the importance of intersectionality to the accuracy of our analyses cannot be overstated. There is no “silver bullet” that will eliminate all of our social challenges with a single shot. Solving our complex, interconnected problems takes complex planning and execution.

Society is a complex system of inextricably intertwined considerations that all have to be accounted for in order for everyone’s needs and rights to be equally met. There are no cutting corners, and we now have the computing power to stitch together effective systems of equity for all into the ways our government functions, if the technology is just used the right way. The fail-safes that can be built in and the audit trails that would be automatically created would prevent and capture any attempts at abuse just as a matter of normal functioning.

We aren’t there yet, but the application of enterprise-class computing technologies to the delivery of publicly funded services is inevitable, and it will streamline a lot of inter- and intra-agency operations, trimming the administrative fat within a lot of State and local publicly funded programs. Eliminating human error and dishonesty from a public agency’s administrative processes prevents episodes of noncompliance that puts the agency in legal jeopardy.

I’ve told the story in past posts of the case in which one of my students went for months without a needed piece of equipment ordered by his Occupational Therapist (OT) as an accommodation for his sensory needs in the classroom, which meant he was up and out of his seat disrupting the instruction, because of an interpersonal feud between two mean old ladies who hated each other in administration. One of the mean old ladies worked at the student’s local school site in the office, processing purchase requisitions and submitting them to the school district’s main office to be processed into purchase orders.

Now, this was back in the day and all of this was done using paper and the district’s own internal courier service, commonly referred to as “brown mail,” because most things came in those big brown manila envelopes. There was no email. If things needed to move faster than brown mail, it was done via fax. So, context.

The other mean old lady in this situation worked in the accounting office at the district offices. I’m not exactly clear on the details of why they hated each other so much, but I do recall that it had something to do with either a green bean casserole or a three-bean salad – I can’t remember which – at some kind of district holiday party. Like, maybe both of them brought the same thing and it turned into a feud over whose was better, or something? I don’t entirely recall the details, I just remember it was something to do with beans and a holiday party and that it was totally dumb.

The mean old lady at the district offices would sit on the purchase requisitions submitted by the mean old lady at the school site just out of spite, without any regard for the people who had submitted the requisitions to the mean old lady at the school site or any students who may have been impacted by her behaviors. The mean old lady at the school site wasn’t willing to call over to the mean old lady at the district offices to find out what had happened to her requisitions, so she’d become hostile with the school site staff who would ask her where their stuff was. They became afraid to ask her where their stuff was, and just took it as a given that the average purchase would take at least 60 to 90 days before it came in.

Computers don’t do any of that! As many concerns as we have about computers processing things correctly, that comes down to how they are coded. They aren’t going to fight with each other over three-bean salads at a Christmas party and then undermine each other professionally to the detriment of the constituents they are being paid by the taxpayers to serve.

So, knowing that the implementation of the technology is inevitable, our job as informed voters and taxpayers is to understand what that technology needs to be able to do in order to truly perform according to the principles of democracy and the rule of law. That technology must account for how intersectionality impacts every person, whether staff, vendor, or constituent, who must participate in the execution of the government’s responsibilities to the people.

This brings me to a very specific issue within special education in the State of California that has affected way too many families in a detrimental way, which is the intersectionality of the African-American experience with special education in the public schools. This is an under-researched and poorly regulated aspect of our current modern society, here in California, and as the State seeks to shore up democracy in spite of the many forces presently working to undermine it, I believe this specific instance of intersectionality particularly deserves the State’s attention.

I’m speaking specifically of the long-outdated and now inappropriate Larry P. requirement. To quote the State:

“The Larry P. Case“

In 1972 in the Larry P. case, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California found that African American students in the San Francisco Unified School District were being placed into classes for “Educably Mentally Retarded (EMR)” students in disproportionate numbers, based on criteria that relied primarily on the results of intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that were racially and/or culturally discriminatory and not validated for the purposes for which they were being used1. In 1979, the court permanently enjoined LEAs throughout California from using standardized intelligence tests2 for (1) the identification of African American students as EMR or its substantial equivalent or (2) placement of African American students into EMR classes or classes serving substantially the same functions3.

The court held that court approval would be required for the use of any standardized intelligence tests for African American students for the above purposes. The court laid out a state process for this. 

The EMR category no longer exists. The court has never held hearings to determine the “substantial equivalent” of the EMR identification or placement, or whether IQ tests are appropriate for assessing African American students for identifications or placements other than the substantial equivalent of EMR. The state process to seek approval has not been invoked.

Although the law on assessment has evolved, as described above, the Larry P. injunction remains in place, and the court retains jurisdiction over its enforcement. The Larry P. injunction does not apply to tests that are not considered standardized intelligence tests.


Footnotes
1 Larry P. v. Riles, 343 F. Supp. 1306, 1315 (N.D. Cal. 1972).
2 The court defined a standardized intelligence test as one that result in a score purporting to measure intelligence, often described as “general intellectual functioning.”  Larry P., 495 F. Supp. 926, 931 n. 1 (N.D. Cal. 1979), affirmed in part, reversed in part, 793 F.2d 969 (9th Cir. 1986).
3 Larry P., 495 F. Supp. at 989.

Here’s what everybody needs to get, and which way too many school psychologists and other special education assessors in California’s school districts do not: Larry P. only applies to norm-referenced intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that result in a full-scale IQ (FSIQ) score. It doesn’t apply to the Southern California Ordinal Scales of Development (SCOSD) Cognition subtest. It doesn’t apply to any standardized speech/language assessment measures. It has nothing to do with OT. It has nothing to do with measuring academic achievement using standardized assessment tools.

Unless the assessment measure is designed to produce an IQ score, Larry P. does not apply. But, I’ve now handled a half-dozen cases in the last couple of years in which the whole reason why the students’ IEPs were poorly developed was because they’d been poorly assessed by people who didn’t score any standardized measures for fear of violating Larry P. because they didn’t actually understand the Larry P. rules. The professional development on this issue throughout the State is atrocious.

More to the point, the State needs to invoke its process to seek approval to now use the current, modern, unbiased IQ tests in the special education process, because the assessment failures caused by poorly trained cowards who don’t have the sense to go onto Google and look up the rules themselves and/or push back against administrative supervisors steering them in a non-compliant direction are causing a cataclysm of disastrous consequences at the intersection of the African-American experience and childhood disability in the State’s public schools. This just feeds these kids into the gaping maw of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

I want to take it one more step further than that, though. I want to encourage more representation of the African-American community in special education assessment. I want to see more college students of color going into school psychology, speech/language pathology, OT, assistive technology, etc., so that they can be there to advocate from an informed, expert perspective within the system for the children from their own community who are at risk of being otherwise misunderstood by people who lack the perspective necessary to appreciate the long-lasting impacts of their assessment errors.

People who don’t actually understand the rules can over-interpret them in an over-abundance of caution. They will not do more than what’s actually been prohibited for fear of doing something they aren’t supposed to, to the point that they’re not doing what they are supposed to be doing. They go from one extreme to the other. In an effort to avoid committing a State-level Larry P. violation, they commit a violation of federal law by failing to appropriately assess in all areas of suspected disability according to the applicable professional standards and the instructions of the producers of the standardized measures used.

It’s currently a “from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire” situation for the State that is wrecking lives and creating special education violations left and right. The State is setting up its public schools to fail at this particularly significant intersection of social factors, at the same time that the State is seriously considering reparations to the African-American community here in the State.

I promise you that none of the assessors I’ve encountered in the last few years who have been committing these Larry P. violations are actually trying to be hurtful. None of them know what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re making dumb errors in judgment, often under pressure from authoritarian administrators who don’t know an IQ test from a roll of toilet paper.

I’m advocating, here, for both the development and implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies that will automate as much of the public sector’s administrative functions as possible according to the applicable regulations, including mandated timelines, as well as for the State to request the court to reverse Larry P. so that schools are no longer enjoined against using current, valid, appropriately normed IQ tests in the assessment of African-American children in California for special education purposes. These two things matter to each other.

Larry P. is no longer a solution, it’s a problem. It’s not that assessors couldn’t work around it; it’s that they don’t know how to work around it and they commit more errors trying to than anything that could possibly go wrong actually using an IQ test on an African-American student in this modern day and age. Further, the specific ecological factors that contribute to the success of students who are impacted by the intersectionality of their disabilities with other traits that can affect their social standing, such as ethnicity, need to be understood as specific data points worthy of intense administrative and policy-making examination.

As a matter of civil rights and monitoring its own internal compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, one would hope that a public education agency would want to know if particular classes of students are somehow being under-served and need more attention from the adult decision-makers involved in their educational experiences. Who is monitoring each school district’s compliance with Larry P., right now? Is that the job of each district’s 504 Coordinator? How is Larry P. compliance in the field such an issue, still, after all of these years and, more to the point, why is it even still a requirement after all of these years?

Analyzing data from an enterprise-class computing solution regarding intersectionality among special education students would help public education agencies recognize trends of noncompliance and programming failures. This would include rampant Larry P. violations producing shoddy assessments that result in poorly crafted Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) that fail to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits according to the current Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) standard pursuant to the 2017 Endrew F. Supreme Court decision.

Issues of intersectionality can be captured by competent data analysis, which can be greatly facilitated by properly coded enterprise-class computing technologies, and used to ensure that all students, pursuant to Endrew F., receive an IEP appropriately ambitious in light of their unique, individual circumstances. A properly configured system would be spitting out reports detailing the instances of noncompliance to the inboxes of the key decision-makers so they could respond as quickly as possible.

Had such a system already been implemented, the Larry P. violations I’ve encountered all over the State over the last couple of years would have been caught among all the others I haven’t encountered and either rectified or prevented altogether by the State realizing what a colossal disaster Larry P. has become in the field and executing the process outlined by the Court to put an end to it. Were the State monitoring the right data points, it would have realized that Larry P. needed to be ended a long time ago and that it causes infinitely more problems than it solves because it forces assessors to assess African-American students differently than everyone else, which is not equal access.

Frankly, this lack of equal access is more discriminatory than using an IQ test could ever possibly be and becomes even more so when the quality of the assessments are compromised because the assessors don’t know how to comply with Larry P. and they jack up their entire evaluations in the process. Jacked up evaluations lead to jacked up IEPs, which lead to the denial of educational benefits and all the consequences that these children will experience over their lifetimes as a result of being deprived of a FAPE.

The people who make these kinds of errors will be among the first to engage in victim-blaming once these students end up in the justice system, acting like it was unavoidable and inevitable, because they can’t recognize or accept the degree to which they had a hand in making it happen. The people who do it on purpose hide among the people who don’t know what else to do, fueling the victim-blaming, which becomes part of our current, exhausting, ridiculous, ongoing culture wars.

I would rather see Larry P. ended so that it’s no longer creating confusion among assessors in the field and technology implemented that will identify when things like this are going on so they can be stopped early on. I would much rather monitor digital data as a compliance watchdog as I get older than have to go in, one kid at a time, to hold the public education system accountable to its mandates under our democracy’s rule of law. So long as there is transparency in how the system operates and all the real-time data, other than anything personally identifying, is accessible to the public to be analyzed for compliance failures, technology stands to enhance the functions of democracy. But, it all comes down to how its coded.

I expect that watchdogs and advocates in the future will spend more time analyzing system-generated data than necessarily representing individual students, and that a healthier partnership between the public sector and the citizenry can evolve in which the user feedback shared with system developers and operators can be used to enhance its functions and allow each agency to serve its mandated purposes in a compliant manner that is both cost-effective and substantively effective.

The more that social and behavioral science is integrated into the policies, procedures, and applied technologies in the public sector, the more effective and efficient they will be. The more integrated the technologies among all of the public agency stakeholders, the more cohesive the communications and execution of time-sensitive tasks. I see a future in which systemic violations, such as rampant Larry P. failures, will trigger an examination of the intersectionality of disability and other social factors, such as ethnicity, on compliance and help identify when something like getting rid of Larry P. needs to happen sooner rather than later.

I see this Larry P. mess as yet another compelling argument for the implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies within public education administration. I hope the State is listening.

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Special Education Timelines During Quarantine

Avoiding the spread of disease is obviously the most important consideration, these days, but life hasn’t ground to a halt; it’s just changed. Everyone is doing what they can, right now, to curtail the spread of disease so that we can all live our lives in peace, which doesn’t mean stopping the living of lives while we ride this out.

The whole point of the measures we’re all collectively taking as a planet right now is to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, with all of these sudden changes, there is a lot up in the air, right now, with respect to our students with disabilities who require services during extended breaks so as not to regress in their learning.

Even more concerning are our students with special needs that affect their behaviors who are cooped up at home with their parents, who are likely on the verge, already, without any behavioral support services. Those parents are at an increased risk of developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from this whole shelter in place situation.

There are funny memes going around right now about parents trying to home-school their general education children and learning to appreciate their general education teachers, but nobody is making a meme about the mom of an autistic young woman who enjoys regular outings into the community as part of her special education program and is melting down on a regular basis, now, because she can’t leave the house, go to school, hang out with friends, or visit her grandmother in a nursing home. These are the families that are already slipping into crisis while all the rest of us are riding this out and complaining about inconveniences.

For our students with developmental disabilities who require ongoing services in order to make reasonable strides towards a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), disruptions in services mean developmental stagnation and regression. That means the current school closures are particularly impactful.

Staying at home is important. If you can stay at home, you should. But, as millions of Americans figure out that they can actually still do their jobs, or at least a significant portion of their jobs, from home, and continue to work remotely, our society is finding a way to adapt on the fly to this situation in ways heretofore not possible because of our technology.

As awesome as that is for many private and public entities that are actively figuring this out, one area in which it has evidently not yet been figured out is special education services, or at least a triage solution for our kiddos who will regress, lose significant ground, and miss critical windows of developmental opportunity in the absence of ongoing special education services. Once again, our kids with the most demanding special needs are the last ones to get consideration by stakeholders in this situation.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know how the system tends to respond to certain things. There are predictable patterns in the behaviors of public education agency personnel in response to certain types of situational factors.

Sometimes, when the people in charge don’t know what to do, you just have to give them suggestions about what they could do to get them jump-started. It’s something similar to “Bystander Effect.”

In situations in which the Bystander Effect, occurs, if there are lots of people around when something horrible happens, everybody expects someone else to step up with a solution, so no one does anything. When there isn’t anyone else to respond or just a few people, individuals are more likely to respond in the moment to a crisis.

Here, it appears that everyone is frozen in place waiting for someone else to do something when it comes to meeting the needs of our students with special needs during this current crisis. Rather than waiting for someone to step up and do something, I’m choosing to do what science says we should do when the Bystander Effect has gripped the crowd and everyone seems frozen in place – impose structure.

Imposing structure to overcome something like this isn’t about telling people what to do so much as to signal their brains that the time of waiting for someone else to do something is over and they need to act, as well. Right now. Proposing a solution in a situation like this isn’t about cramming a particular agenda down anyone’s throat; it’s about snapping people out of it so they stop looking at the car crash by the side of the road as they slowly drive by and actually stop their car to get out and help.

We can’t ignore the needs of our students who are at risk of regression and loss of windows of developmental opportunity to learn because of factors beyond their control. These students are the least able to do anything about the deprivations they are experiencing at the moment. They are at our mercy and we can’t afford to be bouncing off of each other like a bunch of hysterical ninnies in panic because we don’t know what to do to help them. We do know what to do. Each child in this situation needs his/her respective village to get its act together and work in a coordinated fashion.

So, in the interest of imposing some structure onto the conversation and planning that now needs to happen, here’s what I am proposing for our students who may need or who already receive special education, so as to prevent a denial of FAPE:

  1. Pending Referrals & Assessments

    1. Child Find [34 CFR Sec. 300.111] – This one is going to be difficult because most public schools are terrible at child find, in general, and most parents don’t even know about it.

      1. Teachers identifying the kids who may need to be referred for special education assessment on the basis of suspected disability will be even more difficult under the current circumstances, depending on how school officials are providing instruction, if at all, during this time of sheltering in place.

      2. Parents may have increased cause for suspecting disabilities when they attempt to assist their children with their school work at home and discover their kids have challenges in processing certain types of information, but they aren’t necessarily expert enough to recognize those challenges as evidence of suspected disability. Further, emotional trauma can cause a child to become eligible for special education under the Emotional Disturbance (ED) category. Parents may find it necessary to refer their children for special education evaluation if they perceive challenges with mastering certain types of concepts in their children while attempting to assist them at home with instruction and/or if their children experience emotional trauma that interferes with their access to education now or upon returning to school once it is safe to do so, again.

    2. Pending Referrals – None of the timelines applicable to referrals for special education assessments plans should be disrupted by the current state of affairs. The only thing that needs to happen in response to any referral is the provision of an assessment plan, pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.9 and 300.300. This is a document-driven administrative process. This has no in-person requirements that would otherwise delay processing. Given that so many people in administrative positions are able to still do their jobs if given the proper tools, there is no physical barrier to carrying out the duties of this step of the process and, therefore, there should be no delay in the applicable timelines just because of the current shelter in place situation.

      1. If a referral was made in writing prior to a student’s school shutting down, an assessment plan should still be provided to the parents within the mandated timeline. Erring by one to five business days may be understandably forgivable given the circumstances and may result in a procedural violation that nonetheless results in harmless error, so parents shouldn’t be threatening lawsuits over something like this.

      2. If a referral is submitted in writing via a manner that is accessible by school personnel, such as via email or through a web portal, during this period of sheltering in place, the local education agency should still act on the referral within the applicable mandated timeline. As a purely document-driven administrative process, this isn’t going to put human beings into physical contact with each other in way that holds up the timeline for the provision of an assessment plan. Parents who want to make such referrals can use our free form letter generator on our site.

    3. Pending Assessments – If a referral for assessment has already been made, an assessment plan has already been signed by a parent, and now the assessment timeline is ticking down, some public education agencies may declare that the timeline is disrupted by the break from instruction due to everyone staying home and sheltering in place. However, that’s not entirely true. For example, the assessment timelines are disrupted under California law for regularly scheduled school breaks and vacations of five or more days, but this shelter in place business isn’t regularly scheduled or a vacation.

      1. Understand that assessment, whether it’s an initial evaluation or a re-evaluation, is considered a related service pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.34. Both 34 CFR Sec. 300.103 and 300.323(c) make clear that a related service cannot be subjected to any unnecessary delays as a matter of legal procedure, as this would delay the provision of services according to an IEP, and, thus, deny a FAPE.

        1. Unnecessary delays include sitting around and freaking out instead of acting. If public education agency officials claim to be working on a solution and weeks go by, they’re not working on a solution; they’re freaking out and wasting everyone’s time. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has already set up mechanisms to keep its complaint and due process systems going; evidently it understands that each State is ultimately responsible for making sure its students get educated, even if their local education agencies waffle under the pressure. If State education agencies can keep their systems going by having their personnel work from home on these administrative duties, the schools they regulate have no excuse for not doing the same, and I suspect State officials will see it that way, too.

        2. Necessary delays would include taking measures in order to otherwise comply with the regulations under the current unique circumstances. If it takes a week or two to put the necessary resources into place, that’s forgivable. Any longer than that without additional extenuating circumstances and all you’ve got is poor leadership within the agency creating unnecessary, and potentially actionable, delays.

      2. It is entirely possible to assess a student who is not medically fragile using the everyday preventative actions being recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

        1. Most special education assessments require at least some standardized testing that is administered in a 1:1 testing situation. An assessor can arrange to conduct standardized assessments in a 1:1 testing location at a school site via prior arrangement without risking an entire classroom or exposing an assessor to either an entire classroom of potentially infected students or household of potentially infected family members of the student being assessed.

        2. Acceptable reasons for delays of any component of assessment in these instances can include illness within the student’s family or that of the assessor that puts them at risk of exposing each other to COVID-19 and a shortage of other assessors to otherwise conduct the assessments or other unique circumstances that might otherwise make a substitute assessor educationally inappropriate, but the delay should not be greater than what the situation actually requires based on what is known at the time.

        3. Public education agencies may need to enlist the support of assessors in the local community to stay on top of assessments as much as possible, and States may need to waive non-public agency licensing requirements under the current circumstances just to make sure everybody who needs ongoing speech/language services, for example, actually gets it.

        4. Classroom observations are going to be the obvious problem for many assessments. Even if an assessor comes to observe a student who is sheltering in place at home, that will not be entirely representative of how that same student functions in a classroom under normal circumstances. It may make more sense to wait until the student returns to school, but the assessment timeline may be ticking down while the child re-acclimates to the school setting, which could include emotional factors that were not present before but which could continue and are, therefore, relevant to the assessment process. Consultations with teachers and parents regarding in-class performance before and after quarantine will become imperative to supply accurate information for the assessment report. Regardless of how a student functioned in the classroom before quarantine, going forward post-quarantine is going to look and feel different for everybody after all of this. Post-quarantine classroom observation data is probably going to be more useful than pre-quarantine classroom observation data.

        5. In an effort to achieve compliance to the degree possible, but with the understanding that some unavoidable delays in the assessment process can legitimately occur because of the current situation, I am strongly recommending to parents and public education officials that short-term individualized response-to-crisis assessment schedules be developed using available technologies to arrive at a plan for each student who is pending assessment so that parents know what to expect by when, school personnel know how to allocate assessment resources, and the process can be kept moving along in a relatively timely manner so that, by the time students return to school, if they need an IEP, the IEP team can have an appropriate one in place for them upon their return. Otherwise, the team can finalize the assessment process once the student returns to school so that IEP team decisions can then be made as intended.

        6. It may be necessary for parents to negotiate timeline extensions with their local education agencies as part of an individualized response-to-crisis assessment schedule, but I am strongly advising parents against agreeing to any such extensions without also including something in writing that describes exactly what is being delayed that necessitates such an extension. For example, if all of the standardized testing can be conducted prior to a student returning to school, but the IEP team agrees that a classroom observation shouldn’t happen until two weeks after the student returns, then the team can agree to keep the assessment process open until the observations can be done, shortly after which the report can be finalized and the IEP team can convene to discuss the results. It may be appropriate for some students in situations like these to complete the evaluation report during this period of quarantine based on what is available so that an appropriate IEP offer is made to the student as soon as possible, with the understanding that classroom observation data will be collected once the student has settled back in and may be used to amend the IEP if it reveals something not already otherwise identified by all the other assessment data on record. So long as parents and schools document their arrangements to get through pending assessments during this situation and the parents give informed consent to any such alternative arrangements, parents will not be inclined to file lawsuits, nor will they have the evidence necessary to argue against delays to which they have, knowingly and with full understanding, consented. Taking these steps will reduce a lot of anxiety about loose ends and what comes next for everybody involved.

  2. Pending IEP meetings – This stands to be one of the biggest procedural challenges simply because of all the IEP meetings that were already on calendar and subject to mandatory timelines at the time that everyone started sheltering in place, but it is still nonetheless one of the easiest situations to solve. 34 CFR Sec. 300.322(c) and Sec. 300.328 require that local education agencies facilitate meaningful parent participation in the IEP meeting process, even if that means using alternative means of participating other than attending meetings in person, such as telephone and video conferencing. While some delay as education agencies get their people set up with the technologies necessary to work this way from home might be within reason, this isn’t something that should cause an IEP meeting scheduled for two weeks from now from not being held at its originally scheduled time without IEP team member agreement. It doesn’t take that much technology to do a conference call and email the paperwork to meeting participants. The law already provides for accommodating the fact that parents and educators can’t always meet in person to conduct IEP meetings, and those laws remain in force, right now.

  3. IEP implementation – This is the grand-daddy of all special education issues facing families of students with special needs, right now. And, it’s a hotbed for lawsuits if local education agencies don’t respond appropriately to the situation.

    1. Online learning options – These options are being proposed for general education students and will work for many special education students, as well, at least in some areas of learning.

      1. Where it will usually not work is with students who have:

        1. Poor task initiation, task maintenance, and/or task completion

        2. Impaired executive functioning and/or attention

        3. Severely delayed communication skills

        4. Severely delayed cognitive development

        5. Vision loss or severe visual disabilities that prevent them from accessing what is on the screen (for students with these challenges who are also receiving speech/language services via a virtual model, it might still work so long as the therapist can see their mouths when they speak, depending on the nature of the therapy)

        6. The forms it can take include:

          1. Video conferencing with teachers and/or therapists

          2. Using online learning games and apps

          3. Conducting research

          4. Watching educational videos

      2. Direct in-home instruction – It may be necessary for teachers to provide home/hospital instruction to students at serious risk of regression on a 1:1 basis in their homes. The law already provides for this option, as well. If it is medically inadvisable for a child on an IEP to go to school, home/hospital is an appropriate placement option under normal circumstances. However, it’s probably fair to say that a judge would not find the current times normal and that every special education student cannot be reasonably provided with in-home 1:1 instruction. This is going to be the area in which education agencies are most likely to get themselves into trouble. If there is any way for teaching staff to use the everyday preventative actions recommended by the CDC to provide 1:1 instruction to those students most at risk of regression, it should be done. Small group instruction of no more than 8 students is still achievable, even if done for fewer hours of the day than normal. One teacher could instruct two or three different groups of no more than 8 students for a couple of hours each day in rotation at a school site and manage to stave off regression and actually continue progress towards FAPE. Individual and small group therapies could also be provided while special education students are on campus, rotating students out so that there are never more than ten people in one place at a time.

      3. Transportation & Other Related Services – Some related services may become unnecessary during alternative teaching arrangements. For example, a student may not need a 1:1 behavior aide to receive 1:1 in-home instruction, but would totally need the aide at school while trying to participate among all the other students. Transportation may not be needed for students who are being served at home but would be needed for those who need to travel to a school site for any direct instruction and/or therapies that cannot be provided any other way. If alternative arrangements are made to serve special education students at risk of significantly regressing while sheltering in place, unusual but temporary transportation services may become necessary in order to implement such an alternative plan. Local education agencies cannot place the burden on parents to transport their children with special needs to school for alternative services during this time, particularly if parents have no way of transporting them. The whole point of special education transportation as a related service is to overcome that very obstacle. If special arrangements have to be made to prevent a student with an IEP from regressing during these current times, those arrangements will have to, by necessity, include an offer of transportation services if the parents cannot otherwise transport the student. Whether or not such related services are necessary really comes down to the individual needs of the child, as always. It’s not like somebody bombed the bus lot; the vehicles are there and the drivers still need their jobs, so, as long as everyone follows proper sanitation and social distancing protocols, transportation services can be provided.

    This is by no means a comprehensive plan. That’s more than one advocate sitting at home on lock-down can develop. It will take State agencies working with their local education agencies to come up with a comprehensive plan. At this point, I have to believe that people are scrambling behind the scenes all over the place to come up with a plan, but the public is still waiting to hear what it is. The families I represent are sitting at home wondering what is going to happen over the next few months. All the information about the schools going around is general in nature and none of it is specific to their children with special education needs.

    To the extent that what I’ve shared can impose some structure on the dialog that needs to be happening right now between parents and special educators, my contribution, here, is food for thought. It’s not my intent, here, to tell anybody what to do. My intent is to break the frozen stance of this quasi-Bystander Effect and stop waiting for someone else to say or do something.

    In a real Bystander Effect situation, if you’re in a crowd and someone suddenly falls to the ground or otherwise experience harm that requires intervention, most people will freeze and look around to see if anybody else is going to do something. In those moments, people who understand what is really happening have to snap out of it and do something.

    The guidance that psychologists are given if we find ourselves in such a situation is to point at the person right in front of us and say, “You! Call 911!” then approach the person in trouble with appropriate caution and, if they are conscious, tell them help is on the way. There’s something magically triggering about issue a command like that because, unless the person you just commanded to make the call has no phone, the call will be made. Suddenly, instead of frozen with uncertainty, that person has a job to do. There’s an action he/she can take to make things move in the right direction.

    Initially, until someone barks a command, everybody is either a deer in headlights or otherwise assumes someone else will take care of it and don’t think they have a role to play. There’s something about barking that initial command that gets everybody working together in unison and it usually doesn’t take more than that. Humans just sometimes need an environmental cue before we know whether, when, and how to act.

    So, that’s basically what I’m doing. Me barking “Call 911!” to someone standing on the other side of a fallen human body isn’t me being bossy. The suggestions I’ve made in this post isn’t me being bossy, either. This is my effort snap all the stakeholders and decision makers out of it so they aren’t standing in a virtual crowd waiting for someone else to say or do something. It’s now been said, public education system. So act.

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IEP Goals Determine Services & Placement

If you’ve read or listened to our past posts and podcasts, or have otherwise been educating yourself on the special education process, hopefully by now you understand that special education is supposed to follow a particular procedural flow. This is not only the method supported by best practices, but also the method required by federal law.

To recap, assessment data provides the present levels of performance and baselines necessary to formulate educationally appropriate IEP goals for an individual learner. The goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Once the enormous milestone of developing the IEP goals has been achieved, then it’s time to figure out what services are going to be necessary and where they can be delivered in order for each goal to be met. This is where things can suddenly go off the rails.

It does no good to articulate sensible outcomes in measurable terms if effective services aren’t put into place to actually work on them and make them happen. Goals are just hopes if you don’t have a plan for the services you will need to meet them, and hope is not a strategy. But, this is often where things can get tricky in developing an IEP.

There are two common reasons for why things can go wrong at this stage: 1) everybody means well, but they don’t know what they’re doing; or, 2) something fishy is going on. In the first instance, it’s usually a matter of training. In the second instance, somebody is gaming the system in pursuit of an agenda in which the student is ancillary, but not the point.

In many instances, where this process gets tripped up actually starts with the development of the IEP goals. When the IEP goals are improperly written and/or necessary goals are excluded altogether, determining what services are necessary to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits to each student becomes compromised.

I’ve had many parents come to me over the years saying things like, “My kid needs more speech and language. He doesn’t know word meanings, can’t follow instructions, and can’t express himself, but he’s only getting 20 minutes of speech per week.” They look at increasing the service minutes in speech as though that’s going to somehow magically translate into working on all areas of his speech/language needs, when the real issue is that there is only one speech goal in the IEP for articulation and the rest of their child’s speech/language needs have no goals.

Because there are no goals for anything else, the number of speech/language service minutes is limited to how much time is reasonable to pursue the one goal that is there for articulation. 20 minutes per week to work on nothing but articulation isn’t automatically off-base.

What these parents really mean, when they say their kids need more speech and language services, is that the IEP is not targeting all of their speech/language needs. If that’s true, then the IEP team has to go back and look at the data to determine what other areas of speech and/or language should also be targeted by explicit intervention, then write goals to those specific areas of intervention need.

Once those new goals are written, the IEP team can then look at how many service minutes will be necessary to meet each goal. In addition to service minutes, which are expressed in terms of frequency and duration, the location of where the services will be delivered has to be determined.

It isn’t automatic that related services, like speech/language or occupational therapy (OT), get delivered in a pull-out setting. The location of services, like all other parts of an IEP, must be individualized to the unique needs of the student.

Pull-out services require the student to be removed from the classroom, often during instruction, and can interfere with learning. It’s a balancing act to find the right time to pull a student out of the regular class routine to go participate in direct pull-out services.

Push-in services bring the intervention into the student’s classroom and make it part of the classroom experience. Sometimes, this can be small group instruction with a reading specialist when the general education class is broken into small reading groups as a normal matter of instruction. This weaves the special education into the general education situation so that students with reading challenges are facilitated in participating with everyone else.

Embedded services are much like push-in, but they are intertwined with the instruction throughout the entire school day as a matter of instructional design for the classroom. An example of this would be embedded speech/language instruction and Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in the program design of a school specifically for students with autism who cannot successfully function and learn on an integrated campus.

In this example, because it can be reasonably expected that all of the students in such a special school will need these supports according to the research and evidence-based practices, they are woven into the instructional design of the program. They are part of how the instruction is delivered on a continual basis.

In such cases, the integration of speech/language and ABA have to be used to describe the placement rather than parsed out as individual related service minutes, because they are part of the placement design that makes that particular placement appropriate for certain students. In this instance, they are not discrete services provided outside of or in addition to what is otherwise happening in the classroom.

Which leads into the next phase of the process, which is placement. Placement is the last decision to be made by the IEP team. There’s a really good reason for this. Placement is supposed to be determined by what is the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) in which the services can be delivered such that the goals are met.

Special education is a service, not a place. The whole point of the IEP is to meet the IEP, but it is discrimination on the basis of handicapping condition to automatically remove kids from the general education setting for instruction just because they have disabilities. Unless removal to a more restrictive setting is the only way for the goals to get met, it’s not the LRE.

LRE is relative; what is restrictive for one student may be empowering for another. A student with autism who can nonetheless function in the general education setting with push-in ABA supports, for example, would be inappropriately placed in a school for students with autism.

Sometimes parents mistakenly think a special school is better because it’s focused on the specific types of needs their child has. But, it’s only better if the student cannot otherwise be successful in a less restrictive setting. Restrictiveness of setting is directly related to the severity of the student’s needs and the intensity of instruction necessary to meet the IEP goals.

Sometimes, creating an appropriately hybridized placement offer for a student who needs some pull-out services, but can otherwise participate in general education the rest of the school day, is such a difficult thing to coordinating in a particular school’s pre-existing culture that special ed staffs find it more convenient to put kids in more restrictive settings. This gives special ed staffs more control over the quality of the instruction and allows them to prevent their kids from being harmed by discriminatory general education practices, but it segregates their students on the basis of handicapping condition.

Sheltering students with disabilities from abuse by sequestering them from bigots inadvertently reinforces discriminatory practices that keep people with disabilities from equally accessing the world at large. Preventing the abuse of students with disabilities through diversity appreciation instruction, as well as proactive, research-based Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) on a schoolwide basis, makes far more sense.

The LRE laws exist for this reason. Rather than sequester students with traits in common to prevent them from being bullied by the rest of the students, it is more appropriate to teach all of the students how to get along with each other. Appropriate programming results in general education students looking out for their peers with special needs rather than picking on them and mocking them. It facilitates unity in the school community.

Because LRE is relative to each student, no parent should go into the IEP process demanding a placement because somebody else’s kid got it and they’re doing great there. Somebody else’s kid is not your kid. You don’t base IEP placement decisions for your child off of what somebody else needs or gets; you base it on your own child’s unique, individual learning needs as targeted by the IEP goals.

Most school districts will tell you that the “continuum of placement” for special education is whatever they already have. That’s only partly accurate. What the school district already has is part of the continuum of placement, but if the placement the student needs doesn’t already exist within the district, the placement has to be outsourced or created.

It’s appropriate for the school district to describe the types of placements it already has. These can include, but are not limited to: general education placement with push-in supports; pull-out to a special education class and/or therapies for part of the school day for targeted specialized support, with placement in general education for the rest of the school day; full-time placement in a special education class; and placement for all or part of the day in a non-public school.

But students are not limited to the types of placements already put in place within a school district. Sometimes, the closest appropriate school is so far away that the child and a family member live in a nearby apartment or other local housing arrangement during the week and go home on weekends, with their local school district funding the housing and travel expenses as related transportation services in the student’s IEP. There’s caselaw around this issue in favor of students (see, for example, Ojai vs. Jackson).

There is no master list of all the “types” of placements that can be offered to a special education student. Like every other part of an IEP, placement is supposed to be tailored to the student, only with the LRE requirements relative to what services it will take to meet the goals in mind. Sometimes, IEP teams have to get creative to meet highly unique individual student needs.

Other times, the types of supports a student needs are relatively common such that there are entire classrooms that provide those kinds of supports to all of their students. Resource Specialist Program (RSP) services are the most commonly delivered special education services. These are the least intensive forms of special education services provided.

Most students on IEPs have relatively mild learning disabilities that make RSP support a useful tool in helping them maintain grade-level performance. They are usually mostly in the general education setting with some special education supports and plenty of them go on to college and successful careers.

Many of these students glide through the K-12 system with an IEP that no one knows about but their families and teachers. Most of their peers have no idea and their closest friends realize it’s no big deal and don’t care.

Further, it is becoming less stigmatizing to be on an IEP than it used to be, so students are being more forthcoming with their peers about their special education statuses, just as matters of fact, without judgment entering the picture. If only the adults could follow their lead.

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How Parents Can Help Promote the Application of Peer-Reviewed Research to Special Education

Image credit: Elco van Staveren

Special education is heavily regulated to protect the rights of eligible students to individualized educational planning, but complying with the regulations is easier said than done. The operational design of most public schools is over 150 years old and based on the mass production mentality of a factory, having been created during the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, the applicable special education laws were first passed in the 1970s, accounting for only the last 1/3rd of the current American public education system’s history.

Trying to implement the individualized educational planning called for by special education law in an environment created for the purpose of mass instruction is like trying to build a custom piece of furniture on a moving assembly line. In the early days of special education, this meant removing students from the general education setting to special education classes, effectively choosing to build a custom piece of furniture in a specialized workshop rather than on the pre-existing assembly line.

The problem, however, is that pieces of furniture do not have civil rights. It’s one thing to segregate inanimate objects according to how they are constructed. It’s another thing to segregate human beings according to whether they need changes in how they are instructed due to disability.

Because special education students have legal protections against being segregated out of the general education setting simply for having a disability, integrating individualized educational planning into a mass instruction environment becomes that much more complicated for special education students who are educated with their general education peers for all or part of their school days. The complexities of individualizing educational programs for each student are seemingly infinite, given all of the relevant disability-specific considerations plus all of the ecological factors involved in each instructional setting.

However, science – specifically research conducted by educational psychologists and their colleagues – has been attempting to keep up with the demands created by various types of unique student needs, including disabilities of all kinds. While it all hasn’t been figured out for every situation by any stretch of the imagination, there is still a wealth of information from education research that never makes its way into the classroom, much less into individual IEPs.

That’s a problem because Title 34, Code of the Federal Regulations, Section 300.320(a)(4) mandates the application of peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education on an individualized basis, unless it’s not practicable to do so. No one has yet defined what “practicable” actually means, so it’s still up for debate.

The history of how all this science ended up being codified within the implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has been summarized in our last blog post, “The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation,” so I won’t repeat it here. You can review the impact of PARC v. Pennsylvania in that post to inform references to it, here.

The point is that the applicable science has always been written into any serious redress to the educational needs of students with disabilities after having been deprived educational benefits by the public school system. In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a psychologist with extensive experience working with children with intellectual disabilities and an attorney committed to representing the interests of children with intellectual disabilities were jointly appointed by the federal court to serve as special masters to oversee the implementation of appropriate interventions to students with intellectual disabilities in Pennsylvania’s public schools as part of the settlement that was negotiated between the parties. The settlement included federal court oversight by way of the court-appointed special masters.

The historical foundations of the requirements for measurable annual goals in IEPs pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(2) and the application of the peer-reviewed research to the delivery of special education as mentioned previously can be traced directly back to PARC v. Pennsylvania. There has never been a time when the law did not expect the delivery of special education to be informed by anything other than evidence-based practices developed from the peer-reviewed research.

From the moment the first laws were created to provide special education to all eligible children in the United States, science was built into its design. Federal Supreme Court case law has established that Congress expected procedural compliance with the IDEA to all but guarantee compliance with the substantive requirements of the law when it authored and passed what is now the IDEA. Specifically, the case law states, “…the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP.” (Board of Educ. v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982))

Congress intended for the applicable science to guide the special education process for a number of good reasons. First, using science means using what everybody can agree actually works under a given set of unique circumstances, to the degree such is known. There is evidence – proof – that under the explicit conditions that were tested, a particular method of intervention works or doesn’t.

Because every special education student presents as a highly unique individual such that their learning needs do not conform to conventional instruction, they require highly individualized instruction that is tailored to each of them, respectively. There is no one-size-fits-all method of intervention proven to work in special education contexts. What is proven to work is writing up a unique program of instruction for each individual student. That is the evidence-based applicable science, that is the bottom line requirement of the applicable federal law, and this has been known and federally regulated since 1975.

This, therefore, begs the question as to why so much of special education is based on subjective opinions, ballpark estimations (often underestimations), and fad theories about learning rather than science. There’s been a lot of research into why the research isn’t being promulgated for use in public education and politics has a lot to do with it.

Applying the research means upgrading facilities, retraining teachers and their support staffs, buying new materials, and paying for more specialists. Further, it’s often necessary to purchase all of the research materials necessary to inform any kind of evidence-based program design and hire someone who knows how to translate the research into a data-driven educational program. For highly paid top agency administrators who get compensated on the basis of how much money they don’t spend rather than how many students they do get educated, applying the research means spending money, and that’s no way to get a raise in that kind of institutional culture.

Another concern of many public education agencies is accountability. When using evidence-based practices in the delivery of special education, one can’t ignore the body of research that supports that the data collection and analysis methods used in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) are the most reliable methods of data collection and analysis used in any special education context (Drasgow, Yell, & Robinson, 2001; Kimball, 2002; Yell & Drasgow, 2000). The problem for some education agencies is that valid data collection means all their missteps will be captured by the data. If they aren’t actually implementing the IEP as written, the data will reflect that, exposing the agency to legal consequences.

People often mistake ABA for a treatment for autism, but this is not the case. It is true that behavioral interventions using ABA can be effective at addressing behavioral challenges with students who have autism, as well as any other human beings with behavioral challenges, but it can also be used as an instructional methodology and as a tool to determine if learning has occurred and, if so, how much. That is, it is excellent at measuring progress towards a clearly defined outcome, such as a measurable annual IEP goal.

The Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (ABC) data collection methods used in ABA naturally lend themselves to measuring progress towards IEP goals. This is how it works: a stimulus (Antecedent) is presented to which the student responds with a specific Behavior, which immediately results in an outcome (Consequence) that either increases the likelihood of of the behavior happening again (reinforcement) or it doesn’t (absence of reinforcement or punishment).

Most people in special education are at least familiar somewhat with using this approach to dealing with inappropriate behaviors. You don’t want to deliver a reinforcing consequence when an inappropriate behavior occurs. Instead, you want to reinforce a more appropriate replacement behavior that still meets the student’s needs; the behavior was happening for a reason and you can’t leave its function unaddressed or a new behavior will just develop around it. Treat the cause, not the symptom.

You only resort to punishing the undesired behavior when reinforcing the desired behavior is not sufficient at extinguishing the undesired behavior. Presenting reinforcement for doing what is expected and withholding reinforcement for doing what is not expected is usually a pretty powerful strategy for positive behavioral interventions.

When using ABC data collection and analysis on the fly during instruction, your thought process is a little different. When you’re looking at whether a student is learning from the instruction you are providing, especially when working with students who have significant impairments that limit their expressive communication skills, sometimes it’s the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a head towards you with eye contact, or the smile or grin that tells you whether or not you’re getting through. There is still an Antecedent (the delivery of your instruction and/or check for understanding), a learning Behavior (the student’s response to your instruction and/or check for understanding, whether verbal or not), and a Consequence (praise for learning or encouragement for trying) that increases the likelihood that the student will remain engaged and continue to participate in the instruction.

When using ABA-based data collection methods to measure for IEP goals, so long as the goals are written as math word problems based purely on observable learning behaviors, it’s pretty straight forward. Take for example this goal, which is purely made up for illustrative purposes: “By [due date], when given 10 calculation problems using multiplication of double digit numbers per trial, [Student] will calculate the 10 problems with at least 80% accuracy per trial in at least 9 of 10 consecutive trails within a semester, as measured by work samples.”

This is easy. There are 10 problems per trial. The student needs to get at least 8 out of 10 problems right per trial (measure of accuracy) in at least 9 out of 10 consecutive trials (measure of consistency) within a semester (measure of time) in order to meet the goal. Nothing is left to guesswork. Everything is represented by an increment of measure.

What ruins a goal out of the gate is basing any part of it on internal thoughts and feelings experienced by the student. Never start a goal with language like, “… when feeling anxious or angry …” or “… when presented with a non-preferred task …” You can’t trigger the onset of measurement based on something you can’t observe. You only know what the student is thinking or feeling once they express it in some way.

There is no way to get in front of the student’s expression of their thoughts or feelings to prompt their behavior in an appropriate direction because there is no way to know what the student is thinking or feeling before they act. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, including those of special education students, cannot be observed or known by other people. No credential in special education imbues special education personnel with clairvoyance. By the time you know what the student is thinking or feeling, it’s too late to influence how they act on those thoughts or feelings; you only know because they’ve already acted.

The same goes for preference. Preference cannot be observed and it can vary from day to day, or even moment to moment, for a lot of special education students. What is preferred at one time will often not be preferred at others. Eventually it is possible to have a good idea of what is not preferred by a student, but then confirmation bias can enter the picture and you see what you expect to see, not realizing you’re prompting it according to your preconceived expectations.

What makes more sense is to write goals that do not target what are referred to in ABA as “private events,” but rather to expected behaviors. For example, a common behavior targeted in the IEPs of students with challenging behaviors is work refusal, which is to say non-compliance with task demands. A teacher will assign a task and, if the student is non-compliant, they will either passively sit there and just not perform the task; do something else passive instead, like doodle or read a book; engage in distracting or disruptive behavior, like play on their phone or talk to their neighbors; or engage in outburst behaviors, possibly accompanied by leaving the room (eloping).

It’s usually pretty easy to figure out if there is a pattern to the types of tasks assigned and when non-compliance occurs such that preference can seem easy to identify. But, trying to rely on that for the purpose of measurement is like trying build a house on shifting sands because someone’s preferences can change so quickly.

The language that I see most commonly used in goals that work around the issue of private events reads more or less like this: “By [due date], when assigned a task, [Student] will either initiate the task, ask for help, or request a 2-minute break within 60 seconds of the task being assigned in at least 8 of 10 consecutive opportunities as measured by data collection.”

This makes things easy. Regardless of whether the student has a personal preference or not for the task being assigned, they will either start the task, ask for help with the task, or take a short break and get it together before they come back to the task.

Some students have processing speed delays that interfere with their ability to get started right away. They need extra time to process the instructions so they understand what you want them to do. Sometimes that extra little break is all they need to get there independently. It just takes them a little longer to think it through and make sense of what you want from them before they know what to do and can start. Other students get emotionally overwhelmed and just need to go get a grip before they tackle the expectations being placed on them. Yet others take longer to stop one activity and transition to another one. That short little break can buy them the time they need to process the mental shift of set and orient themselves to the new demands being placed on them. Other times, students just don’t understand the expectation being placed on them and need clarification.

In any event, if there’s a problem, the goal provides a solution; otherwise, the student just needs to perform the task as assigned. Further, the language of this example goal can be modified for a student to provide for alternative acceptable responses and/or a different response time.

With respect to measurability, there is no guessing about what anybody is thinking or feeling in a goal formatted this way. Measurement is triggered by the delivery of a task demand (the assigned task) and is based on whether any of the described acceptable outcomes occur within 60 seconds. All of the elements of the goal are measurable.

Further, a goal written this way follows the ABC format of ABA. First an Antecedent is presented (the task demand), then one of three acceptable Behaviors (task initiation, request for help, request for break) occurs, then an appropriate Consequence (completion of the task, delivery of help, or receipt of a short break) is immediately forthcoming. Everything that needs to be measured can be observed. The observable criteria are easily represented in increments of measure. It’s black-and-white without making any assumptions about a student’s thoughts, feelings, or preferences.

So, having said all of this, how does this get us to the point of the article, which is how parents can successfully advocate for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and implementation of their children’s IEPs? Well, first, I needed to be clear as to what I mean by applying the peer-reviewed research, hence everything I just got through explaining.

Parents first need to understand what they are asking for and how it impacts the design and implementation of their child’s IEP. Further, any professionals reading this for the purpose of further developing their skill set may not have all the background information necessary to make sense of all of this, either.

A foundation first had to be laid. Having now done that, parents need to keep the information I’ve just shared in mind when participating in IEP meetings and reviewing IEP documents for appropriateness.

If you live in a consent state like California, I usually suggest signing only for attendance at the meeting and taking the document home for review before signing agreement to any of it. In California and other states, you can give partial consent to an IEP and the education agency has to implement the consented-to portions without delay while the non-consented-to portions remain subject to IEP team discussion and negotiation.

Anything that can’t be resolved via the IEP process must go to due process for resolution, whether you are in a consent state or not. Just because you are not in a consent state doesn’t mean that an education agency won’t change the language of an IEP at your request. An IEP meeting would likely be called to discuss your concerns and, if you back them up with facts and logic, the education agency isn’t going to have a good reason to say, “No.” Not everyone is outlandishly unreasonable in special education; there are some definite bad apples, but they don’t account for the entire barrel. Due process is your only resort if your efforts to resolve things at the IEP level are not met with success and your child is increasingly compromised because of the unresolved matters.

If you are unfortunate enough to have to rely on due process to see things resolved, the fact that your denied requests were supported by facts and logic will only help your case once you get in front of a hearing officer. Understanding the underlying arguments of what makes something legitimately measurable and the federal requirement that special education be delivered according to what science has already proven works makes you a far more informed IEP participant than at least some of the other people at the table.

As a parent, the more you can support your requests and arguments with peer-reviewed research, the better. Once you frame your requests according to the proven science and make it as black-and-white as possible, you eliminate all kinds of silly arguments. This means not only asking for goals that are truly measurable, though that goes a long way towards solving and preventing a lot of problems, but also understanding the nature of your child’s disability(ies) and what the research says can be done to teach to learners with such needs.

Gathering the necessary research data to inform a request for a particular assessment, service, curriculum, methodology, technology, or placement requires accessing the peer-reviewed literature and understanding what it means. A lot of it is really dry and technical, as well as expensive. This isn’t a burden parents should have to take on, but if it’s one that they can take on, it will only help them become better advocates for their children. Google Scholar can be a good place to start.

In truth, it should be education agency personnel doing this research, but if parents want to see the science applied, they may have to push for it, themselves. Parents can also submit published research articles to their local education agencies that appear to apply to their children’s educational needs and request that the approaches used on those articles be used as part of their children’s special education programs, including being written into their children’s IEPs. If the local education agency declines to honor any request, 34 CFR Sec. 300.503 obligates it to provide Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why to the parents.

Conversely, if the education agency proposes a particular approach and the parents are unsure about it, the parents can request an explanation of the peer-reviewed research that underpins the education agency’s offer. Either it honors the request or it provides PWN explaining why it won’t. If it’s the latter, it better be one heck of a good explanation or it will only reveal that the education agency has no research-based explanation for its recommended course of action, giving the parents a good reason to dispute it.

If what you are asking for as the parent is backed up by facts, logic, legitimate measurement, and credible research that all directly apply to your child, and the education agency still says, “No,” then you will either end up with no PWN because the agency doesn’t want to put the denial in writing, which violates the law and only makes your case stronger in hearing, or you will end up with a PWN full of malarkey that won’t stand up in due process. If what you are asking for makes total sense and the education agency won’t do it or something else equally or more appropriate, the education agency will have some explaining to do in hearing.

So long as what you are asking for is necessary for your child to receive an appropriately ambitious amount of educational benefits (meaning as close to grade level or developmental norms as possible), there’s not a lot of good reasons for a public education agency to turn down your request. It’s illegal for the public education system to use fiscal considerations to determine what should be in a special education student’s IEP.

Just be sure to submit all of your requests for changes to your child’s IEP in writing. It is the education agency’s receipt of your written request for changes that triggers the PWN requirement. In the instance of requesting assessments, many states allow for a public education agency to decline to conduct assessments for special education purposes upon parent request, but the agency must provide PWN when doing so. For more information on special education assessments, see our previous post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments.”

If it doesn’t decline a parent’s written request for assessment, the education agency must provide the parent with an assessment plan to sign that authorizes the agency to conduct the requested assessments. State law regulates the provision of assessment plans; in California, local education agencies have 15 calendar days to get an assessment plan to the parent, regardless of who made the referral for assessment. Submitting the request for assessment in writing is not only important for triggering the PWN requirement if the request is declined, it’s also important in establishing when a state-mandated timeline starts counting down.

You as a parent can encourage the application of science in special education by insisting upon it. If you live in California or another consent state, you can use your authority to withhold your consent to anything that looks sketchy in an IEP being given to you for your signature. You can consent to instruction in the areas targeted by IEP goals but not to using the language of the goals for the purpose of measuring progress if they aren’t actually written in a measurable way. You can consent to everything in an IEP except a change in placement. If you can’t resolve all of the issues you have with an IEP this way, those left unresolved become due process issues.

Even if you are not in a consent state, you can still make the record in writing that you disagree with the sketchy portions of your child’s IEP, explain why using math and science, and request appropriate changes. The local education agency will likely call an IEP meeting and change those things it’s willing to change and give you PWN on those things it is not willing to change. The things left unresolved at that point are due process issues.

Understanding how to use math and science to solve everyday problems is a solid skill to have, but not everybody has it. It’s a skill necessary to developing a sound IEP for any special education student. Parent education can be provided as a related service under a student’s IEP if the purpose of the parent education is to help the parents understand their child’s disability and/or to help them be equal participants of the IEP team. There is absolutely nothing wrong with parents asking to be trained on how to write measurable annual goals and the IEP process in general as part of parent training as a related service under their child’s IEP. Parent training is specifically named as one of many possible related services that can be provided to a student with an IEP by 34 CFR Secs. 300.34(a) and 300.34(c)(8)(i)).

If you’re distrustful of the quality of instruction you might get from parent training through your child’s IEP, you may have to result to self-education by reading everything you can find about your child’s disability, as much of the peer-reviewed research about instructing learners with the types of needs your child has as you can digest, and simplified reports of the research findings in trusted publications from credible sources. You may need to periodically consult with experts for hire, but what you invest in informing yourself you may save many times over by preventing yourself from getting duped.

The bottom line is that parents can protect their children’s right to evidence-based special education planning and implementation the more they understand how to use measurement and evidence in the planning and implementation processes. By knowing what to look for, they know what request when they don’t see it. Informed parents can monitor the situation for education agency compliance.

In those areas where parents have not yet mastered the knowledge necessary to know whether an approach is appropriate for their child or not, they are encouraged to ask questions like, “Can you explain to me how this fits my child?” and “How can we measure whether this works in a meaningful way?” By shifting the burden back onto the education agency to explain how and why its recommendations are supported by the peer-reviewed research and written in an appropriately measurable manner, parents rightly shift the burden of applying the science to the appropriate party.

Parents are not, and should not, be required to become experts in order to participate in the IEP process. But, for the sake of protecting their children’s educational and civil rights, and their own rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, it behooves parents to become as knowledgeable as possible. It’s more difficult to get tricked or misled the more you know, and the more dry and technical you can keep things, the less hysterical drama you’re likely to experience in dealing with your local education agency.

References:

  • Drasgow, E., Yell, M.L., & Robinson, T.R. (2001). Developing legally correct and educationally appropriate IEPs. Remedial and Special Education 22(6), 359-373. doi: 10.1177/074193250102200606
  • Kimball, J. (2002). Behavior-analytic instruction for children with autism: Philosophy matters. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10883576020170020101
  • Yell, M. & Drasgow, E. (2000). Litigating a free appropriate public education: The Lovaas hearings and cases. The Journal of Special Education, 33(4), 205-214. doi: 10.1177/002246690003300403

 

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The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation

Image credit: Justin Lincoln

Trying to piece together the actual special education process from the implementing federal regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a lot like trying to create origami from paper shredder cuttings. However, it’s been done and, when laid out in proper order, the special education process totally makes sense.

When followed as intended, the special education regulations are a marriage of law and science. It is further assumed that procedural compliance with the regulations is likely to result in the provision of the Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) promised to each special education student by the IDEA. The specific language comes from what is known in special education circles as “The Rowley Decision,” which specifically states, “the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP. “

In order to understand why the regulations require the things in special education they do, it helps to first understand the history of the language in the regulations. Prior to Congress enacting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) in 1975, which ultimately became the IDEA during a later reauthorization, there were no laws that specifically promised any kind of education to children with special needs.

Prior to the EAHCA, children with disabilities were routinely denied enrollment into the public schools. In the beginning, it was an accomplishment just to get a public school to open its doors to a child with special needs, and there was nothing that made it mandatory to educate the child according to any particular standards once the doors had been opened.

Then, in 1971, disability advocates took the matter of the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Citizens (PARC) vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the U.S. District Court. The settlement and resulting consent decree produced much of the language that is now found in the implementing regulations of the IDEA, particularly with respect to FAPE and individualized educational program development.

In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a class of individuals who all had intellectual disabilities (IDs), which at the time were described as “mental retardation,” were being denied access to public school on the basis of their diagnosed “mental retardation.” They were either languishing without any education or receiving privately funded education at their parents’ personal expense. PARC filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of itself and the child members of the class, sued for injunctive relief, settled with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and obtained a consent decree overseen by the U.S. District Court, which it later enforced through the Courts to compel Pennsylvania to enroll children with IDs into its public schools and provide them with appropriate programs.

Quoting page 8 of the May 5, 1972 Opinion, Order and Injunction from PARC v. Pennsylvania, “The lengthy Consent Agreement concludes by stating that ‘[every] retarded person between the ages of six and twenty-one shall be provided access to a free public program of education and training appropriate to his capacities as soon as possible but in no event later than September 1, 1972 …’ To implement the agreed upon relief and assure that it would be extended to all members of this class, Dennis E. Haggerty, Esq., a distinguished member of the Pennsylvania Bar who has devoted much of his energy to the welfare of retarded children, and Dr. Herbert Goldstein, an eminent expert in the education of retarded children who is Professor and Director of the Curriculum Research and Development Center in Mental Retardation at the Ferkaus Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Yeshiva University, were appointed Masters at the expense of the Commonwealth … Next, the Consent Agreement charges defendants with the duty within 30 days, to formulate and submit to the Masters a plan to locate, evaluate and give notice to all members of the plaintiff class … Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Agreement states that: ‘The defendants shall formulate and submit to the Masters for their approval a plan to be effectuated by September 1, 1972, to commence or recommence a free public program of education and training for all mentally retarded persons . . . aged between four and twenty-one years as of the date of this Order, and for all mentally retarded persons of such ages hereafter. The plan shall specify the range of programs of education and training, there [sic] kind and number, necessary to provide an appropriate program of education and training to all mentally retarded children, where they shall be conducted, arrangements for their financing, and, if additional teachers are found to be necessary, the plan shall specify recruitment, hiring, and training arrangements.'” [emphasis added; internal citations omitted]

Here, we see the language of FAPE (34 CFR Sec. 300.17), the marriage of law and science in the creation of the program design, the precursor to the federal “child find” requirements (34 CFR Sec. 300.111), and language that effectively describes creating what amounts to an IEP. PARC v. Pennsylvania laid the foundation for what ultimately became the IDEA, which specifically mandates that the peer-reviewed research be applied to the delivery of special education to the degree it’s practicable to do so (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)).

The appointment of the masters in PARC v. Pennsylvania is important to note because it marks from the outset the need to combine the efforts of legal professionals and psychologists to come up with evidence-based approaches to special education instruction that conform with the regulations. While there have been many efforts over the years by those of a particular ilk within the public education system to minimize the science and place undue emphasis on legal maneuvering, they have never been successful at eliminating the science.

Now, we are seeing the courts rely more and more on the dry, neutral facts of science rather than the hysterical budget shielding that typically goes on in special education. As more and more people become more fluent with using math and science in everyday life, the public is increasingly expecting to see science rather than politics in the delivery of public instruction.

It has always been the intent of the applicable law to use the applicable science in the delivery of special education. The arguments for relying on facts and evidence in designing and implementing IEPs are too compelling to be overcome by cronyistic politics altogether. Politically speaking, the science has never carried as much weight in special education as it does now, which is tragic in that it’s taken this long but it’s also inevitable. The truth is the truth and no amount of political spinning changes what a child’s unique learning needs actually are or what research has proven actually works.

So, that being the case, when we look at the logical flow of how an IEP is supposed to go together, it’s important to understand how the law and science become inextricably intertwined as the IEP process goes forward. To start, a child cannot be found eligible for special education without first being assessed. Assessment determines if the child has a qualifying disability and, if so, what to do about it.

Competent special education assessment is a highly scientific process. People with special credentials and licenses are brought in to collect expert data, analyze it, and provide expert opinions to the IEP team as to why a child is struggling in school and what can be done about it. This process can become compromised by internal public education agency politics, however. See our previous blog post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments,” for more information about this step of the process.

In an ideal world, a child’s initial assessment for special education is thorough and competent. It measures all of the student’s unique learning needs and assesses in all areas of suspected disability. The data it produces is then used with input from teachers and parents to create an IEP, presuming the child is eligible for an IEP. This is where things can get really messy.

There are two ways things can go badly at this stage:

  • The assessments were poorly done and now there isn’t good data to inform the development of the IEP, or
  • The assessment data is fine but the IEP offered to the student doesn’t match what the assessment data says the student needs

Parents need to understand what is supposed to happen at this stage of the process or they can be quickly bamboozled by seasoned bureaucrats with their own agendas. The information gathered by the IEP team about the student’s learning strengths and needs is supposed to result in measurable annual goals that describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen in each area of unique learning need.

Where things often break down is in translating all of the baseline data into measurable annual goals that target appropriate learning outcomes in every single area of unique learning need. That’s a tall order. It’s one thing to measure what already is, but it’s another thing to use that data to project where things should be in a year.

IEP teams often struggle to identify all the areas in which goals are needed, much less write the goals they come up with in a measurable manner. In my experience, the average special education professional would fail the 4th grade under the Common Core if their IEP goal-writing skills were used to measure their abilities to apply math and science to solving everyday problems.

A lot of the guidance given to special education professionals during the 1980s and 1990s about IEP goal-writing was a bunch of preemptive legal defense hooey that was utterly devoid of any kind of valid science or math. These approaches provided teachers with formulas and supposed hacks that they usually didn’t understand and usually used incorrectly in the field.

There was no sincere effort that I ever observed back in the day to teach special education professionals the technical nuts and bolts of goal-writing, and I still assert now that the training being done is grossly inadequate. A half-day workshop for continuing education units is usually about it for most special ed staffs, and most of what such a workshop instructs is usually garbage.

These are the workshops that taught teachers to write the measurement for every goal as “… with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials …” even if it makes no sense. For example, it’s highly inappropriate when used here: “By [annual due date], [Student] will cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation.”

First, try to make the math work, which you can’t. Then ask yourself what an 80% accuracy rate of crossing the street safely must look like, however it might be calculated, and whether it could possibly be educationally appropriate. It’s supposed to be a free and appropriate public education and there’s nothing appropriate about being run over in the street like a bug as a result of participating in publicly funded instruction.

My brief advice to school district administrators is to not let your attorneys develop your employee training for any aspect of special education that requires scientific rigor. And, unless you are qualified yourself in the applicable sciences, if you are an administrator, don’t think of developing that training yourself, either. Use actual experts; don’t be a chump.

Doing sound assessments only to toss the science and math out the window when it comes time to write the IEP makes no sense whatsoever. But, there is a political game that sometimes get played with parents in which public education agencies will deliver a decent assessment, but then offer a garbage IEP and act like the garbage IEP is what the data and law say the agency can do for the student. It’s a lie.

In reality, the IEP is based on how much the education agency is willing to spend on the student, but the agency’s administrators can’t admit that, so they try to run a con on the parents in which they use valid assessment data to argue for a garbage IEP. They’re effectively gaslighting the parents because the data doesn’t support the IEP at all, but the parents are usually too confused to understand what is really happening and just let it go, thereby allowing the education agency to get away with shortchanging a kid.

The parents get an assessment report that describes their kid, but then they get offered an IEP that is weak relative to the kid’s actual needs and they figure that’s the most the schools must be able to do for them. In truth, their kid is getting robbed. If the IEP doesn’t match the assessment data, something is really wrong. This can be particularly the case with IEP goals.

The data can make clear what the areas are in which goals are needed, but then only a few goals get put into the IEP by school personnel. This is a problem because the services that are offered to a special education student are supposed to be driven by what is necessary to meet the goals. If you don’t have goals in each area of need, there’s nothing to compel all of the services that are needed. Missing goals mean missing services. Schools that want to prevent spending on services can accomplish this by leaving goals out of IEPs.

Goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Services describe what it takes to meet the goals. This includes service frequency, duration, and location. For example, a student may receive 30 minutes per week of individual speech/language services to address their communication goals.

Accommodations are tools and strategies that make access to the grade-level content possible for a child with special needs. They are not the same things as modifications. Modifications actually change the learning expectations for the student to something less rigorous than the grade-level standards so that the instruction is accessible to the student.

For example, the accommodation of being able to dictate one’s answers rather than write them down doesn’t change the nature of the material being studied or the questions that have to be answered. The only thing that changes is how the response is produced, but a grade-level response is still expected.

In another example by contrast, a student with developmental delays may participate part of the time in general education math where students are calculating the hypotenuses of triangles, but the work is modified to cutting out different sized triangles for the student with developmental delays. In this example, the instruction has been scaffolded towards the grade-level expectations by modifying it to the student’s level of learning.

Before one can understand what a hypotenuse is, one must first understand what a triangle is, so instruction on triangles in general lays a foundation for the eventual instruction of the calculation of hypotenuses. Scaffolding towards the grade level standards and developmental norms is a critical method used in special education as per the peer-reviewed research to adapt the instruction to learners who cannot perform at grade level because of their disabilities. There still has to be a way to measure their learning and push them as close to grade level as possible.

Once goals, services, and accommodations are identified, the IEP team then determines the student’s educational placement. This is usually not a specific classroom or campus; it’s the type of classroom and/or campus required. Placement is decided at the end of the process because it is impossible to know where is the best place to deliver the services and accommodations such that the goals are met if the goals haven’t been written and services and accommodations haven’t yet been determined.

In addition to these critical steps, an IEP can also include an Individualized Transition Plan (ITP), which is basically a plan within a plan that describes what will be done for a teenager or young adult with an IEP to prepare them for life after high school. Students exit special education either by graduating with a regular diploma or aging out, usually at age 21 or 22, The ITP is supposed to be the driving force of their IEPs from at least age 16 forward, though nothing prevents IEP teams from starting younger.

Another component that an IEP may include is some kind of Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP). They can go by a variety of names, but they’re all basically the same thing, and usually loosely based on Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). This is another science that gets grossly watered down in special education, sometimes to the point of becoming ineffective if not harmful.

Good ABA is a wonderful thing, but there are way too many programs operating these days that are “ABA-based,” meaning they aren’t fully adhering to the science and only have borrowed those parts from it that they find most easy to use. They take a fluid science, try to turn it into something formulaic, and ruin the whole damn thing. It’s right up there with crossing the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials.

To be clear, when I talk about ABA in this blog/podcast, I’m talking about the actual science, not some hokey fly-by-night scam trying to take advantage of the autism community. I have plenty of colleagues who operate completely legitimate, scientifically rigorous ABA programs that save and change lives for the better, and they are just as disgusted as I am by the charlatans ruining the good name of a credible science for the sake of making a buck off of autism. These charlatans who have corrupted the legitimate science are the ones with whom the autism community takes such issue when they complain about ABA.

There is no way to have a conversation about the IEP process and the degree to which science plays a role in it without discussing ABA. ABA is the most reliable method of data collection currently used in special education, even when not done that well. This is because the field is dominated with people teaching their students to cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation. Even shoddily done ABA-type data collection is usually better than that.

It’s my argument that, if the science has to be applied to the degree it’s practicable to do so, and ABA-type data collection is the most reliable, then IEP goals should be based on ABA-type data collection methods. If IEP goals were actually written according to scientific method like they were supposed to have been from the start, we would naturally default to ABA-type methods of data collection because that’s the only thing that will work.

This becomes particularly important for IEPs with BIPs. Real ABA, not the half-baked version that is peddled by some agencies, should be used to develop measurable annual goals and any BIP in an IEP. This will allow for legitimate measurement of actual progress. Here, it’s not exactly about the instructional approaches of ABA so much as how to accurately measure learning. By using ABA-based teaching and measuring approaches, it’s a lot easier to tell if a student is actually learning anything or not, which is the whole point of measurable annual goals and measurable BIP criteria.

When you understand that there is a logical order to the sequence of the special education process that the law describes from what it has taken from science, the parts of an IEP start to make more sense. An IEP is not an arbitrary document. It’s an enforceable contract that describes what a public education agency is supposed to do to tailor the instruction to a student with special needs. It includes what it includes for logical reasons.

Congress organized how IEPs are supposed to go together based on the advice of attorneys and psychologists who worked very hard to come with with a marriage of law and science that will work so long as the public education system pays equal attention to both the science and the law. There needs to be more training for professionals in the special education community as to the scientific origins of IEP design and the scientific rigor actually necessary to deliver special education according to Congress’ intent.

Parents need to understand the importance of the science, as well. They are the most important members of any IEP team and if they don’t understand what the data means, they can’t give informed consent to anything.

Parent education is a related service that can be added to an IEP to help the parents understand their child’s special needs as well as help them better participate in the IEP process (34 CFR Sec. 300.34(a)). If you feel as a parent like you don’t have enough information to be an equal member of the IEP team, it’s your right to request parent training as a related service so that your rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process and informed consent are honored.

 

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The Basics of Special Education Assessments

Most people new to special education are quickly blindsided by the processes and procedures that have to be followed. Many parents new to the process don’t exactly understand that customizing school for their children with special needs is what special education is supposed to do. Often they will say that they don’t know what special education will be able to do for their children, in large part because they don’t understand what special education actually is or how it works.

There is a huge need to demystify the special education process for those who don’t fully understand it. The process starts at the very beginning with a referral for assessment, but before I launch into a discussion of special education assessments, I first want to map out the special education process in general so the role that assessments play in that process becomes clear.

Because special education can only be given to students who meet specific eligibility criteria, a process had to be developed to determine who meets those criteria. The basis for a referral for a special education assessment is “suspected disability.” If the parents, teachers, or other involved professionals have a reason to suspect that a disability might be responsible for why a student is struggling in school academically, communicatively, socially, physically, and/or behaviorally, it’s enough to trigger the assessment process.

Sometimes, special education assessments end up ruling out disabilities and identifying other challenges that are interfering with student learning that require solutions other than special education. It is never a bad thing when a child who is struggling in school gets help, regardless of what types of help may be needed.

Federal law mandates that public education agencies conduct a process called “child find” in which they actively seek out and identify those students who can be suspected of possibly needing special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.111). A great many special education lawsuits have been filed over the years on behalf of students who were never identified through “child find,” but should have been.

I have worked as a paralegal on several cases in which there was enough evidence to suspect a disability was responsible for a student’s struggles but it failed to trigger the “child find” process. When students who are eligible for special education are denied eligibility, including from a failure to conduct “child find” that denies them the chance to be found eligible in the first place, they are usually due compensatory education to make up for the education they should have gotten but didn’t. “Child find” failures are no small things, but they occur systematically everywhere.

Very often, children of color, children from households with low incomes, children in single-parent families, and children who have immigrated here from other countries are the ones most often missed by “child find.” In many instances, they are instead blamed for their challenges and end up funneled into the juvenile justice system, thereby greasing the wheels of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

It often takes a parent referral to see a student properly identified for special education. Struggles over homework, tears shed over grades, disciplinary problems at school, and other obvious signs of trouble will prompt many parents to look into their options for help from their local schools and some will stumble upon some basic information about special education and the referral process. If it makes enough sense to them, they will write a letter requesting that their child be tested for learning problems that might require special education, which triggers the assessment process.

Depending on what State parents are in, the laws vary as to whether their local education agencies are legally obligated to act on their referrals for special education assessment. Some States give parent referrals equal weight to those made by school personnel and other States do not. The federal laws leave it up to the States to decide, by default making it such that education agencies can decline parent referrals for assessment with Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why the referral is being declined (34 CFR Sec. 300.503).

California law, however, gives parent referrals equal weight to those made by education agency personnel (EDC 56029) and mandates that an assessment plan be provided to parents for their consent within 15 calendar days of any referral for assessment being made (EDC 56043(a)). States can add protections to the IDEA, they just can’t reduce them to anything below the minimum standards of the IDEA. Not all States provide the same kind of protection of parent referrals that California provides.

Even when a parent referral is accepted, many school districts will still limit assessment in a way the parents don’t realize is happening in order to prevent students from being found eligible for special education and thereby prevent special education expenditures and a host of additional legal obligations. For far too many families, just getting that initial evaluation can become a legal battle, but then the question becomes whether the assessment they got was any good.

I want to focus on what happens once the assessment process actually gets going, though. Eventually, most families of eligible children who are pushing for appropriate services will get an initial assessment that is used by the IEP team to determine whether the student is eligible for special education or not. If the student is found eligible, re-assessments will then occur at least once every three years, or triennially, to update the data available to the IEP team for ongoing IEP development.

The purpose of special education assessment is to determine 1) if the student is eligible for special education and, if so, 2) what the content of the student’s IEP should be. Needless to say that if the data gathered by the assessment is inaccurate, incomplete, or incompetently interpreted, things can go horribly wrong. And, they do. A lot of special education litigation arises over education agency failures to competently assess in all areas of suspected disability.

For example, if a child is verbal but can’t read people’s facial expressions or tone of voice, there still needs to be a speech-language evaluation that looks at not only articulation, receptive language, and expressive language, but also at pragmatic (social) language. Pragmatic language includes the ability to read nonverbal body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

Children with autism tend to be very literal with words and miss the nuances that tone of voice, facial expression, and body language can contribute to conveying someone else’s communicative intent, so they may misunderstand sarcasm or idioms and cliches. They can similarly struggle to make their own faces match what they are trying to say in a way that makes sense to most other people. Students with other types of handicapping conditions can also have similar challenges for various reasons related to their disabilities.

This isn’t all people with autism, of course, but pragmatic language deficits are commonly occurring features of autism. It stands to reason that any child assessed for autism should also have a comprehensive speech-language evaluation that includes pragmatics. I’ve lost count of the number of students on the autism spectrum I’ve represented over the last 28+ years who have had huge problems with interpersonal communication but had never had their pragmatic language tested until I asked for it. It’s one of those obvious things that shouldn’t have to be specifically requested, but I often end up having to request it, anyway.

And, this example goes to why it’s important that parents understand the critical nature of assessments and getting them done correctly the first time around, if at all possible. What happens if assessments are bad is that whatever IEPs are produced from them will also be bad. This can include an inappropriate denial of special education eligibility altogether at the initial IEP, as well as students being found eligible but then given weak IEPs that don’t actually address their needs.

Simply giving a student a document that says “IEP” on it does not magically bestow educational benefits upon that student. The contents of the document matter and they should be informed by scientifically valid data in all areas of suspected disability and unique learning need. The IEP is supposed to be the blueprint by which the special education student’s education is delivered according to that student’s unique learning profile, which can only be ascertained through valid and sufficiently rigorous assessments that include teacher and parent input.

What tests should be administered to a given student depends on the student. Just as the special education program developed for each student must be individualized, so must the assessments conducted to inform that program. If a student doesn’t present with any evidence of hearing loss, it makes no sense to test in the area of hearing. However, if a student reports that the words swim on the page when the student attempts to read, an assessment of visual processing is entirely in order.

Similarly, if the primary areas of concern are social and classroom participation but the student’s grades are otherwise fine, you can conduct all the IQ and academic achievement tests in the world, but they will fail to give you relevant data about the actual source of the problem. At best, academic achievement testing may tell you the degree to which the social/behavioral challenges are interfering with classroom participation and work completion, but social/emotional and behavioral assessments are necessary to get to the bottom of social and classroom behavioral challenges, including lack of participation.

It is not uncommon for individuals with autism and/or anxiety disorders who are otherwise verbally and intellectually intact to do well in their academics, at least in the lower grades, but have a truly difficult time being a member of a classroom and/or being socially integrated with the rest of the students. School is supposed to teach more than academics; it’s also supposed to give students the opportunity to learn and rehearse social skills that will ultimately allow them to become gainfully employed and fully functional within society in adulthood.

The thing to understand, here, is that a student does not automatically have to be struggling academically to need special education. A student needs to be struggling in any aspect of school as a result of a disability to such a marked degree that individualizing the student’s educational experiences is necessary in order for the student to have opportunities to learn that are equal to the opportunities given to same-grade peers who do not have disabilities.

Our students with anxiety and depression will often miss a lot of school due to psychosomatic illnesses. This prevents them from accessing education altogether, but is not directly reflective of a specific challenge with academics. Very often, these kids can handle the academics okay, but they can’t handle all the other people at school. That’s a different special education problem to solve than accommodating dyslexia or an auditory processing disorder.

I can tell you that, as an educational psychologist and behavior analyst, there are student-specific lines of inquiry that an individualized assessment of each student should pursue. No two assessments should look exactly alike from one student to the next. The federally mandated requirement placed on schools is to assess in all areas of suspected disability and unique student need on an individualized basis (34 CFR Sec. 300.304).

That means social/emotional functioning, pragmatic language, and behavior are probably going to feature more prominently in an assessment of a student suspected of autism or certain types of social/emotional disorders. Measures of cognition and academic achievement, analysis of classroom work samples, parent and teacher interviews, and classroom observations are going to be more useful in troubleshooting a potential learning disability. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and adaptive physical education evaluations are going to be important for a student with an orthopedic impairment that impacts how the student navigates the school campus.

There is no “one-size-fits-all” assessment procedure in special education. There should be no “one-size-fits-all” anything in special education. The whole point of it is individualized instruction, which can only be individualized to the student if the IEP is informed by individualized assessment data.

The importance of individualizing assessment cannot be overemphasized, and I have an example from my past to drive that point home: Many years ago, a couple of years or so after I first became a paralegal, I was working a due process case in which, between the testimony of the school psychologist and the district’s director of special education, it became clear that the only reason the school psychologist had used a particular verbal IQ test on our 7-year-old language delayed client with Down’s Syndrome was because the district kept those tests in bulk in the supply closet, and it would take longer than the 60-day assessment timeline to order a more appropriate test through the district’s purchase order process, as overseen by the special education director.

It is my recollection that the administrative law judge who tried the case had his own blistering line of questioning after those facts made it onto the record. He basically eviscerated the special education director for sneaky, underhanded abuses of the system to save a buck at the expense of assessment accuracy. The judge ended up ordering the school district to fund an outside assessment done by an expert who used the right kinds of tests.

The dad had already paid to have the outside expert assessment done, so we had it as evidence of how to do it right in hearing, plus the outside expert testified credibly as to his methods and findings. The district ended up having to reimburse the dad for the outside assessment and there was a huge training initiative throughout that district’s special education department shortly after that hearing decision was published. Heads rolled and policies changed for the better, but it took exposing what was really going on in a hearing to effect significant changes.

The function that assessments serve in the special education process is to set it all in motion and inform all the other steps that will follow. An IEP must include a statement of a student’s present levels of performance at the time the IEP was written, thereby establishing baselines. An IEP must also include annual, measurable goals that target learning outcomes to be achieved in one year’s time from the date the IEP is written that move the student forward from those baseline positions in each area of unique learning need.

There is no way to realistically identify the target outcomes to be met with one year’s worth of work in each area of unique student need without valid assessment data to inform that analysis. How much is realistic for an individual student to learn in a year’s time comes down to a combination of variables that should have all been measured and described by the assessment data.

Goals target the outcomes intended by a student’s IEP. What services are included in an IEP, including the frequency, duration, and location of those services, are determined on the basis of what will be necessary to meet the IEP goals. Placement is the last decision made by an IEP team and is determined by what is the least restrictive setting or combination of settings that allows the services to be delivered such that the goals are met without unnecessarily segregating the student away from the general education population.

You can’t decide where a special education student can be most appropriately educated until you first determine what you’re going to have to do in that setting or combination of settings. What needs to be done is determined by what you want to make happen. You don’t know what to make happen until you understand where things already stand and what you are still missing. You don’t know what is already intact and available, or what is missing, without first doing an assessment.

So, everything in the IEP process depends on the assessments being done right in the first place, or the entire IEP process falls apart from the outset. If an assessment is done badly, there aren’t adequate baseline data to inform an IEP’s present levels of performance or inform decisions about how aggressive each measurable annual goal should be in terms of its targeted outcomes. Further, if it’s done badly, there’s no guarantee there’s enough data to identify all the areas in which goals are actually needed.

“What can the student already do in a given area of need?” and “What is realistic to expect from this student after one year’s worth of work in this given area of need?” are the two key questions that have to be answered by special education assessment reports. That’s because those two very questions have to be answered when crafting a new IEP.

If you can’t get that far with the data from the assessments, you’re off to a really, really bad start. If you can’t lay a proper foundation, your whole construct will fall down. Competent, reasonably thorough assessment is the very foundation of a sound IEP, so it is important for parents to take this step of the IEP process very seriously and hold everyone else on the team to their respective professional standards.

Federal law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research and the professional standards of any experts involved to the delivery of special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)). That includes during the special education assessment process. Any standardized tests used must be administered and scored according to the instructions provided by the producers of each test, which must be scientifically valid for the purposes for which they are used (34 CFR Sec. 300.304(c)(1)). The enforceable law does not skirt the applicable science, and there is no legally justifiable reason why any publicly funded education agency and/or any of its contractors should be skirting it.

This can be difficult for many parents who have no background in science or law. However, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur on a societal level that is worth noting.

Millennials are becoming an increasingly represented generational cohort among parents of children with special needs. They use their smartphones ubiquitously to call BS on a host of issues by looking up the truth, and collaborate with each other to address shared concerns. Special education advocacy today is becoming something entirely different than what it was when I started 28 years ago.

When I was a young, beginning advocate, I represented a number of housewives who could bake some mean cupcakes but would nearly faint at the presentation of a bell curve graph and deferred to their husbands on any big decisions. Now, I’ve got young moms and dads taking their own behavior data, charting it, and presenting it to their kids’ IEP teams with a written list of questions, concerns, and requests, all based on their own common sense with no formal prior exposure to the applicable sciences or law.

Where things get interesting is how school district administrations are currently configured. Many of the old-timers that I’ve been dealing with over the last two decades or more have retired and run off with their pension money before there isn’t any pension money to be had, anymore. Millennials are now starting to take the retired old-timers’ vacant job positions and, where that has happened, I’ve found that I don’t have such an uphill battle when making scientifically research-based requests in conformity with the regulations on behalf of my students and their families.

The biggest challenges I’m seeing now are Millennial parents armed with knowledge attempting to advocate for their children to public education agencies still run by the old-timers. The old-timers run things according to cronyistic politics, by and large, which has no scientific support whatsoever. In fact, cronyistic politics have been supported by a great deal of science as being impediments to the implementation of effective educational programming (Coco, G. & Lagravinese, R. “Cronyism and education performance,” Economic Modeling, Feb 2014, 38 443-450; Shaker, P. & Heilman, E. “The new common sense of education: Advocacy research versus academic authority,” Teachers College Record, Jul 2004, 106:7 1444-1470) and the impetus behind the mishandling of education dollars that take money out of the classroom that could otherwise fund effective instruction and undermine a community’s investments in education (Eicher, T., García-Peñalosa, C., & van Ypersele, T. “Education, corruption, and the distribution of income,” Journal of Economic Growth, Sep 2009 14:3 205-231).

When knowledgeable parents go up against cronyistic old-timers, the old-timers resort to their familiar bag of power-mongering tricks. But, trying to intimidate a mom who was educated under the Common Core to use math and science to solve real-life problems is a world apart from trying to intimidate a housewife whose science and math skills are limited to following recipes in a cookbook and balancing a checkbook.

I’m watching old-timers retire in droves nowadays because their weapons of choice against parents aren’t effective anymore and the courts are increasingly relying on the applicable science to inform how the law applies to each special education student on an individual basis. Law is supposed to be evidence-based, as is science. Education science allows special education law to be as black-and-white as possible. Everything else, particularly in a cronyistic system, is subjective opinion and hearsay. The environment no longer reinforces the old-timers’ behaviors like it used to, and their behaviors are starting to become extinct.

So, parents going forth into special education, especially those of you who know how to use your smartphones to look things up and fact-check, fall back on the science and lean on it hard, starting with the assessment process. When you are first given that assessment plan to sign, don’t sign anything until you understand what it means and the language of it is clear.

Very often, assessment plans will say vague things like “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” which can sound a whole lot like a mental health evaluation by a clinician to a lay person. In reality, what it usually means is rating scales filled out by parents, teachers, and sometimes the student that are scored and interpreted by a credentialed school psychologist, not a licensed clinician. Rating scales scored and interpreted by a school psychologist is not the same thing as a mental health evaluation by a licensed clinician.

But, how is a parent unfamiliar with the process supposed to know that? Would any reasonable layperson just assume this language meant a mental health evaluation by a clinician? I’ve seen this happen more than once involving youth with significant mental health issues for which consideration was being requested by the parent of the rest of the IEP team of residential placement via the student’s IEP. The parents would be given an assessment plan that said “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” think they were getting an evaluation to explore residential placement, and only find out 60 days later that they had been given the run-around while their child continued to fall apart. Residential placement is the most restrictive placement possible through the special education system, but it is possible for those students whose needs are that dire.

In these cases, the students’ needs were absolutely that dire and the responsible school districts attempted to delay the costs of residential placement by first doing rating scales by their school psychologist as part of a 60-day evaluation process, who then recommended a mental health evaluation, sometimes including a residential placement evaluation but sometimes not, thereby triggering a new 60-day assessment timeline. If a residential placement evaluation was not included with the mental health evaluation, the mental health evaluation could then conclude that the student should be considered for residential placement, triggering yet another new 60-day evaluation timeline.

Or, worse, the mental health evaluation could be silent on the issue of residential placement, leaving it to the parents to know to keep asking for such an evaluation; but, by this point, most parents erroneously conclude that residential placement isn’t an option so they drop it. There are youth in immediate crises who need instant mental health services, and their school districts are stalling the process by adding an unnecessary layer of assessment that gives it another 60 to 120 days before it has to act on the data (i.e., foot the tab for services).

Each of the students from my caseload who have shared this experience, in different school districts mind you, ended up either hospitalized and/or incarcerated at some point before finally getting the help that they needed. In most of those cases, the issue had to be forced with lawsuits that ultimately resulted in confidential settlement agreements. In each instance, the unnecessary delays in receiving immediate help contributed to self-injurious behavior, attempted suicide, and unlawful conduct that could have otherwise been avoided.

In my first case like this, I actually took it to due process myself back in the day when advocates could do that in California, and prevailed. In that case’ decision, the hearing officer made it clear that it defies the entire purpose of the IDEA, which requires that children with qualifying disabilities be identified and served via IEPs in all areas of need as quickly as possible, to subject our most vulnerable children to double or triple the amount of assessment time of a normal special education evaluation before getting the help they need.

I don’t know of any authority that has come out since then that contradicts this interpretation, though it was a long time ago and I’m not an attorney, but I think most people will agree, that it was not likely Congress’ intent to make our most severely impacted students suffer without appropriate supports and services for months longer than it takes other special education students to get what they need. These include, but are not exclusively, students with tendencies towards violence, running away, property destruction, self-injurious behaviors, and other non-social behaviors that require a great deal of expert intervention. These are not the students who should be waiting twice to triple the time to get the services they need to keep themselves and everyone else safe and focused on learning at school.

If it looks like a critical area of need is being excluded from your child’s assessment, don’t sign the assessment plan until the public education agency adds what is missing. If the agency refuses to add it, note on the assessment plan that you are consenting to what is offered, but you still think the assessment is deficient based on what they are excluding, which you should list in your note. That way, the record is clear that you aren’t delaying the other testing by withholding your consent, but you’re also not agreeing it was appropriate to leave out what you requested.

If the matter ever goes to hearing, the fact that you documented your disagreement with the exclusions on the actual assessment plan will become part of the evidence and the agency will have to explain its refusals of your requests to a judge or hearing officer. I’ve seen agencies change their minds after parents have written such feedback on assessment plans because the agencies don’t want to have to explain those documents to judges or hearing officers down the line.

Often, the best way to prevent litigation is to prepare for it. The parents who understand the value of making the record in the right way are the most successful self-advocates out there. But, there are still enough cronyistic old-timers still entrenched in the system who think they can still get away with intimidation tactics, lies, and subterfuge. It’s getting harder and harder for them to get away with these behaviors, and parents who push for the truth from the very beginning, starting with the assessment process, have a greater chance of getting appropriate services for their children than not.

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Podcast: Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students

On March 1, 2009, we originally published “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students.”

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Podcast: Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans & IEPs

On January 12, 2009, we originally published “Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans and IEPs”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans and IEPs.”

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Podcast: Present Levels of Performance

On December 12, 2008, we originally published “Present Levels of Performance – What They Are & Why We Need Them”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast, “Present Levels of Performance – What They Are & Why We Need Them.”