Tag: evaluation

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Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students

In previous posts, we’ve talked about what “serious behaviors are” and how they can interfere with a child’s receipt of a Free and Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”). In today’s posting, I want to discuss how assessment of behavior can and should take place.

As with any other type of assessment in special education, the assessment of behaviors that interfere with learning must be done by a qualified professional. Specifically, the implementing regulations of the IDEA (see 34 CFR  300.304(c)(iv) and (v)) requires that assessments be administered by “trained and knowledgable personnel” and “in accordance with any instructions provided by the producers of the assessments.” This is particularly the case with standardized assessments, but you also have to bear in mind that, as a result of NCLB and its influence on the 2004 reauthorization of the IDEA, the use of scientifically research-based methodologies and practices must be used to collect relevant data and develop appropriate programming for all children, including those with handicapping conditions. (See 34 CFR  300.35 and the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (aka NCLB)  9101(37).)

Many parents have attempted to litigate the issue of what constitutes appropriate assessment, arguing for the use of Applied Behavioral Analysis (“ABA”), with mixed results. Many of these cases, however, have had to do with the pursuit of a scientifically research-based methodology proven to yield positive outcomes for children with Autism as an across-the-board instructional strategy. ABA is actually a method of analyzing behavior and applying that knowledge to whatever contexts are appropriate to the individual being served, hence the title “Applied Behavioral Analysis.”

What is known, regardless of what you call it, is that behavioral interventions are most successful when the function of the behavior is identified and addressed rather than the structure of the behavior. I can remember as a child getting into trouble for fighting with my younger sister and being told to “stop fighting” but no effort was made to actually resolve the disputes we were having. We were simply ordered to quit interacting in a displeasing manner, leaving our actual conflicts unresolved for many years. This is a perfect example of the adults in the situation addressing the structure of the behavior – what it looks like – rather than the function served by the behavior – that is, the behavior’s purpose. It’s treating the symptom rather than the disease.

For example, one of the students we have been representing is a high school student with sensory integration issues, high anxiety, and Autism. He is easily overwhelmed by noisy and busy environments and is tactile defensive, particularly once he reaches an agitated state. At that point, he will put his head down on his desk until he processes through whatever mental log-jam has occurred and is ready to return to his situation. When this happens, people need to leave him alone rather than add more stimulation to his experience so he can clear through all of the inbound data and return to a point where he is receptive to additional input. He’s gotten very good at self-regulating this way and will immediately return to his school work once he has mentally checked himself out by putting his head down on his desk for a couple of minutes or so.

This has been known for many years, now, but it seems to be the case that every so often a new person will be placed in his learning environment who disregards what is already known and thinks that he or she can somehow overcome this student’s neurology by doing things his/her own way. The last time this happened, our student had become, once again, overwhelmed by a very chaotic learning environment over which his teacher exercised poor control; he put his head down on his desk. While the aide assigned to him and the teacher left him alone, another aide in the classroom took it upon herself to go over to him and try to “speed up” his recovery process by “talking him through it.”  She didn’t understand that she was actually giving him more data to process and making it take longer for him to recover. She was actually making the experience increasingly painful to the student and when he told her to leave him alone, she made the mistake of putting her hand on his shoulder.  She intended it to be an encouraging gesture, but it was sensory overload for him at that point and his automatic response was to slug her.

There was no thought in his actions. It was a fight-or-flight response. When he realized what he had done, he was mortified. As with many people on the Autistic Spectrum, he is a very rules-based person and he has been raised by good parents who have made it clear that hitting is not appropriate. He knew what he had done was wrong and he was terribly remorseful. This put him into a psychological tailspin and the anxiety, which was already heightened in the first place, kicked into high gear. He developed somatic complaints of severe headaches and painful gastro-intestinal problems and began engaging in school refusal behaviors. His clinical psychologist found that the physical symptoms were tied to the anxiety he had about returning to that classroom and recommended home/hospital instruction until the situation could be resolved. The District arranged for a home instruction teacher to come to the house while things were worked out, which held him over academically and aided in his recovery from his emotional trauma, but he was unable to work on his socialization skills at home being away from the other students with whom his social skills work was being done prior to this event.

This is the kind of stuff that can result in a denial of a FAPE. One person who fails to take a student’s IEP seriously can undermine the entire program if he/she doesn’t respond to the behavioral issues appropriately. But the first step is identifying the function of the behaviors. What useful purpose do they serve to the student?  This information is needed not only to develop an appropriate behavior plan for a student, but also to appropriately implement it and suggest improvements to it over time.

In the example given above, the behavior in question was the student withdrawing from academic instruction. This behavior serves a useful function for the student and putting his head down on his desk was a positive replacement behavior taught to him when he was much younger at a time when his only response to over-stimulating situations was “I gotta get outta here!” and he would elope from the classroom, running across the campus as fast as he could to get away from the overwhelming situation. There were clear-cut environmental antecedents and behavioral antecedents that cued the adults in the room that he was reaching the point where he was going to need to “check out” for a couple of minutes. The consequence and, thus, the function of the elopement behavior was to permit the student to both escape from and contend with the sensory overload he experienced, as well as self-regulate. His nervous system just can’t take that much inbound data at once. It’s a manifestation of his disability.

What he needed, and what he ultimately got, was a more socially acceptable way of self-regulating in a situation like that. Essentially, he needed a socially acceptable tool that would let him go off “autopilot” and “steer the ship manually” as it were, making deliberate decisions about what to do with many pieces of incoming data, putting it all away in the proper processing centers of his mind, and clearing through the bottleneck of sensory information before returning to the academic task at hand.

That’s how behavioral assessment and intervention planning is supposed to work. From there, it’s all about training the staff on the intervention plan, implementing it in the day-to-day course of affairs, and collecting on-going data on its efficacy so that improvements and needed tweaks can be made to it as time goes on. The plan has to evolve at the same pace that the student makes progress towards the behavior goals in which the inappropriate behavior is not only extinguished, but replaced with a more appropriate coping strategy that sees the student’s evolving needs met.

Please keep your eyes open for our next posting, in which we will discuss the differences between FBAs and FAAs, and when each is meant to be used. As always, if you have any questions, please post a comment or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

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Understanding Assessment Data

The whole point of special education assessment is to identify what is preventing a child from accessing his/her educational opportunities and provide the data necessary to figure out a way to overcome whatever is getting in the way. Over the years, I’ve seen all kinds of things happen with assessments.

 

I’ve seen very good assessments performed by both education agency personnel and outside assessors. I’ve also seen horrible assessments performed by both education agency personnel and outside assessors. 

 

I’ve seen assessments that yielded valid data to the degree that assessment was done, but that, overall, were substantively lacking because assessment was not conducted in all areas of need. I’ve also seen assessments that were outright fabrications, which just makes me ill because, regardless of the assessors’ motivations to misrepresent the facts, no child is served when inaccurate data is presented as though it legitimately documents the child’s needs and how they can be met.

 

There are two varieties of assessments that are most commonly used to collect data on children for the purposes of special education: criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessments. Each has unique aspects that bring value to the assessment process.

 

Criterion-referenced tests ask whether a child can perform a specific task. For example, can the child properly punctuate and capitalize a sentence, yes or no? Criterion-referenced tests are simply looking at whether or not a child can produce a specific outcome.

 

Norm-referenced tests are more complex. Norm-referenced tests that measure cognition (IQ), academic achievement, visual-motor processing, vocabulary development, etc. all have in common the way their scores are presented and interpreted.

 

When a norm-referenced test is developed, the producers of the test recruit thousands of people from all walks of life who collectively represent the population to take their test. These recruits are collectively referred to as the “normed group” or “sample” and it’s their job to establish what constitutes as “average” on the test. 

 

By having normed groups at each age and/or grade level take the test first and establish what is “normal” for a person of each age or grade to score on the test, the scores of people taking the assessment in the real world can be compared against something meaningful.? The purpose of norming a test before it’s put out for actual use is so the scores achieved in the real world can be compared against what should be expected by a particular age or grade.

 

The scores on norm-referenced tests are mathematically designed so that even though different tests measure different things, the scores can be compared to each other. This is referred to as “standardizing” the scores, which is also why these tests are referred to as standardized assessments.

 

In order to standardize the scores from many different kinds of tests, the producers of the tests use statistics to make the scores comparable by using normal distributions. Graphically, this is also known as a bell-curve.  I don’t want to make this overly-technical for folks with little to no background in statistics, but I don’t want to over-simply this so much that I’m not really telling you anything either, so I’m going to attempt to strike a balance, here.

 

One way to standardize the scores is to use what is called, appropriately enough, Standard Scores. By converting the raw scores of a given assessment into Standard Scores, they can be compared against the Standard Scores of another type of assessment. This is very commonly done when looking at whether a child has a specific learning disability using the discrepancy model, which calls for a significant gap between academic achievement and cognitive ability on standardized tests that measure each.

 

Let’s say that a student takes a standardized IQ test such as the WISC-IV and achieves the following scores:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 101

Perceptual Reasoning = 104

Working Memory = 99

Processing Speed = 96

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 100

 

Now, let’s say that the same student takes a standardized measure of academic achievement such as the WJ-III and, on the portions pertaining to reading achieves the following scores:

 

Letter-Word Identification = 78

Reading Fluency = 70

Reading Comprehension = 72

 

First, given that the subtest scores on the WISC-IV are so close together, the Full Scale IQ can be presumed to be sufficiently representative of the student’s cognitive abilities. ?An IQ score of 100 is dead-center average; in other words, it’s perfectly normal.

 

Reading scores in the 70s, however, are not normal for someone with perfectly normal intelligence. If you look at your PDF handout that you should have already downloaded, you will see that there is a big gap between achievement (the WJ-III scores) and ability (the Full Scale IQ).

This is one way to use standardized scores to understand the picture painted by the data. Another way, which many parents find a lot easier to understand, is Percentile Rankings. Percentile Rankings present the scores as comparisons against the normed sample, which is to compare the child’s scores against the general population.

Because of the nature of normal distributions, reliance on Percentile Rankings is more appropriate with scores that are fairly close to the mean, where Standard Scores are more reliable at the extremes of the distribution. For this reason, when you look at the PDF handout we’ve provided, you’ll notice that the scores don’t all exactly align from one illustration to the next.

 

Taking our Standard Scores from before and converting them to Percentile Rankings results in the following:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 52nd %ile

Perceptual Reasoning = 62nd %ile

Working Memory = 48th %ile

Processing Speed = 38th %ile

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 50th %ile

 

Letter-Word Identification = 7th %ile

Reading Fluency = 2nd %ile

Reading Comprehension = 3rd %ile

 

You need to understand that Percentile Rankings are not the same thing as percentages of correct answers. For example, if your child got 50% on his/her science test, you’d know that was an “F” grade. With Percentile Rankings, 50th Percentile (or “50th %ile”) means that half of your child’s same age or grade peers (depending on which comparison is being made) scored beneath your child and the other half scored above your child.? At the low extreme is the 0 Percentile and at the high extreme is the 100th Percentile.

 

If you averaged the scores of all the people who took the test, their scores should mostly cluster around the 50th percentile. A relatively small number of people gifted in whatever area the test measures will score at the high end of the distribution while another relatively small number of people will score at the low end. This accounts for the hump in the middle of the distribution and the skinny ends at the extremes. Most people’s scores will fall within the tall hump.

 

By looking at the Percentile Rankings, parents can know for example, that if their child scored at the 62nd %ile in Perceptual Reasoning, then he/she outscored 62% of his/her peers and was only outscored by 38% of his/her peers.

 

If, however, the same child scored at the 3rd %ile in Reading Comprehension, that means that 97% of his/her peers outscored him/her on this measure and only 3% of his/her peers scored lower. This puts things into perspective.

 

If a child is outperforming 62% of his/her peers in Perceptual Reasoning, but is being outperformed by 97% of his/her peers on Reading Comprehension, there’s a problem. Clearly something is interfering with this child’s reading that can’t be accounted for by low cognition. This is when you begin to dig for processing disorders that might be responsible for a learning disability.

 

All too often, parents go into IEP meetings where report data is presented and it all flies right over their heads. Unfortunately, some school agency personnel take advantage of that fact and will either skimp on their actual data collection or misrepresent what the data means. They may present only broad cluster scores, which are just averages of the subtest scores, without presenting the subtest scores themselves. This is dangerous because if there is a lot of scatter among the subtest scores – that is, they aren’t all close in number and you have a wide variety of scores falling along the distribution – then the averages represented in the clusters don’t tell you anything.

 

For example, if instead of the scores represented above on the WISC-IV, let’s say you have a student with the following scores:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 120(PR=91st %ile)

Perceptual Reasoning = 136(PR=99th %ile)

Working Memory = 93(PR=31st %ile)

Processing Speed = 82(PR=12th %ile)

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 108(PR=69th %ile)

You can see here that because of the diversity of the subtest scores, the overall average of the Full Scale IQ doesn’t really paint a clear picture of what is going on with this person. An IQ score of 108 is still a fairly middle-of-the-road average score. But, this is a person who is scoring in the above-average to superior range when it comes to Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning.

 

Because of the disparity among the subtest scores, the Full Scale IQ is not considered to be reliably representative of the student’s intellectual abilities and the subtest scores have to be looked at individually. I’ve seen WISC-IV subtest scatter like this with kids who have learning disabilities and/or ADHD. 

 

The topic of assessment scores and data interpretation is extremely complex and multi-faceted. People get Masters’ Degrees in school psychology just to be able to make sense of it all. There’s no way I can hit all the things you need to know in a blog posting.

 

But, understanding the scores well enough to read the assessment reports with any comprehension is critical for parents and educators alike. It’s been my unfortunate experience that some assessors either don’t understand their own data or even how to properly administer the assessments in the first place, which results in inaccurate data. I’ve seen reports in which the scores actually contradict the positions asserted by the reports’ authors. I’ve seen testing in which the assessor completely failed to adhere to the test instructions provided by the producers of the test, thereby rendering invalid scores.

 

The more parents understand about assessment scores, the less they are able to be misled by inaccurate and/or disingenuous representations of the data. The more teachers understand about assessment scores, the more able they are to put that data to constructive use in developing teaching strategies for their students with special needs.

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Understanding the Initial Assessment Process

The way special education law generally works is that the implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (“IDEA”) set the basic framework at the federal level and each state’s laws speak to how the federal requirements of the IDEA will be implemented within its respective state. Similarly, U.S. Territories, the District of Columbia, etc. have their own equivalents of state laws speaking to the implementation of the federal regulations within their respective jurisdictions. For the purposes of today’s posting, when I say “state,”? I’m also referring to the other types of American soil.

So, given that there is so much variation from state to state in how the federal regulations are implemented, I’m going to start at the top with the federal regulations. I’ll touch on a couple of the states’ regulations, but there’s no way to fit them all into one posting. You can research your own state’s regulations by going to its web site. The U.S. Department of Education has all the states’ web sites here: . If you can’t find it on their site, there’s a phone number for the special education division listed somewhere on their site and you can call and ask what the timelines are.

To start out, let’s define what exactly an initial assessment is. I will tell you that it is not necessarily the first special education assessment the child has ever taken. An initial assessment or initial evaluation (“assessment” and “evaluation” are used interchangeably in special education) is the assessment that determines if a child is eligible for special education. Sometimes children are tested at parent request every few years and are found ineligible. It doesn’t matter how many times the child was tested before; if the child’s fifth assessment finds him eligible for special education, then it is the initial assessment of his special education program that begins with his first IEP in which he is found eligible.

Sometimes kids exit special education only to later qualify again years later. Even under a circumstance like that, if the child wasn’t in special education at the time he/she was assessed and was in special education after the assessment, then the assessment that “re-found” the child eligible for special education would be considered an initial assessment.

This use of the term is meant to distinguish it from re-evaluations and triennial evaluations. We’ll talk more about those in future blogs, but for the purposes of distinguishing among these different assessments enough for the present discussion, a re-evaluation is any assessment conducted subsequent to the initial evaluation. It could be a year later, three years later, or ten years later. A triennial assessment is also called a three-year evaluation.

All evaluations are supposed to be sufficiently comprehensive in all areas of suspected disability to properly inform the IEP team. For initial evaluations, this is paramount because a child’s eligibility determination needs to be based on a rich body of data that includes scores on standardized testing and actual school work, as well as feedback from the adults interacting with the child throughout the day. The parents play a huge role in informing the IEP process.

But, initial evaluations aren’t supposed to be all about finding kids eligible. That’s only half of what initial assessment is supposed to achieve. The other half of the initial assessment is to identify the student’s present levels of performance. If the child is eligible for special education, this information is used to create the measurable annual goals.

If the child is not eligible for special education, he/she may still be eligible for a 504 Plan, in which case the present levels data would drive the content of that document. If the child is not eligible for a 504 Plan, then the local education agency would still have to provide regular education accommodations. In the very least, the child’s teacher should know about the assessment findings so that he/she can provide regular education accommodations to the degree they are needed.

Once a referral has been made for special education assessment, an assessment plan must be provided to the parents. While many school districts rely on 34 CFR Sec. 300.503 to issue denials of assessment referrals, in California, for example, whether or not school districts must conduct an assessment once a referral has been made is non-negotiable.

5 CCR Sec. 3021(a) states that all referrals for special education assessment <em”>shall initiate the assessment process. According to EC 56029, a referral for assessment is any written request by a parent, teacher, other service provider, or foster parent of the student to have the student tested for special education.

Georgia, to the contrary, has a very curious practice that I’d like to know more about. Its stance is apparently that while parents have the right to make referrals pursuant to the federal regulations at 34 CFR Sec. 300.301(b), local education agencies have the right to refuse those referrals pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.503(a)(2).

I’ve seen schools say the same thing in California despite the State laws that prevent it, but in this instance, it’s the Georgia Department of Education that’s taking this stance (see the Georgia Department of Education Special Education Implementation Manual

Gwinnett County (Georgia) Public Schools conveniently leaves out of its public information anything about how parents can make referrals for assessment as well. With the State Department of Education taking the position that it has apparently taken, at least based on what I could find, I have to wonder if there are local education agencies in Georgia that simply ignore parent referrals altogether without any consequence. I’d be interested in hearing from folks in Georgia about this. I really couldn’t find anything to help me out looking at the that have come out of Georgia.

Regardless of what state you’re in, once the referral has been made and assessment has been consented to by the parents in writing, under the newest IDEA regulations, local education agencies can’t take more than 60 days to conduct the assessment, write the reports, and hold the IEP meeting to go over the data. However, some states have imposed even shorter timelines. It is 30 days in Minnesota for the evaluation process to take place. While state law cannot diminish the protections offered to students under the IDEA, it can add to them.

The same federal law that specifies the maximum deadline also mandates that initial assessments be comprehensive enough in all areas of suspected disability to allow the IEP team make informed decisions about whether a child qualifies for special education services and, if so, what those services should entail. This is where things can get dicey.

There can be a great variation of opinions as to what constitutes as “reasonably sufficient” when it comes to assessments. At minimum, the assessors should be qualified for the types of assessments they are respectively performing, follow the instructions of the producers of any standardized assessments, and follow the “best practices” of their respective professions.

It is also important to know that, while those areas that were tested may have been done so sufficiently, that doesn’t mean that all areas of suspected disability were assessed. I can’t even begin to tell you how many children I’ve come across with huge red flags in the area of auditory processing who have never been properly assessed for it. Auditory Processing Disorder (“APD”) can only be diagnosed by an audiologist.

The quality of any evaluation is important, but the initial evaluation is the one that’s opening the Pandora’s Box of the child, the way he/she learns, and the nature of his/her disability. You need to go into that situation equipped to contend with whatever you may find because, typically, you have very little to go on regarding a child’s educational needs at the time of the initial assessment, other than the fact that the child is not being successful in school.

Our next posting will be devoted to understanding assessment data. If I can, I think I’d like to put it together as a screencast for you because there are statistics involved and, personally, I need visual aids to understand concepts like that. I can’t presume I’m the only one.

Please do post your comments, particularly parents and educators in Georgia. We’d like to hear people’s feedback regarding how long these assessments take in their experience.

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Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are Not Appropriate

Update:

On January 4, 2013, a due process decision was issued in California that addresses “child find” and the use of SSTs, which you can read by clicking here. This case illustrates much of what is discussed below and provides good legal language that makes clear what “child find” is and what school districts’ obligations are to comply with the federal “child find” requirements.

Everyone involved in the special education process needs to fully comprehend what the federal “child find” requirements are, what that means for them and children who depend on them, and how they can best support a functioning “child find” system. In a nutshell, “child find” is the federal mandate requiring education agencies to actively seek out, identify, and serve all the children in their respective jurisdictions who are eligible for special education. The federal regulations can be found at Title 34, Code of Federal Regulations, Sections 300.111 and 300.131.

Legitimately, general education teachers are already over-burdened. They often have too many kids in their classes and not enough support from their administrations. But, that’s the nature of the job. I don’t like it and I’m more than happy to do what I can to improve the situation, but I certainly can’t fix the whole thing all by myself.

The problem I have with the “we already have to do so much” mentality that many teachers have is that they are compartmentalizing all of their various obligations to their students as though they are autonomous of each other and must be dealt with separately when many of them can actually be combined into one activity.

Children are incredibly complex organisms, their complexities markedly different from those of adults based on the fact that children are growing, where adults are aging. Neurologically, what’s going on in their brains is nothing short of breathtakingly incredible. To watch a child at play is enjoyable enough because children are beautiful, but appreciating the kinds of data that a child is taking in and wondering what he must be doing with it inside his head is both humbling and mesmerizing to me.

This is a mindset I think anyone going into a career as a K-12 educator needs to have. I think a great many people do have that mindset when they begin their careers, but over the years they get worn down and burned out by education agency internal politics, mindless bureaucracy, and parents complaining to them about negative outcomes resulting from or influenced by the agency’s internal politics and mindless bureaucracy.

Part of the petty politics that can come along with any organization is the decisions by top management to stay silent on a regulatory requirement so that the staff doesn’t incur the expenses that compliance would have otherwise entailed. In other words, they deliberately keep their people clueless to save money.

In my experience, this is what has largely happened with “child find” and general education teachers everywhere. They have never heard of “child find.” (Granted, in some places it goes by other names, such as “search and serve” or “seek and serve,” but even in those places where it’s called something else, it’s administration that calls it something else; the teachers still have no idea what it is, much less how to implement it. (The federal regulations actually use the language “child find” to refer to the process.)

If I were a classroom teacher and I realized that I was being deliberately kept ignorant of an obligation placed on me by federal law to the detriment of my students, I’d be pretty upset. I don’t know exactly what happens to people, but especially when they are just starting out in their careers and are still a little Pollyanna-ish about life but have absolutely no clout and are at the mercy of their employers’ whims as to whether they have a job or not, there has to be a fracturing of the soul at some point for some of those people when they realize that what they signed up for and what they wound up with are two very different things.

>For some people, that results in burn-out. Burned out people either stay and weigh the system down further with their defeated attitudes or they leave and go on to some other type of career. Other people manage to somehow rise above it and accomplish amazing things in spite of all the toxicity going on around them.

I realized a long time ago that I could best serve the situation by working outside of the system. I have all the respect in the world for the people who go to the front lines every day, make a positive impact on the lives of youngsters, and manage to come back at the end of the day still grounded and at peace.

Which is why this whole “child find” issue royally chaps my hide. Good teachers are being denied the tools and resources they need to educate their students. Apathetic teachers are being encouraged to remain apathetic. The public education system exists to educate children and yet educational services are being denied to children for fiscal reasons while administrative and legal costs soar out of control.

Many education agencies have subscribed to the “Student Study Team” model of addressing parent and teacher concerns about student performance, though there is nothing in the federal law that calls for Student Study Teams or SSTs. Most general education teachers from education agencies that utilize SSTs believe that only the SST can refer a child for special education assessment or that the proper response to a request by a parent for assessment of his or her child is to call an SST meeting.

The federal regulations governing the assessment process can be found at . You will note in neither the “child find” regulations cited above nor the assessment regulations cited here are there any references to SSTs.

SST meetings are not required by the special education assessment process called for by the IDEA. They are often just internal policies created by the education agency, not the law, though this varies from state to state.

SSTs can serve many legitimate purposes and I’m not bad-mouthing the SST concept per se. But, I do have a criticism of the practice of using SST meetings as a stall tactic or as an opportunity to try and talk a parent out of pursuing assessment. That sort of thing is only done in bad faith and has no place in our institutions of learning.

In California, it’s flat-out against the law. If a parent makes a written referral for assessment, the local education agency has 15 calendar days to get an assessment plan out to the parent. Period. Title 5, California Code of Regulations, Section 3021(a) requires local education agencies to honor all referrals for assessment, regardless of who they come from.

I went looking online to see how other states are doing things and stumbled across a very interesting publication put out by the Idaho Department of Education. Idaho Special Education Manual, 2007. I was fascinated by its description of its Problem-Solving Teams as part of its special education process. These are essentially SSTs being used as a pre-screening tool to make sure that special education referrals aren’t being made willy-nilly, but you can see from the description of the Problem-Solving Teams and their procedures how they could be used to delay the referral process when parents make referrals.

What I find troublesome about the way Idaho has worded things in this Manual (beginning on page 6), is that people might be erroneously led to believe that the Problem-Solving Team is the only way a special education referral can be made. That simply isn’t true under the federal regulations.

There was no language in the section devoted to referrals that described what to do in response to a parent referral. But, there is language that says parents can call a Problem-Solving Team meeting to discuss their concerns, which puts them through the paces of a potentially lengthy process before a referral for assessment is made (if it ever is) by the Team.

If I were a parent of a child with disabilities in Idaho, I would need a really compelling reason to go through the Problem-Solving Team process to achieve a referral if federal law permits me to simply write one up myself and bypass the Problem-Solving Team referral process altogether. My advice to parents in Idaho is to go ahead and make the referral and skip the whole Team thing if you’re already really sure that your child has a disability that impacts his/her education.

If you are a parent in Idaho, or anywhere else, making a referral for your child to be assessed for special education, just make sure you document when you made your referral so you can establish when exactly the Procedural Safeguards actually took effect. The date you put on the letter isn’t enough. You need proof of delivery.

If you’re a teacher, take it upon yourself to become familiar with “child find” and learn how you can best implement it in your classroom. Realize that children with hidden disabilities, like learning disabilities and emotional health problems, usually look “normal” and have average to above-average intelligence.

Just because they “look okay” doesn’t mean they aren’t eligible for special education. How are they functioning in the classroom? Are there certain things they just don’t get? Are their respective weaknesses so severe that it’s impacting their academic performance or how they interact with others in the school setting?

Try to put yourself in your student’s shoes. Where is the breakdown occurring and how do you think that makes your student feel? There are some helpful tips at LDOnline.org on how to recognize signs of a possible learning disability according to grade level.

The best thing any of us can do is continue to learn and grow so that we can equip ourselves with the knowledge and tools we need to make the special education process more effective and collaborative. When the “us-versus-them” mentality is gone and parents don’t have to maneuver around sordid education agency politics and manipulated policies to achieve appropriate services for their children, we’ll have made tremendous headway.