Tag: PBIS

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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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Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports in Special Education

In memory of Cedric Napoleon

I wasn’t going to write on this topic quite yet, but I’m working on a case right now that has me upset over public agency mismanagement and misconduct that has resulted in the physical abuse of our nonverbal student with severe special needs and God only knows how many other students within this public education agency. It reminded me of a lot of things, including our organization’s founding and the protective purpose KPS4Parents has always served as student and family advocates.

I maintain my list of topics to write about as draft posts on the backend of our site, sometimes just as a title, sometimes with a brief description, as the ideas come to me and, when I go to write, I have them more or less organized in my head in the order I want to write them. But, sometimes, like now, something happens that makes one of the topics leap up to the top of the list.

I am currently providing paralegal support to an attorney on a case in which our student has gone for years without behavioral interventions in her IEPs after previous years of successfully benefitting from such IEP interventions. She has regressed to the point where she was behaviorally 10 years ago, before receiving any appropriate behavioral interventions at all.

The educational neglect in this case rises to the level of physical abuse. The school district’s bumbling ineptitude at the expense of our student’s welfare has been nothing short of galling. Our student is now sitting safely at home waiting for her case to be either adjudicated or settled but without the benefit of any instruction or related services until it’s resolved.

Which takes me back to the founding of KPS4Parents and the event that was the last straw that compelled our founder, Nyanza Cook, to start KPS4Parents. In 2002, I was a lay advocate in private practice helping families of students with special needs, and Nyanza hired me to help her with her step-son’s case, which is a story unto itself for another day. It’s how we met and these were the early days. It was the context we were in at the time.

Nyanza hails from Killeen, Texas near Fort Hood, the largest U.S. Army base in the continental United States. While diversity has been tolerated, if not embraced, within the U.S. military in many instances, outside of the military base in the rural areas of Texas, diversity is not so much appreciated. Killeen Independent School District (KISD) has historically operated separate schools for students with “behavioral problems,” most of whom have been African-American or Latino. The quality of special education in KISD has been historically abysmal, particularly for students of color, which is how it’s misconduct led to our organization’s founding.

In 2002, a young man named Cedric Napoleon was attending a Special Day Class (SDC) at one of KISD’s special schools for students with “behavioral problems.” Cedric was a foster child living with his foster mother, Toni Price. He had experienced severe trauma in early childhood, including deprivation of food for days that led to a food hoarding behavior and other behavioral challenges. He was in special education under the Emotional Disturbance (ED) category and his SDC was supposed to be configured specifically for students with ED issues.

Also in the classroom at the time was Nyanza’s nephew. On one fateful day in March 2002, Cedric was suffocated to death by his classroom teacher during a prone restraint. He was not being violent towards others, trying to run out of the classroom, or hurting himself when she restrained him. He was being non-compliant and she took it as an affront to her authority. She pinned him face down on the floor out of hostile rage and when he said, “I can’t breathe,” she replied, “If you can speak, you can breathe.” He expired shortly thereafter as Nyanza’s nephew and his classmates watched on in horror.

That night, Nyanza got a hysterical phone call from family members gathered at her parents’ house in Killeen. They knew she was talking about starting a special education advocacy organization and had been advocating for her step-son in California. They put her nephew on the phone with her and all he could say in a dazed voice was, “They killed him, Auntie. They killed him.” He was terrified to return to school after that, and never did. His life has been one of despair and tragedy ever since.

The day Nyanza’s nephew witnessed Cedric’s murder in his classroom by his teacher, he was already there because he had his own ED issues. To add the trauma of witnessing Cedric’s murder to his own pre-existing special education needs, in the place that was supposed to help him overcome his pre-existing special education needs and at the hands of the person who was supposed to help him, was just too much.

More than one life was destroyed that day. Cedric’s classmates witnessed his murder in that ED SDC and were affected for life in ways that could only lead to more suffering for them. The District’s students most vulnerable to trauma were severely traumatized by one of the most grotesque abuses of their trust possible. They witnessed their teacher kill a classmate for daring to defy her authority.

Nyanza called me that night as soon as she got off the phone with her family and told me what they had told her. She and I agreed that when teachers were murdering our babies in plain sight of our other babies (we have an it-takes-a-village mentality, which makes all babies our babies), we couldn’t stand idly by. The death of Cedric Napoleon was the final straw that compelled Nyanza to go through with starting our organization, she asked for my help, I said “Yes!” without hesitation, and we had our paperwork in order by June of 2003.

In Cedric’s case, to make matters worse, once his life had ended, so had his foster mother’s legal authority to act on his behalf as a parent. She could not pursue justice for him because she lacked the legal authority and the foster care system did little to nothing about it. Cedric’s killer was never tried for murder. She was never subject to any disciplinary action by the public education system in Texas.

On May 19, 2009, Toni Price finally got her chance to do something about what had happened to Cedric. The Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives was being presented with a report of the findings of an investigation the Committee had previously ordered to have done by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) regarding the use of seclusion and restraints in public schools. There had been a fairly recent similar study conducted of private schools that produced shocking and horrifying disclosures as bad as Cedric’s or worse, and the Committee had wanted to know if these problems were also pervasive in our nation’s public schools.

The GAO report started circulating among those in my professional circle online shortly after the hearings and ultimately found its way to me. I remember reading through it and getting to the section describing what happened to Cedric and going, “Wait a minute. I’ve heard this story before … OMG! This is the kid from Nyanza’s nephew’s class!” I immediately forwarded the report to Nyanza and either called or texted her to follow up. At some point we ended up on the phone and she was flabbergasted to see Cedric’s story spelled out in the report. It was the same student she had told me about back in 2002.

In the course of conducting its investigation, out of all of the cases of problems with seclusions and restraints that GAO examined, Cedric’s stood out as particularly horrifying, in no small part due to the fact that his killer had never faced any serious consequences for killing him at the time of the investigation. The investigators searched for this teacher when their investigation revealed that she had faced no consequences and, shortly before the date of their presentation to the Committee, found that she had relocated to Virginia and was running an SDC on a public school campus that was only a 45-minute drive away from where the Committee was convening to hear the presentation of their report.

There was no effort to conceal the outrage that several Committee members expressed over the fact that this woman had not only killed an ED student in the ED SDC where she was supposed to be helping him get better, but that she faced no consequences and was able to get credentialed in at least one other state because the fact that she had killed a student didn’t follow her on her record. They openly referred to Cedric’s death as a murder.

The Committee’s disgust is exposed during the hearing (click here for video of the full 2-hour hearing), and I share that disgust. It is disgusting; disgust is the only healthy response to what this woman did. Rep. Rob Andrews (1:22:22 – 1:28:16 of the hearing video), Rep. Lynn Woolsey (1:53:02 – 1:54:18 of the hearing video), and Rep. George Miller, Committee Chair (1:55:21 – 1:57:44 of the hearing video) had particularly candid things to say and there was bipartisan heartsickness over the whole thing.

The only reason Cedric’s killer was found was because of the GAO’s investigation. Had it not conducted it, a known killer would have been allowed to remain as a fox in a henhouse, circulating among the same types of individuals upon whom she had preyed before. Their parents had no idea they were sending their vulnerable children off to a child killer each school day. Even now, almost 11 years later, the thought still makes me shudder with horror.

The Committee’s take on the situation was influenced in no small part by the testimony of various witnesses produced by the investigators in support of its findings. Among those asked to testify was Toni Price, Cedric’s foster mother. Her testimony was compelling; even now, it still makes me cry.

Toni argued for a national, if not global, directory of teachers found guilty of child abuse for education agencies to use for screening teaching applicants, and she did so from the most informed position possible. She spoke as the primary caregiver of a child with mental health needs killed by the person entrusted to address them every day at school, but with no legal recourse to do anything about it, leaving advocating for that child and protecting others like him to no one. Only the fluke of a Congressional investigation at the right time on the right topic exposed what happened, and Toni took the opportunity to say what needed to be said.

Which brings me back to the topic of this post and podcast, which is the use of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) in special education. Subsequent to the May 2009 hearing, GAO began gathering additional information and the U.S. Department of Education began promulgating guidance and technical information regarding PBIS. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Education produced the Restraint and Seclusion Resource Document.

In February 2019, after 10 years of collecting data on the use of seclusion and restraints in our public schools, GAO produced another report and another hearing was held during which the last 10 years’ worth of data collected and analyzed were presented to the Committee. Witnesses gave testimony, provided additional evidence, and answered questions. You now can look up the CRDC data for your own school district on the CRDC site.

Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Department of Education announced an initiative to address the inappropriate use of seclusions and restraints in our public schools. Just this last December, four members of the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a bill, HR 5325, referred to as the “Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma Act of 2019” or the “Ending PUSHOUT Act of 2019,” which seems like way too poor of a word choice for a name just to create an acronym, but the body of the bill still nonetheless prohibits seclusions and restraints and includes other regulations pertaining to behavioral interventions.

HR 5325 is still a bill pending before the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was introduced just last month, so obviously nothing has happened with it, yet. Congress has been a little busy lately and the last time the Committee tried to pass legislation to address seclusion and restraints in 2009, it passed in the House only to never see the light of day in the Senate. That’s likely to happen again, now, with our current configuration of Congress, but the effort still needs to be made.

What GAO reported in the most recent hearing was that there wasn’t enough data in, yet, regarding the efficacy of Education’s efforts to promulgate PBIS technical information and guidance among the public schools or the degree to which the schools that availed themselves of it found it beneficial. In controlled research situations in which implementation fidelity was maintained, PBIS was proven to work, but how well public schools actually implement it with success in the absence of researcher oversight and fidelity checking remains to be seen.

What seems to be the case, and the whole reason this issue is before the House Education and Labor Committee, again, is that there is an obvious need for federal oversight and regulation, here. There is a lack of consistency from state to state as to how behavioral interventions are to be implemented in schools. Some states have regulations regarding seclusions and restraints in schools and others do not. Even those states that have laws in place don’t provide for adequate enforcement of those laws.

The lack of built-in accountability has made it possible for horrible situations to happen. And, they continue to happen. The only way the public school system is held accountable in situations like these is when individual families take legal action. Hence, the case I’m now working on that has made these issues spring to life for me, once again, much to my deep disappointment.

Educator and support staff training, or a gross lack thereof, more specifically, is often at the heart of these cases. But, so is the lack of teacher accountability and the degree to which educators tend to cover up each other’s tracks, even if it means a child dies in the process.

The fear of talking usually goes to fear of losing their jobs, fear of reprisals from their co-workers, fear of being held accountable for the actions of others, fear of getting in trouble for the same thing for which someone else is getting in trouble because they’ve done it, too, and has to come with a tremendous amount of internal conflict. Only sociopaths could smoothly walk that rocky landscape without being troubled by the experience.

The willingness of school administrators to let something as horrible as student traumatization, physical injury, and/or death by the hands of teaching staff and aides in the learning environment get swept under the rug and hope nobody notices, if not actively seek to conceal it, is repugnant. There is a lack of professional integrity in the public education system that can reach sickening proportions, and these cases are examples.

So, I really don’t have an upbeat ending for this post and podcast. I’m pretty not okay with what I’m still seeing going on with respect to seclusion and restraints in public schools in California, which is supposed to be the most progressive state in the country. It’s particularly bad in rural communities far away from specialists and adequate facilities, particularly when those communities are mostly made up of low-income households.

In some cases, like the one I’m working on now, the student has experienced nothing short of absolute barbarism. It shouldn’t take people like me helping to hold the public education system accountable after the fact. The answer is prevention. In the absence of any guidance in the student’s IEPs as to how to address her behaviors, she was repeatedly secluded and restrained by teachers and aides who didn’t know what else to do.

This was all just up until a few weeks ago, which is why she’s now safely at home but without any instruction or related services until her attorney, in collaboration with me as his paralegal and the experts we’re bringing onto the team, can get this mess cleaned up. It just sickens my heart that after all the years that I’ve been doing this work – 29 years this coming June, mind you – this is where things are still at. In the most progressive state in the Union, we’re still secluding and restraining non-verbal students who are struggling to communicate their wants and needs. It puts bile in the back of my throat.