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- About
Child Find: Emotional Disturbance
Speaking: Michael Minor, Amy Smith
Rate This Video:
Child Find Legal Requirements
Starts at 02:30
Emotional Disturbance Definition
Starts at 09:32
Universal Screening and Emotional Disturbance
Starts at 15:50
Thinking About Behavior Within a Framework
Starts at 30:53
Questions
Starts at 42:55
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>> Hi, my name is Diane Funsten
and I'm an Educational Consultant at the PaTTAN office in King of Prussia.
I'd like to welcome you to today's session
which will focus on the identification of students with emotional disturbance.
As you can see on your screen, the handouts are available on our website
and you can see the address on the slide.
When you get to the PaTTAN home page and if you see the tab Training,
under it is a drop down menu,
select the word Calendar, go to today's date, May 8th,
and then select the name of today's webinar.
Click handouts and you can download them to be saved on your desktop
or to be printed.
I would like to introduce our two presenters
who are colleagues of mine at PaTTAN.
First Amy Smith who is an Educational Consultant
at the PaTTAN office in King of Prussia and Mike Minor
who's at our PaTTAN office in Pittsburg.
I'm going to turn the presentation over to them.
>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our presentation today
on Child Find specifically dealing with emotional disturbance.
At PaTTAN, our mission is as always to support the initiatives
of the Bureau of Special Education and the Department of Education
and to serve the students
who receive special education in Pennsylvania and build a capacity
of our local education agencies throughout the state.
PaTTAN has a commitment to promoting the least restrict environment
for all of our students with IEPs and to begin by serving students
in the general education setting using supplemental aids and services
before moving on to a more restrictive environment.
Our agenda today as you see on the screen;
the beginning of the presentation
will deal with the legal requirements of Child Find
and definition of emotional disturbance
and I'll do that section of the presentation.
The remainder of the day will be dealing with Universal Screening
and how that relates to emotional disturbance and Mike
will be giving you that information.
So let's move on to what the requirements
are for Child Find regardless of the disability.
All districts are required to be dealing with Child Find.
It is a mandate that is giving to us at a federal and state level
and a requirement for all charter schools as well.
So you'll find information on Child Find in IDEA, Chapter 14 and Chapter 711.
Child Find is really the beginning of the evaluation process.
It requires that all districts, all LEAs, locate,
identify and evaluate any and all children within their jurisdiction
who might be eligible for special education services.
The severity of the disability is irrelevant
whether it's a very mild disability or a very severe disability,
all districts are required to be actively insuring
that we find the children who would benefit from
and are eligible for special ed services and get those services to them.
Even if the school is not providing those educational services,
those special ed services,
it's their requirement to be actively searching for them.
Child Find begins at birth and runs through age 21.
This is the actual text that I've taken directly from Chapter 14
and it outlines the Child Find responsibilities that each LEA has.
And we're going to look at these; there are four different criteria
and we're going to look at these one by one.
The first, as we're dealing with public awareness,
Child Find begins with the idea of public awareness.
Every district is required to adopt and use a public outreach awareness system.
Basically what this means is that districts are required to have
a purposeful plan on how they are going to reach out to the public
to make them aware of the special education system
and how to access it.
They are actively required to locate and identify children
who may be eligible for special education any child
that is within their jurisdiction.
So any child in the district
who may be eligible for special education services,
they need to be actively providing information
to insure that those children are found.
Public awareness also --
the Chapter 14
requires us to provide written information from the school district.
It needs to be within the school district handbook
and if they have a website,
it needs to be clearly and explicitly written on their website.
They must include any information for the parents
that might indicate or give them some information
about what a potential sign of a development delay or learning delay
or other kind of risk factors that might indicate some sort of disability.
Now this information is directly meant to help the parents understand what may
or may not be a red flag
that their child might have some sort
of eligible criterion for special education.
The third requirement we have with public awareness
is provide an annual notice.
Every school district needs to put in the newspaper, electronic media,
or some other type of media
a public notice that informs the public
about the existence of the special education services,
how to access those services.
There needs to be the method in which
they choose to have this public notice,
needs to be in a place that has a circulation
large enough to insure that the parents will have access to this information.
If you're going to choose a newspaper,
a local newspaper,
choose the one or several different ones that will cast the widest net
to let the families know how it is
that they access special education and what special education means.
And finally, the fourth criterion that we're responsible for in terms
of Child Find and public awareness is for intermediate units.
Intermediate units are now responsible for Child
Find activities that provide equitable participation services to happen.
This is directly related to parents who have chosen to enroll their children
in private schools.
We are still required to find those children
and provide services through the intermediate unit
and they do that through the provision of Equitable Participation Services.
Now our charter schools are also responsible.
As we know that they are not responsible to Chapter 14,
they follow Chapter 711 and the language related to Child Find in Chapter 711
is seen here on your screen.
It is very, very similar to the language
that we just covered with some very slight language changes.
Charter schools are as with the other LEAs are responsible to establish written
policies and procedures that insure all children with disabilities
were enrolled in a charter school or a cyber-charter school
and in need of special education or related services
are identified, located, and evaluated.
So exactly the same idea that we just covered in Chapter 14.
They also must establish and provide a written policy
that includes similar types of public awareness activities.
There has to be enough sufficient information
that will inform the parents of students about special ed services,
how they can request them,
and have all this information written in their handbook
and if they have a website,
on their website as well.
So Chapter 711 gives our charter schools very, very similar kinds
of responsibilities that other LEAs have in terms of Child Find.
And again, Child Find applies to any disability.
This is not specific or anything unique to children with emotional disturbance.
All right, so let's move on to talk about emotional disturbance
and I'm going to start that by giving you the definition
of what emotional disturbance is.
The definition of emotional disturbance has not changed since 1977.
There's been no real clear consensus in the field about this definition
so it has not changed in some time.
There are three parts to this definition.
I've simply separated them here using text boxes,
but I'm going to go through these one by one
so that we can look at these in more detail.
The very first characteristic, the first part of the definition,
is that if you are going to identify a student
as being eligible to be identified as a student with an emotional disturbance,
they must have one or more of the following five characteristics
and we're going to talk about those in a minute.
Those characteristics need to exist over a long period of time
and to a marked degree.
Before you send a question in,
there is no definition in the law about a long period of time
and how long that is or to a marked degree and exactly what that means.
That is a decision that would be made by the Multi-Disciplinary Evaluation Team
to determine whether they believe that they have reached the threshold
of past a long period of time and a marked degree at this point.
In addition, having those five characteristics is not enough.
They must also adversely affect the child's educational performance.
So we've got five characteristics,
they must have occurred over a long period of time to a marked degree
and impacted the child's ability to perform in an education setting.
So let's look at those five characteristics and what they are.
You need one or more of these.
One is enough;
if you have more, that's fine.
The first one is to rule out the idea
that your inability to learn is explained by one of these factors,
either an intellectual issue,
a sensory issue, or something related to your health.
So ruling that out
or we could say ruling in the fact
that your inability to learn is not caused by that.
The second characteristic would be an inability
to build and maintain personal relationships
and those relationships could either be with their peers
or with the adults in the building.
So inability to have and maintaining satisfactory personal interrelationships.
The third characteristic is inappropriate types
of behavior or feelings that occur under normal circumstances.
As we go through these,
you'll recognize that these characteristics
paint a broad picture of many, many different types
of possible mental health diagnosis.
The fourth characteristic
is a general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.
And finally, a tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears
that are associated with personal or school problems.
So one or more of those five characteristics being present
is required to be identified as a student with an emotional disturbance.
The final characteristic, the third part of our definition,
is the one I think probably causes the most concern or confusion.
First they begin this part of the definition
by saying that schizophrenia is included within this definition.
And finally, it goes on to give us sort of an exclusionary factor
where it talks about the term emotional disturbance
does not apply to children who are socially maladjusted.
There is no definition of socially maladjusted.
There's no definition in IDEA or Chapter 14 or 711,
there's no definition of socially maladjusted in the DSM.
It's a term that was used again back many years ago
and has been in there ever since.
However, it goes on to this last part
of the definition that says you cannot have an identification
as a student with an emotional disturbance
if you are socially maladjusted
unless it's determined that you have an emotional disturbance.
So it's a little bit of a circular kind of thing here.
It's an exclusionary characteristic that's really not exclusionary.
So if you have one or more of these five characteristics
and it applies over a long period of time to a marked degree,
your educational performance has been impacted,
and you are socially maladjusted
you could still be identified as a student with an emotional disturbance.
So it's an exclusionary factor
that is not what we typically think of as an exclusionary factor.
So that's the definition of emotional disturbance.
That language comes directly from IDEA and Chapter 14 and 711
and that is all the information about Child Find, our requirements,
what we are required to do for Child Find for any disability.
And at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Mike
who is going to give you some information
about Universal Screening for children with emotional disturbances.
So, Mike.
>> All right, thank you, Amy. Good afternoon, everyone.
We're going to spend the next couple of minutes trying to get a better sense
of how Universal Screening is also applicable to behavior.
Many of us are familiar using the Dibble, using AIMSweb,
and how you can use Universal Screening
for youngsters with reading and math skills
to identify what sort of level of need a youth might have.
But we can do a similar thing within the behavioral world.
The initiative here at PaTTAN, the behavior initiative,
we've been working with Dr. Kathleen Lane
from University of Kansas and Dr. Wendy Oakes
from Arizona State University
and they've been sharing with us a lot of the research
and practical application of Universal Screening.
So we started out as a pilot last year
and will continue next year to roll that out to LEAs across the state.
Some of the previous research has shown that roughly 3-6%
of the students in our buildings at some point
will have an emotional or behavioral disorder
that's impacting them.
And roughly 1% of all students ages 5 to 21
receive special ed services under the classification of emotional disturbance.
So the questions that I would have you think about as we go through these slides;
one would be how do you currently
identify the supports or the level of supports needed?
What is the intervention going to look like for students
with emotional or behavioral unrest?
And specific to if it's a child you're thinking about,
is an evaluation needed to determine if he or she has an emotional disturbance,
what are you looking for?
What sort of observations are you doing,
what sort of data are you collecting, behavior rating scales, record review,
and things of that sort.
So as Amy talked about the Child Find,
you can see how the Universal Screening specific to emotional disturbance
fits into that locate, identify, and evaluate.
The main purpose of Universal Screening is by collecting this data and rating
and thinking about what does the student's behavior look
like whether it's an externalizing behavior or an internalizing behavior,
we can make programmatic decisions whether it's academic,
social, emotional,
or behavioral.
By doing the screenings,
you can prevent learning behavior and social difficulties
and try to stop them or prevent them from becoming more severe or more persistent.
So when we do our screening,
similar to the Dibbles, you're aware of the Dibbles.
We're doing it three times a month.
Roughly mid-October, the beginning of October,
mid-October is when you do the first screening.
So the teacher would select one of the Universal Screeners
and go right down the list of students in his or her classroom
and identify using a lifer skill
how significant each one of the predescribed behaviors is.
If a student is identified he or she has an elevated risk or a Tier 2
or a Tier 3 support,
we would then implement that intervention, track its progress,
and make accommodations or modifications as needed.
Then in the winter, you'll come back around the time of winter break,
do another screening,
and you can determine if there are more students that need
advanced tier support or students
that may have been receiving Tier 2 support now more at a Tier 2 level or need
and what sort of changes might you need to do with that intervention.
And then finally in the spring, around the end of April, beginning of May,
you're going to do the third screening
and that'll give you a snapshot
of how the entire year has gone at the individual student level,
the classroom level as well as the systemic level
of your whole school.
The two areas that we're looking for with screening tools;
we want to look at the social validity, the cost,
the time involved, is it effective,
do the teachers find it worthwhile, and then also the psychometric properties
to make sure that instrument is valid and it's reliable.
Is it measuring what it said it's going to measure?
So at the bottom of this slide,
you'll see we have five examples of screening tools.
You can do research on them, you can contact us,
we can give you additional information on them,
but the one I'm going to specific talk about is the SRSS
and that's the Student Risk Screening Skill.
Each one of those has strong psychometric properties.
Where there is some variability is in the social validity.
Some are free, some cost more,
some take quite a bit longer to complete than others.
So you'd want to think about within your school building,
what is going to give you the best result.
So if you want something that's cheaper or free,
you would want to look at the SRSS or the SDQ.
The BASC, the SSIS might cost a little bit more money.
They might go into a little bit more detail
and specifics than some of the other scales.
So many of you are familiar with the framework
when we talk about schoolwide PBIS.
And we talk about the green is your primary prevention or Tier 1
and that covers roughly 80% of the students in a building.
Fifteen percent of students fall at that secondary prevention or Tier 2.
That means there was some at risk.
We need to identify what that behavior or that emotional component
is and set up a plan to address it.
And then lastly is the tertiary prevention or Tier 3
and that's roughly 1-5%
of youth who are going to receive individualized instruction,
individualized behavior plans,
individualized wraparound.
What I want you to look at also is at the bottom of this triangle,
the CIT3,
the Comprehensive Integrated 3 Tier model that Drs.
Lane and Oakes talk about when they do the screenings,
is we're looking at the academics, the behavior,
and the social aspects of the student.
So we're looking at the whole student.
We're not divided or putting a line down between this is the academic side
and this is the behavioral side.
We're getting the picture of the entire student
so that when we create our data grid and then later our intervention grid,
we're looking at those behaviors that may be impeding
or an impediment for that student as well as academic variables and components.
So if you just look at it as a step by step process,
if you're going to go forward with the Universal Screening
which is definitely something
that would be recommended,
as you're thinking about what are we doing next year
as far as professional development,
you'd want to pick those three timeframes
when you're going to complete the Universal Screening.
I would strong recommend that when you do the fall screening
you do that during a faculty meeting where everyone's together.
You can go over the scale,
the social validity piece, read the instructions,
everyone can fill it out, score it,
and when they walk out of the room at the end of that meeting,
they would actually have the grid of every student in their classroom
and be able to identify who is at an elevated risk
whether it's a secondary level,
a tertiary level.
So if you have a student and you're starting to wonder
whether or not an emotional disturbance is presence,
this data is definitely a starting point
as you work on thinking of what interventions
do we want to put in place to try to teach more appropriate behaviors
as well as lessen the impact of those targeted problem behaviors.
Other things you do is you want to identify your secondary supports.
What do we already have in place as a district?
So we're not necessarily reinventing the wheel,
but we're thinking about what evidence based programs do we already have?
Can we utilize those for certain situations and select students
or do we need to look at other interventions
and get training on those?
The third step is thinking about the entry criteria
and as we do evaluations
and we think about students on the continuum of emotional disturbance,
you need to have that background data,
that record review where you're going back and looking at grades, teacher reports,
any previous behavior plans, point cards,
behavior interventions that have been put in place
and trying to get a sense of where are we right now.
And then you're going to incorporate current data
such as attendance, tardies, in-school out-of-school suspensions,
and then those specific behavior screening scores.
The next step is thinking about what are the outcome measures
because our goal is to put the intervention in place,
to monitor, to see success,
and then start to save that program back.
Thinking about that exit criteria and then if there are any other additional needs.
So this is what the SRSS looks like.
It has seven items and if you look at the top of the scale
you'll notice those are all externalizing behaviors.
As the students is -- so our first student is Trent Anderson.
The teacher would sit at that faculty meeting in October
and he or she would just go directly across using that Likert scale
in the upper left hand corner,
0, 1, 2, 3,
and identify how often does Trent steal?
How often does he lie?
And when you go across and you've completed those seven items,
you have a score from 0 to 21.
That correlates with the triangle on the right side of this slide.
You see 0 to 3 is a low risk where that's at Tier 1.
Some risk is 4 to 8;
those are youngsters who have those secondary level needs
or those targeted at risk
whether it's a social group,
an academic group, tutoring, check-in,
check-out.
And then lastly at the top of the triangle scoring at 9 to 21
would be a child with a tertiary level need
or more of an individualized point card,
behavior plan, wraparound support.
So that would take roughly 15 to 20 minutes, three times a year.
So we're talking anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour
that the teacher would invest in completing a scale such as the SRSS
and they would have a very nice snapshot
as to which students are in need
of elevated or additional behavioral or emotional support.
One of the interesting things I want to mention with the SRSS
is they're doing additional research to make it the SRSS-14
so seven of the items will be these externalizing behaviors
and then they're going to add seven internalizing behaviors
because obviously you'll notice what's missing is that internalizing component.
So once they've collected the research,
it's going to add a little bit of time to it, but it's a free scale
and it really gives you a nice picture of where the student is.
It has strong predictive validity
with where the student falls within that triangle
relating to office discipline referrals through the year,
courses passed versus courses failed,
and in-school and out-of-school suspension.
So that quick of an instrument
can really give us a lot of information as we move forward.
So there's just another scale of what an Excel document might look like.
And you see on this one it's highlighted as to what level they're in;
if they're a yellow or have some risk or red, a higher level of risk.
On this slide, we're highlighting --
on the far right you see we have the AIMSweb reading
and the point of that is if you think back to that triangle I showed
and at the base we had the academic, behavior,
and social,
you'll identify that Julius Otam you'll see is at some risk behaviorally
and is at risk with his or her reading skills.
And then Kendra and Jasper are at risk behaviorally and at risk reading.
So that visually lets us know that those youngsters are in need
of an additional intervention grid,
whether it's an academic or behavior or both,
that helps to facilitate moving forward,
making sure developing an action plan
that everyone understands that it is we're going to work on.
So in this case what they worked on was small group reading instruction to support
and improve the reading needs
as well as the self-monitoring checklist for the behavior.
And this class is an example --
this was a first grade classroom sample.
This is what the Intervention Grid looks like.
So very simply, in the support column you write down what is it he or she needs.
Then you describe it under description; what is it going to look like?
Is it a behavior contract?
Is it small group reading instruction?
What is the entry criteria?
We have to make sure that we progress monitor the success or lack of success
the student is having with the intervention
so we can determine if we need to adjust the goal,
if we need to go back and come up with another intervention
or if we're going to continue
to move forward and hopefully reach that targeted end point.
And then finally, what is the exit criteria?
So here is an example.
If we go back to the small group reading instruction,
you see they describe the reading is going to be 30 minutes,
three days per week.
They're going to monitor participation and instructional paths
and they're going to use checklists each day
to compare the teacher's rating.
So was the student identified as needed such support?
On the SRSS, if they fell in the moderate
or the high risk so when the yellow or red band as well
as having difficulty with the AIMSweb,
showing at the strategic or intensive level.
That is a youngster that when you walked out of that faculty meeting
you knew immediately he or she needed an intervention to be put in place.
And then as we track that intervention and that response to that intervention,
we can get a sense as to how significant
that behavior or emotional need is on impeding the student academically.
Does that support the presence of an emotional disturbance.
You see that they're going to progress monitor using AIMSweb, different subtests
and then they're having the daily self-monitoring checklist.
This is an example at a middle school level using a behavior contract.
So you see that's a negotiated contract
between two parties contingent on the manifestation of specific behaviors
and then getting access to the reward.
They're using the SRSS.
The academic for this older group of students
is two or more missing assignments within a grade period.
And then they're also doing self-monitoring.
In this they use the SDQ which is another one of the rating scales
we mentioned a little bit earlier in the slide
that had the five screeners on it.
And then they talk about work completion and accuracy
and also looking at passing grades because that's one of those variables
that when they're scoring lower on the screeners,
we find that there's a correlation.
It's predictive of them having more difficulty with passing courses.
So within Pennsylvania,
we talk about behavior within a framework, within a multi-tiered system of support
and that is PBIS, Positive Behavior Interventions and Support.
So in this particular slide, I'm sure many of you have seen this slide
where on the right we have the behavioral systems
with the 80, 15,
5 going up by tiers.
And on the left hand side
is the academic system specifically looking at reading, math,
where we have the core,
we have the secondary level and then we have the individualized tertiary level.
So when we talk about schoolwide PBIS,
we're looking at again a multi-tiered system.
The aim of it is to bring the school together,
to get everyone on board,
they're using a common language,
and you're talking about what the expected behavior is.
What do you want to see?
We're not focusing on the inappropriate or the targeted behavior,
but we're going to teach alternative behaviors
that are the expectations and those are addressed at a schoolwide level,
they're addressed within the classroom,
they're written in a positive tone not in a negative tone.
And then we think about how can we
prevent behaviors from getting worse or getting more intense
or more prevalent,
not only within the classroom
but also the non-instructional settings across the building.
At the bottom you'll see those are two excellent websites.
You have the papbs.org.
That's our Pennsylvania site and the pbis.org is the national site
which definitely has a lot of pertinent information
that you can take back to your buildings.
So the schools that are implementing schoolwide,
they find there's an increase,
there's an improvement in academic success.
They find safer, more productive school environments.
Everybody's on the same page, the staff,
the faculty report the higher satisfaction.
The administrator have that perception of the building that's working as one.
And a great importance
is research shows a 20 to 60% reduction in the office discipline referrals.
So by decreasing those office discipline referrals,
that allows the teachers more time to focus on their instruction,
to differentiate their instruction,
to intensify their instruction dependent on what the student
needs versus spending more of the majority focusing on classroom management
or trying to get youngsters to sit in their seat, to pay attention.
It really creates the culture of everyone working together,
being proactive versus reactive,
and identifying what the expectation is.
So this just outlines a lot of what's already been discussed.
Positive rules, we're teaching the behaviors across different settings.
We're going out on the playground
and talking about what it means to be respectful.
You'll get on the bus,
what does it mean to be safe on the bus?
That's Tier 1, that's your core universal.
Tier 2 are your targeted interventions,
self-monitoring, check-in, checkout, check and connect.
There may be a specific social group for how to ask for help,
how to share toys.
Or an academic group that's providing some additional assistance
or tutoring assistance in a highly specific area of need.
Intensified instruction, more intervention.
There's more time being spent with the adults
to support these students to prevent future behaviors
or to prevent those behaviors occurring at a higher rate.
Tier 3 again is our intensive interventions.
That is typically where we're conducting our FBAs,
our Functional Behavior Assessments.
Once we're done with the FBAs,
those are leading into our Positive Behavior Support Plan.
Another project we have here at PaTTAN currently is called PTR,
Prevent-Teach-Reinforce,
that comes out of the University of South Florida.
There's a lot of good information there.
In a simplified sense, it's an FBA process,
but it really spends much more time on how we can teach the adults.
When we put those antecedent modifications in place,
what exactly do you need to do?
How are you specifically going to respond if the student complies with the request
or does not comply with the request.
And the teach component is what exactly are those alternative skills
we're working on.
Project RENEW is another Tier 3 intervention we use at the secondary level
and that's a person center planning for youth at risk of dropout
or with severe emotional and behavioral disruptions.
We'll be starting year three on RENEW next year.
So PTR and RENEW
are definitely things to be thinking about to have in your tool belt
to support you in addition
to the traditional FBAs and BSPs that we have been developing.
So if you tie it all together, the importance of data.
As Amy alluded to,
the criteria is over a long period of time to a marked degree.
So what is that level of need
and by collecting our Universal Screening data
and incorporating those academic Dibble scores,
courses past, attendance, things of that nature,
you can see where is this youngster falling?
Is he in the green or the low risk?
Is he at some risk or at a high risk?
And then when you think about the ABCs of behavior
especially when we're talking about students
whether they've been identified with an emotional disturbance
or that's something we're possibly going to be evaluating,
what are the triggers?
What's establishing that behavior?
What are the consequences and what's maintaining that behavior
or what's reinforcing that behavior?
And by incorporating all of that information,
that's ultimately going to lead us to the why.
Why is this behavior occurring?
And it's very simple.
It's either to gain something or to escape or avoid something.
So once you can pinpoint through the use this data,
again going back and doing something
as simple as that SRSS for 20 minutes in the fall,
that gives us a good idea and we go back
and we look at previous reports,
previous record reviews, graphs,
data collected on self-monitoring or a point card
that was in place the year before,
we can then tailor and individualize the intervention
specific to that student's needs.
So then when the situation comes up
and we want to decide whether or not we're moving forward with an evaluation,
we would have all of that data and support readily available to us.
So we can do indirect functional assessments such as surveys, interviews,
questionnaires, gain insight from mom, from dad,
from the homeroom teacher, from the gym teacher.
Just talking about what do they see, what are triggers,
what does the topography,
what does that behavior actually look like?
And then finally, what are the consequences?
What's reinforcing it?
What's punishing it?
And then direct observation is where we actually go into the setting
whether it's in the classroom,
on a job site,
at the daycare,
at the home.
Depending on where you work,
you may be observing in all of those different contexts.
So if you do a descriptive functional behavioral analysis
not only are you collecting and gathering information,
but you're directly observing that student in his or her natural environment
to get a sense of the progression of that behavior.
If you do all that and you pull it together,
it's going to help you as your support if you going to determine if a student
exhibits the characteristics Amy outlined earlier.
Those five criteria that we look at with an emotional disturbance.
So if we look at the first one;
an inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory,
or health factors.
I'm sure there are different questions
and scenarios you think about within your LEA.
So is this an ability to learn?
Is it a true inability to learn or is an unwillingness to learn?
Is it academic based deficit?
Is it a motivation based deficit?
So if the student's making sufficient progress,
then he or she would not meet this characteristic.
If he or she has a health, intellectual,
or sensory reason that's impacting
and that's the culprit as to why he or she has an inability to learn,
then the student would not meet this characteristic.
So those are things just to think about in case you ever read the regulations
you're not exactly sure what is A asking us specific to an emotional disturbance.
For B we're looking at difficulty building
and maintaining satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and others.
What does that relationship look like that that student has with his teachers?
Is it developmentally appropriate?
Does it look similar to the other youngsters in his classroom?
Is the student engaged in a maladaptive or inappropriate relationship
with other peers, other adults,
whatever that might be?
Other relationships the student's exhibiting; are they age appropriate?
Does he or she have friends; you know,
what does that friend or group look like?
Are they much older? Are they much younger?
Are they truly his or her friends?
So can he move into and build that relationship
and then sustain that friendship across time and across contact?
C is looking at the inappropriate type of behavior under normal circumstance
and that's a big one that oftentimes you'll hear when
we actually sit down and talk about what was justified as the area
or the criteria that was most impeding that student academically.
Are these behaviors or emotions
feeling significantly deviant from other same aged peers?
Does he or she exhibit control of those behaviors?
And then we think about the pervasive mood of unhappiness and depression.
Does that occur across settings?
Does it happen in the a.m.
versus the p.m.?
Is it only in a certain class that the student might have difficult with?
You know, are mom and dad reporting similar behaviors at home specific
to unhappiness and depression?
And does that behavior affect the student's ability to experience enjoyment?
Is it atypical for his or her developmental period?
And for the last one,
developing physical symptoms or fears associated with personal school problems.
Again, those symptoms must be related to a personal school problem
and not directly attributed to a medical condition.
So if you take all of the information,
you think about the five criteria, and you think about how appropriate or how
much is Universal Screening needed in the sense of behavior,
in the sense of emotions,
and bringing those short screeners together with the academic variables,
that will give you a really nice picture
as to the students and their level of need versus if too many months,
too many weeks have gone by and then we put an intervention in place.
This is allowing us to be much more proactive.
So what interventions have we done in the past?
What worked? What didn't work?
Is there anything that we can just change a little bit
and we have might have more success with it?
Do we truly understand the function of the behavior that we're seeing?
And then lastly,
how significant is this manifestation on the student's educational performance?
What is the effect from the emotional disturbance
looking at the student academically?
So two questions to ask yourself;
does the student meet the eligibility criteria for emotional disturbance?
When you look at those five, yes
he does, no he doesn't, and can you legally defend it?
So if you've compiled your data,
you've done your Universal Screening,
you've done indirect assessment
or descriptive functional assessment with direct observation,
that will really help you in making your determine as to whether or not
a student meets the criteria for emotional disturbance.
Are there any questions from the audience?
And I will bring Amy back on the line.
>> Yes, Mike, thank you. We do have some questions.
Before I get started with our questions though,
I do want to let everyone know that this webinar will be on the PaTTAN website
and it usually takes us a few weeks to get that edited and up on the website.
So in less than a month it will be up on the website.
And I did get a question as to whether or not the participants
today would be receiving some sort of notification that it was on the website
and you will not.
So you'll simply need to check back every now and again
to see if it's available up there.
Give Mike a chance to take a breath.
I'm going to answer a couple of questions
that came in for the first half of our presentation.
One of the questions that I've seen a couple times
is can a student have an identification as both emotionally disturbed
and other health impaired?
And if you think this through,
absolutely a student could be identified as having both.
When we go through the -- let me just come up with an example of that --
as we go through the three-part definition that we have.
First, we're looking for one or more of those five characteristics
over a long period of time
and to a marked degree that impacts their educational performance adversely.
So we're going to assume that that's part of the child's profile.
And that they have one or more of those characteristics.
The first one discussing and specifically talking about possible health factors.
It is possible that you could have health factors to the degree
that you are identified as a student with other health impairments
that have absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty
you are having in terms of your educational performance.
So you could have fears of schools or the fifth characteristic.
You could have the physical symptoms of fears of schools.
You could have an inability to building
and maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships
and have another health impairment,
something like Sickle Cell Anemia
or you could have some sort of motor problem
that has absolutely nothing to do with your difficulty
in your identification as a student with emotional disturbance.
So definitely it's possible to have and be identified as meeting the criterion
for both of those disability categories.
Several questions about the idea of educational performance.
Are learning and performance the same?
What all does educational performance mean?
Is that strictly academic or what about behavior in the hallway
or during recess?
What do we look at to determine educational performance;
is it grades only, it is PSSAs only?
What is it that we're looking at to make that decision?
I would say that when you're looking at educational performance,
you would be assessing all aspects of expectations for a child
throughout the academic day.
And that would include any kind of ability
to master the academic material that's put in front of them.
And not only learning the material,
but being able to perform the tasks that are being presented to them.
I would expect both of those things to be in place for a student
that did not have a disability.
In addition, the entire school day
would include things like behavior in the hallway, behavior during recess,
transitioning from one place to another.
All of those things I would think would be factors
that you would need to consider as part of the educational performance.
Let me jump ahead and give a question to Mike.
All right, so Mike, this one is for you.
Come back and find it. All right.
So the question is, what is the time period
that you would recommend an intervention be in place
before reviewing it to see if it worked?
>> Good question. I don't have a specific exact answer to that.
I think you need to give an intervention
enough time to see if it's going to take effect.
A lot of times you'll have that like in one sense
you'll have an extinction first
where the behavior actually will get worse before it starts to get better.
So sometimes you need to let that play out.
You don't want to give it one day and say,
"Oh, that absolutely didn't work."
Two, three weeks, you start to track that behavior,
but if the behavior is a safety risk to self or others,
then that's when we need to step back and immediately
either discontinue the intervention or think about changing that intervention.
But usually you need to give it a couple of weeks to really let it take hold
so that the student understands what's expected of him or her
and also the adult understands what he or she might need to change
and how they react or how they arrange the environment
so we teach the alternative behavior.
>> Okay, thank you. Mike, I have another question for you.
Along the same lines.
How many interventions would you suggest trying
before you move on to a special ed evaluation?
>> Well, I think that can vary.
If we've been able to identify
what we hypothesized the function is of that behavior
and you thought out and looked at and analyzed what the antecedents are,
what's triggering it,
what's maintaining it and you put a solid, evidence-based practice into place,
you may be able to do only one intervention.
Say you run it for four or six weeks
and collect that data.
But if it's just sort of a random I like this intervention,
let's try that,
that may not be the best way to say you're only going to use one.
You really need to make sure that you tailor that intervention
as to what the specific need is.
And sometimes when we set up interventions we might have an intervention
that's focusing on decreasing one behavior,
but we're also working on -- say, decreasing calling out
and we're doing that also focusing on increasing staying in your seat
and raising your hand to gain someone else's attention.
So the one behavior might start decreasing the way
we want to see, but the other one isn't.
So you may need to ride that out.
>> Thank you.
Along the same lines, the question came in, do you need parent permission
before you implement an intervention?
>> Is that one for me?
>> Yes, please.
>> Typically as we've done a lot of the screening component
we've got similar with the Dibbles,
there might be a caveat on the website
or we talk about do you want to take your student out of it,
but when we get into the interventions
we always want to have that open communication
with the parents as to what we're going to try,
what we're going to implement
so that hopefully they'll be having that carryover
and we start to see a generalization of that behavior in the other setting.
Do we need strict permission?
I've always practiced it more as there's just an open communication back and forth
versus getting an actual written signature from the parent.
Is Di there by chance though?
>> Yes, she is. She's muted right now.
Let's move on. The question came in and Mike, I'll take this one.
Why are there so many children and youth with so many mental health
and behavioral issues?
It appears to have been significantly increasing.
Ms. Savvy, I think that that is a true statement
and I think that is a very broad question
and I think that you would have to look at many, many factors
in school and outside of school.
Over the last several years,
the economy has really put a lot of stress on a lot of families
and that might have something to do with it.
The difficulty accessing services relating to mental health
may have something to do with it.
But I think that that is a very broad, very, very good and very fair,
but very broad question
that would have a lot of different answers possible for that.
Mike, this one is coming back to you.
The question is, I'm in a learning support room in K to 3
and need some suggestions on how to gain parent's support
with our charter and data collection and consequences.
These students have so much dysfunction at home, are struggling
and daily phone calls and emails are not helping.
So the idea of how -- do you have any suggestions
on gaining parent's support?
>> Well, I think one thing
you need to think about is are we also notifying the parent
when the student is doing something appropriate?
So instead of -- I'm not saying that that's not the case and the situation.
But if the phone calls or the emails home are just when Johnny
has done something inappropriate or he didn't turn in his work
or used an inappropriate word,
then that's all that parent is hearing.
So we have to get the parent to better understand the behavioral process
and what it is we're working towards,
why it's so vital to have that continuity,
that using the same language at home and at school
so the student sees that we're working on the same page.
And really just reinforcing the parent for what he or she is doing
and what we want them to continue to do in a positive sense
and letting them know, you know, sending notes home about the student did well.
Sometimes that can really change the tone
if they haven't been receiving such communication.
>> Thank you, Mike.
Here's a quick one for you.
What does RENEW stand for?
>> RENEW stands for Rehabilitation for Empowerment, Natural Support,
Education,
and Work.
So it's a hybrid that involves school-based behavioral health
as well as secondary transition
for transition aged students who are at risk of dropping out,
but really need a lot of support at home and school
to help them back better choices and decisions.
>> Okay, thank you.
Here's a scenario that was sent in and Mike,
I'll address this one.
A high school student who is enrolled in multiple honor
and AP classes is able to maintain above average grades
and scores advanced and proficient on all standardized testing,
but reportedly exhibits self-injurious and suicidal behaviors
and requires multiple hospitalizations.
I'm assuming this is a question regarding whether or not
they can be identified as having an emotional disturbance
given that they are maintaining above average grades.
I'm also getting a lot of questions
about what if they have this diagnosis,
can they also be ED
and many different types of diagnosis have been sent in as questions.
Regardless of what the child has been identified with,
regardless in the past either in school or a private practitioner somewhere,
you must follow those three sections of the definition,
going through them one by one and determining
whether or not the team agrees that they meet those criteria.
So are they having their education adversely affected?
Again, is academic performance the only thing
that we should be looking at in terms of educational performance?
I think the entirety of a student's school day
and what it is that's expected of them should be part of that,
not simply academics.
So looking at the entirety of the student,
the entirety of what it is they are expected to do during a school day
would constitute educational performance and meeting all three sections
of the criterion defined in all three of the sections of the definition
have to be in place
for you to identify a student as having an emotional disturbance
regardless of other diagnosis they may have.
Nowhere does it say if you've already conduct disorder
you cannot be identified with an emotional disturbance
or any other mental health kind of diagnosis.
So simply stick with the three sections of the diagnosis -- I'm sorry,
of the definition, go through those three sections
and if the child meets all of those,
then you have the answer towards whether or not they meet the criterion
to be identified as a student with emotional disturbance.
Okay?
We are out of time just to let you know.
I think we have answered the majority of the questions.
If there are any left Mike
and/or I will answer them and get the information off to you.
If you have any questions later or if any of your colleagues
who might hear this broadcast later,
please, please feel free to contact
either Mike or I and we will be happy to answer any of your questions.
I want to say thank you to Mike in Pittsburgh
and thank you for joining us today and enjoy the rest of your evening.
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