[Dianna]

I will probably be taking notes in minutes in IEP meetings. How detailed should the notes be? What info should be included?

[Jenny]

Great question Dianna. Definitely check first to see if your district has a template for note taking. Some districts have already created that for the notetakers at the meeting. Check a few examples in your district. Pull some initials and triennial assessments from last year and see what type of information is included. I know that the district that I was helping last year had some COVID-related statements that the district wanted us to include. When I take notes, I start with the agenda on the page and then give some highlights for each section. I always ensure to indicate that parents were asked if they had any questions and indicate parent replies. Hope this helps!

[Suzanne]

Hi, My name is Suzi and I am a 2nd year school psych. I was listening to the intervention discussion and recall something being said about the school psych being reluctant and maybe even refusing to assess a student who has not been provided any or maybe not proper interventions.

Neither my 1st year district nor my intern district used this strategy and therefore had an influx of students being assessed and often eligible for sped services. The district I will be working with this coming year has 18% of their students in special education which seems very high to me. How can one go about addressing the need of interventions with the team? I would assume I would need to consult with the sped department first at the district level to see if their legal teams allows this.???

[Jenny]

Great question Suzi. Remember that there is a difference between child find and being found eligible. The district may be required to assess a student even if they have not yet received and exhausted general education resources, but one of the exclusionary factors under SLD is that the student must require special education and their needs cannot be met within the general education setting. If you have a student you are evaluating and they have needs that could be met possibly within the general education interventions, the team can find the student not eligible at the time and try the interventions. Does this help?

[Suzanne]

Jenny,

Yes, I know about the exclusionary factors and I feel there should always be caution around using those as they are so subjective based on other factors. For instance, if a school site does not have adequate interventions in place can you still use that exclusion? I have even been at sites where not all Kindergarten teachers use phonics to teach reading.

If during my evaluation, a child is found to have a learning disability and interventions were not tried, would it be an acceptable practice as the School Psychologist to write in my report that I do not consider the student eligible for sped at this time because of a lack of interventions and urge the team try interventions first? I worry that would create a division between myself and the gen ed teachers.

Also, at what age or grade would this not be prudent if say a student has struggled (fell through to cracks) for say 2-3 years and are now in 4th grade but interventions have never been used?

Thank you,

Suzi

[Jenny]

This would definitely be a conversation I would have with my district leadership to see how they would want me to handle this. In general, I would feel uncomfortable using a “lack of interventions” as an exclusionary factor if my school site did not have any interventions. That would be different if I had a student in the 4th grade who was struggling in reading and we never tried any of the intervention we actually had for students at that school site. Of course, each student is different. If I had a student with phonological processing concerns which helped to explain their reading decoding skills, and the intervention program was specifically phonologically based, I would likely want to try that program before saying the child had a disability.

[Kimberly]

I very much enjoyed the information on MTSS that was shared during the boot camp as my district is beginning to commit more people, time, funding (we will have full-time psychologists at all elementary schools starting this year!) to support a consistent building of this framework. I also just attended the CA MTSS Professional Learning Institute and was curious about what appeared to be a lack of representation from CASP/school psychologists (with the exception of Jessica Hannigan!). There was a very strong representation by CA school counselors (by no means am I inferring an us vs. them… just curious). Do you know if there is ongoing collaboration between CASP and the CA MTSS people? In my opinion, the conference gave the impression that we (SP’s) are not an integral part of MTSS implementation/development.

[Jenny]

Hi Kimber,

Great question and the answer is I don’t know. I would encourage you to reach out to the association and ask that question directly!