Before the Student Has Been Found Eligible for Special Education Services

In the United States during the 2021-2022 school year, there were 7.3 million students with disabilities, which comprise 15% of the national public school enrollment (Pew Research Center). And this number continues to increase year after year. As a K-12 public school educator, you will surely educate students with disabilities who benefit from Individualized Education Programs (IEP), but not all of your students with disabilities will have been diagnosed. As a teacher, you will want to be aware of your students’ academic and developmental progress and support them in ways that best align with their needs.

A literacy organization called Reading Rockets documented ten steps in the special education process, making it clear what the process looks like for students who need special education services; these ten steps are listed in the accordion below. As an educator, you will want to know what this process looks like so that when you have students needing special education services, you know how to approach the process proactively.

The Pre-Referral Process for Special Education

Students who are struggling often exhibit signs that indicate they need extra support. As a teacher, you will want to be aware of your students and their progress so that you can provide additional support to students when needed. Some signs indicating that a student may need additional educational services include: 

• Difficulty with reading and/or writing
• Problems with math
• Poor memory
• Problems paying attention
• Trouble following directions
• Difficulty with fine or gross motor skills
• Trouble telling time
• Problems staying organized (Learning Disabilities Association of America, as cited in Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)

Educators must follow steps to ensure timely interventions when a student shows signs of struggling and additional educational support might be needed.

During the pre-referral process, school personnel work together while keeping parents apprised to try and resolve problems informally assessed within the classroom. The pre-referral intervention ensures that all students have the opportunity to receive reasonable accommodations before a formal referral for special education is initiated. This stage is focused on gathering student information, both interindividual and intraindividual, while providing effective, high-quality instruction and implementing interventions for struggling students. When an intervention is put into place, frequent progress monitoring is essential as it will help teachers make instructional decisions.

Two well-recognized pre-referral intervention processes that offer targeted support to all students include Response to Intervention (RTI) and Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS).

Step 1. The Child is Identified as Possibly Needing Special Education Services

Response to Intervention (RTI)

Response to Intervention is part of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports offered to students in K-12 public schools. As part of the “Child Find” process, Response to Intervention is a systematic approach that allows all students to have their learning assessed and monitored. The Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act ( IDEA) ensures that students with disabilities are provided with Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) that is tailored to their individual needs. While schools can use RTI to determine the existence of a learning disability, RTI is also used as an early intervention system.

The components of RTI:

• Universal screening
• Progress monitoring
• Multi-level prevention system
• Data-based decision making (4 Essential Components of a Response to Intervention (RTI) Framework)

RTI is a multi-tiered, data-driven intervention model where students are exposed to several levels or tiers of increasingly intensive instructional intervention. Initially, the core curriculum is delivered to all students; then, modifications of this curriculum are provided to learners who fail to make adequate progress, while even more intensive levels of support are offered to students whose struggles persist. Bayat, Mindes, and Covitt (2010) describe this three-tier approach as follows:

Tier 1. At the first tier, screening of all students occurs, followed by exposure to whole-group, high-quality research-based instruction and progress monitoring.

Tier 2. Children who still have difficulty following the implementation of an evidence-based curriculum receive more intensive support and services.

Tier 3. Pupils who continue to demonstrate a lack of progress are provided individualized and highly intensive services beyond those offered in tier 2. Instruction is typically given by a specialized instructor like a reading specialist or special education teacher.

This video, Response to Intervention: A Tiered Approach to Instructing All Students, explains the process further.

Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS)

The Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) is the framework that guides RTI. Both offer multi-tiered interventions featuring a continuum of services utilizing increasingly intensive interventions and supports based on a student’s documented need. While RTI focuses on students’ academic needs, MTSS takes a more comprehensive approach by addressing the student’s academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs.

Referral

After RTI and MTSS interventions have proven unsuccessful, or through child-find, a referral is the next step toward receiving special education services. A referral for special education is a formal request to evaluate a student to determine eligibility for special education services. Often, this process begins with a general education teacher who has concerns about a student’s academic achievement or social or behavioral problems. A referral may be initiated in certain cases because of a student’s cultural or linguistic background or low teacher expectations. That is why documentation of pre-referral intervention strategies is so important.

Documentation often included in a referral are student test scores, work samples, RTI or MTSS intervention data, and behavioral observation and checklist data. Including this information helps create a comprehensive picture of the student and the concerns that need addressing. The referral is reviewed by the school’s multidisciplinary team, child study committee, or special services team (this group may go by other names). The committee includes teachers, school psychologists, social workers, and special education teachers. The team aims to review the referral and all accompanying documentation and decide whether a full assessment is justified. If the team proceeds with a full assessment recommendation, a written request for evaluation permission is sent to the parent or guardian. To proceed with a comprehensive assessment, the school must obtain permission from the parent or guardian.

Timeline from the Point of Referral to IEP Development

There is an explicit timeline needs to be adhered to so that students can receive special education services in a timely manner. This timeline is illustrated below and explained in further detail throughout this module.

Step 2: The Child is Evaluated

The comprehensive assessment can begin once the school has received written permission from the student’s parent or guardian. The data gathered from the comprehensive assessment will then be used to determine if the student is eligible for special education services. It is important to note that a time-sensitive timeline must be adhered to. The comprehensive assessment must be completed within 30 school days of the school receiving permission from the student’s parent or guardian. Additionally, the assessments used for special education evaluation must meet certain psychometric criteria, with the most important being reliability and validity.

A reliable measure will likely produce the same results in measuring what it is intended to measure. A valid measure measures what was intended (construct validity), corresponds well to other valid measures (concurrent validity), and predicts with accuracy how students are likely to perform on an accountability measure (predictive validity).

A complete comprehensive assessment includes:

• Curriculum-based assessments (CBAs) that measure a student’s progress in content delivered by the teacher.
• Norm-referenced tests, a standardized measurement that compares a student’s performance to peers of the same age or grade.
• Criterion-referenced tests which measure specific performance or content standards on a scale from basic to proficient.
• Intelligence scales (also called IQ tests) that measure a student’s overall cognitive ability.
• Academic achievement tests to understand the student’s present level of academic performance in subjects such as reading, math, or writing.

Understanding the Special Education Process from Multiple Perspectives

Step 3: Eligibility is Decided

After students have completed a comprehensive assessment, the school determines if they are eligible to receive special education services. Eligibility for special education services varies from state to state. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act recognizes 13 categorical disability areas under which students can qualify for special education services.

13 Disability Categories

After completing a comprehensive assessment, the student and their parent or guardian meet with the multidisciplinary team to discuss the results. If the meeting takes place 30 days or more following parental consent, the student’s parent or guardian must be provided with the complete assessment before the meeting; otherwise, if the meeting occurs within 30 days of parental consent, the parent or guardian must be provided the complete assessment at the time of the meeting.

Step 4: The Child is Found Eligible for Services

Following the comprehensive assessment, the school decides if the student is eligible for special education services (as outlined in step 3). If the student meets the eligibility requirements for any of the 13 disability categories outlined by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, then a plan of action is created to help support the student.

Depending on the student’s age, the action plan could be an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP). If the student is three years old or younger, an IFSP is developed, whereas if the student is school-aged, then an IEP is developed. The student’s support team develops both plans in partnership with the student’s parent or guardian. Given that you will most likely be teaching in the context of K-12 education, you will probably deal most with IEPs. For the student to receive special education services, the IEP must first be developed.

Before the Student Has Been Found Eligible for Special Education Services

References

4 Essential Components of a Response to Intervention (RTI) Framework

10 Steps in the Special Education Process

Bayat, M., Mindes, G., & Covitt, S. (2010). What does RTI (response to intervention) look like in preschool? Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(6), 493–500.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Pew Research Center

Schaeffer, K. (2023, July 24). What federal education data shows about students with disabilities in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/24/what-federal-education-data-shows-about-students-with-disabilities-in-the-us/