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, or 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.

The literacy organization Reading Rockets documented 10 steps in the special education process, making it clear what the process looks like for students who need special education services. The accordion below lists these 10 steps. As an educator, understanding these steps helps you proactively approach the process to ensure that students who need special education services receive them.

The Prereferral Process for Special Education

Students who struggle often exhibit signs that indicate they need extra support. As a teacher, when you are aware of your students and their progress, you are better able to provide any necessary additional support to students. Some signs 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)

When a student shows signs of struggling and possible need of additional educational support, educators must follow steps to ensure timely interventions.

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

Two well-recognized prereferral 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)

As part of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports for students in K-12 public schools and of the “Child Find” process, Response to Intervention (RTI) offers a systematic approach for assessing and monitoring the learning of all students. The Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act ( IDEA) ensures that students with disabilities receive 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, they also can use RTI as an early intervention system.

The components of RTI include:

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

A multi-tiered, data-driven intervention model, RTI exposes students to several levels or tiers of increasingly intensive instructional intervention. Initially, RTI calls for delivery of the core curriculum to all students; then, it provides modifications of the curriculum to learners who fail to make adequate progress, while offering even more intensive levels of support 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 framework of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) guides RTI. Both offer multi-tiered interventions featuring a continuum of services that involve increasingly intensive interventions 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 prove unsuccessful, or through child-find, a referral, a formal request to evaluate a student to determine eligibility for special education services, is the next step.  Often, this process begins with a general education teacher who expresses concerns about a student’s academic achievement or social or behavioral problems. A referral may be initiated in certain cases, a referral may be requested because of a student’s cultural or linguistic background or low teacher expectations. Documentation of prereferral intervention strategies plays an important role in initiating a referral.

Documentation for a referral includes student test scores, work samples, RTI or MTSS intervention data, and behavioral observation and checklist data. This information helps create a comprehensive picture of the student and the concerns that need addressing. The school’s multidisciplinary team, child study committee, or special services team (this group may go by other names) review the referral. The committee includes teachers, school psychologists, social workers, and special education teachers. The team reviews the referral and all accompanying documentation to decide on the need for a full assessment. If the team proceeds with a full assessment recommendation, the school sends a written request for evaluation permission 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

Illustrated below and further explained in detail throughout this module, an explicit timeline helps ensure that students receive special education services in a timely manner.

Step 2: The Child is Evaluated

The comprehensive assessment begins once the school receives written permission from the student’s parent or guardian. The school uses the  data gathered from the comprehensive assessment to determine student eligibility for special education services. A time-sensitive timeline must be followed: The comprehensive assessment must be completed within 30 school days after receipt of written permission from the student’s parent or guardian. The  assessments for special education evaluation also must meet certain psychometric criteria, with reliability and validity as the most important.

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 likely student performance on an accountability measure (predictive validity).

A complete comprehensive assessment typically includes:

• Curriculum-based assessments (CBAs) that measure a student’s progress in teacher-delivered content.
• Norm-referenced tests, a standardized measurement that compares a student’s performance to peers of the same age or grade.
• Criterion-referenced tests that 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 complete a comprehensive assessment, the school determines their eligibility to receive special education services, which varies from state to state. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act recognizes 13 categorical disability areas that qualify students 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 student eligibility for special education services, as outlined in step three). If the student meets the eligibility requirements for any of the 13 disability categories outlined by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the school develops a plan of action to help support the student.

The action plan could be an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for school-age students or an Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) for students three years old or younger. Those who teach  in the context of K-12 education most likely will deal with IEPs.The student’s support team develops both plans in partnership with the student’s parent or guardian. The IEP must completed for the student to receive special education services.

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

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/