On Hiatus

You're probably saying, "Duh". I really want to keep this blog going but it's really hard to do. I became really busy this fall. I decided to take on RTI for my building and become the RTI facilitator. I know, I know, you probably remember my RTI updates and rants where I adamantly opposed becoming involved with RTI. But here's why I did it: I want it to be done correctly. No one else in my building knows what to do, so I took it on. The other reason is because I have a new principal. I knew that I would be able to require teachers and specialists to follow a protocol if the principal backed me up. It was also a refreshing change to have someone else in the building that was aware of RTI. I've been fighting this battle by myself for 3 years now. So that's why I took it on. Many of my colleagues were surprised and thought that someone made me do it. No, I volunteered (after much soul-searching).

I seriously logged in to say that this would be my last post for a while. I started with the idea that I was going to blog every day, then it turned to every 2 or three days, then it was once a week, and now I haven't posted since October. I'm incredibly busy at work. I've remained anonymous so in order to maintain my anonymity I don't blog from work. By the time I get home I don't even want to look at a computer, so my blogging has suffered. I was about to pull the plug on this blog until I saw a comment. Sara C. commented on my Teach for America post. I often think that I'm just blogging for no one in particular. I know a couple of people follow my blog, but I never thought that people care enough to comment and disagree with what I have to say. That sounds like I'm adding something to the conversation on education! I can live with that.

So I guess I'm saying that I'm not gone yet. I'll be back in 2011. I hope I can keep the conversation going.

BBC

It's Been A Long Time...

Sorry folks,

I can't believe I let almost 2 months pass between posts. I guess that's what happens when you are in the thick of annual review season. Let's recap the last 2 months.

-I finished reading the entire Percy Jackson and The Olympians Series (all 5 books) by Rick Riordan. I highly recommend them. I think they are at a 4th grade reading level, but I know plenty of kids that enjoyed those books. My favorites were Book 1, The Lightning Thief; Book 3, The Titan's Curse; and Book 5, The Last Olympian. Rick Riordan just started a new series of books based on Egyptian mythology. Those should be good as well.

-The search for a new principal is ongoing. There were several rounds of interviews and they may have narrowed it down to a handful of candidates. The process is so secretive that only those on the interview committee know anything, and they aren't saying a word.

-For the first time ever my teacher's union gave concessions for the upcoming school year. We took a contract extension with a limited raise, in the hopes that the economy will turn around and we will get a bigger raise the year after. This will prevent any layoffs and program cuts. This was threatened to happen last year with every new teacher in each building getting a pink slip. In the end, only 4 teachers were laid off, and I believe most of them retired anyway.

-Year one of RTI is coming to a close and there have been mixed results. Our initial evaluations have gone down a lot. My team is afraid that we will be swamped next year. We will wait and see. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds with a new principal since my current one is in charge of RTI.

-I have a student that likes to sleep. He has a gastro-intestinal issue, and his parents are not reliable. He has missed a lot of school. He absolutely hates his teacher and does whatever he can to get out of her class. We are starting to realize that he can be manipulative and we need to come up with a survival plan for him and us until the end of the year.

-I was recently trained on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). I'm excited about adding a new weapon to my testing arsenal. I already have 2 students to use it on next year.

-For some reason, parents think that they can just send in a letter saying that they want their child tested and then "poof" it magically happens. They are all astonished by the 60 calendar day evaluation timeline. I have either received or heard about 3 such requests in the last 2 days. That's all for now. I'll try to keep this updated more frequently.

BBC

RTI: An Update 4

My principal forwarded a referral to the PPT last week. I had the chance to present it to the team to have them review it and decide if we would accept it or not. I have learned that my teammates and I have the same philosophy on RTI, and I knew that they would have questions about the referral. The big question: Where was the data? I sat in on the meeting when the RTI team decided that this particular student "flat-lined" and wasn't making progress. My response was, "What about Tier 3?" My question was met with this response from my principal, "The administrators met and we were told not to get hung up on what is a Tier 2 intervention and what is a Tier 3 intervention." So I accepted this referral knowing that my team would reject it. This was better than me outright rejecting it at the RTI meeting, even though I could have. So the referral was missing some key information, such as the starting and end dates for interventions, the dates for some of the tests, and the pre- and post-test data for the interventions. Essentially, a lot of pertinent data was missing, and they needed to provide it.

Once again, the issue is that those that are properly trained and well-versed in RTI are not responsible for it. Nor do we want to be. But regular ed teachers have no clue how to do this and they aren't providing the right information nor are they conducting proper progress monitoring. This whole operation has been piecemeal and the worse refrain that the administration has used is "this will look different in different schools." So there is no expectation of uniformity, except in really lame cases such as the form that people fill out. We wanted more information and felt that the RTI form is inadequate because it tends to lead to underreporting. When I suggested changing it, I was met with some resistance. Can we add an additional form? It's obvious that this whole thing is a mess because people have no concept of what we are doing. People are frustrated because they aren't sure of when PPS gets involved. I've been running interference between my principal and the speech and language pathologist because there is a misunderstanding on how language issues should be detected. I suggested to my speech and language pathologist that she create a screener that looks at articulation and some basic language issues. She should spell out each step with boxes and charts and labels so that each part is completed. There should also be a criteria of 80% proficiency, so that teachers know what is expected. Then each teacher gets one when they suspect some sort of language issue. That should stave off the mob that's slowly building. Unfortunately, my SLP hasn't received any directives from her supervisor, so she is at a loss. Hopefully, this language screener will appease my principal and we can keep this process moving along.

BBC

RTI: An Update 3

As I suspected, I'm being slowly sucked into the RTI vortex at my school. We've started the process, yet no one knows what they are doing, and I'm afraid that it will somehow disintegrate into our former pre-referral system. Ugh.

My principal has begun the process of looking over referrals. I expressed my concern that there were only 2 referral forms on her desk. Teachers are still in the mode of "I don't think this child is doing well, let me fill out a referral form." They don't get it. The data, the numbers should tell them who gets referred. Am I supposed to believe that only 2 children are significantly behind in reading? Almost everyone did well on the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment)? Really? My principal first tried to find a time to schedule an RTI meeting so that relevant staff would be present. She doesn't work well with visual logic problems. I was able to figure out the day and time when everyone could meet. I guess this spoke to my scheduling skills. Mistake #1.

A couple of days ago, my principal asked me how to move forward. I told her my vision of how RTI should look. Mistake #2. (Damn it, I said I would profess to no knowledge of RTI!) Then today, she told me about her administrators' meeting with the superintendent. The principals were complaining about the RTI process and the confusion that was ensuing in their schools. People are stressed out and felt as if there is no direction coming from Central Office. Well, that would be the case when Central Office tells everyone that RTI will look different in each school. Now principals are comparing what other schools are doing and they are upset over the differences. Initiating RTI without a clear cut view of how it should look in every school, and without some uniformity was a major mistake. But what do I know, I'm just a school psychologist. Wait, I know everything! Because unlike all the other education professions, school psychologists have been talking about RTI for years now. Years. And everyone else is being introduced to it now. Unbelievable. The kicker: My principal remarked, "Well, you and I will have to figure out how we're going to run RTI here." We??? (sigh)

BBC

RTI: An Update 2

After the last few days, I am starting to feel a little more confident about the RTI process in my school. It has been promising that my principal has taken charge and responsibility of the whole process. This is a refreshing change, because I initially thought she would make me the RTI coordinator. The rollout will be rough, but I'm feeling better about because I won't be responsible.

BBC

RTI: An Update

My district decided to roll out RTI at all elementary schools this year for grades K-2. It decided to do this by having a 2 hours inservice with every k-2 teacher, elementary special education teacher elementary school psychologist, social worker and speech pathologist. It was a packed room with a bunch of confused people. There was too much information and not enough explanation on why RTI is a different concept. That's my main gripe: So far, only special ed people have been talking about RTI. Regular ed teachers haven't been talking about it. So when they sat in the inservice, most of them had no idea what the presenters were talking about. Each school should have had its own day to discuss this. The teachers need a new frame of reference. Many times I heard teachers still using terms as "referral" and "pre-referral" and they just didn't get it.

Unfortunately, my principal is to blame for the teachers from my school misunderstanding RTI. She erroneously told them that RTI was just like our broken pre-referral system. Therefore, the teachers didn't bother to pay attention. She is in denial, and we need her to get a grip and realize that this is a paradigm shift. The old way is dead. RTI is now.

The literacy specialists are inviting a teacher from a school that ran a pilot RTI program. We hope to learn how they adjusted and what role each person played. That's the main concern from the support staff: How do we fit into RTI? If our principal isn't taking the lead, then we need to be proactive and figure out how we fit before someone tries to use us as before.

BBC

RTI: The Experiment

"It's just like stuff we've already been doing." That's what my principal said in response to teachers asking "what's RTI?", when she informed them that there was a professional development day that would focus on it. Yeah, this year is going to be great. (sarcasm alert) When she said that I looked across the room to a couple of special ed. teachers and chuckled. This is going to be a mess. Where to begin? First, there is nothing happening in my school that is related to RTI. For some reason my principal thinks that it's better to introduce it as something that has been done before, but it's not. This is a huge shift from everything we've been doing. Our pre-referral process is a nightmare, and it needed something major to fix it. This is a start if it's implemented well. Second, the fact that teachers haven't heard of RTI is a major concern, but it has always been my concern. This is supposed to be a regular ed initiative, but regular ed people haven't been talking about it. This should be interesting.

BBC

RTI Can't Come Soon Enough

I have this feeling that I will be signing a record number of kids for testing this spring. There are a number of students who have been retained and aren't making academic progress (Big surprise! When you have a kid repeat a grade but don't change anything, what do you expect? What's that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results?) Well, now there are few kids that are basically in a holding pattern and we need to land these planes before they come crashing to the ground. Unfortunately, I feel like air traffic control and once I have these planes landed, each one is waiting for a gate to open and I have no gates available. Today I felt like I had to land one of those planes prematurely. There was a first grader that was recommended for retention last year who has made no progress in his academics. There was some inconsistency with attendance in kindergarten, which I forgot about at the meeting. It could be argued that there has been a lack of instruction. He should be receiving kindergarten instruction, yet he was getting first grade instruction. We met with the parents today and I wanted to give them some possible options on how to move forward. I hoped that there would be other interventions that we could use, but there weren't any viable options to present. The literacy specialist was absent and I wasn't sure about her availability to implement an intervention. It was hard to offer choices when I wasn't sure what the choices were. In the end the kid will be evaluated, and I'm not sure what he will qualify for. I just wish there was a clear procedure of how to address the needs of students before moving towards special education. That's where RTI will hopefully be effective. The 3-tiered approach to interventions will be welcomed. My state is supposed to start using RTI next fall, but with the economic crisis, I'm not sure if the state education budget will be able to fund this initiative. Something has to happen soon. I don't like dealing with such a nebulous matter.

Disappointment

I wasn't sure how to title this one, but "disappointment" seemed the most relevant. I attended a district meeting on Response to Intervention (RTI). My district is moving towards using RTI in the near future and we have been meeting to figure out how we will implement it. There was discussion to use one of the elementary schools to pilot a program so that we could see how effective the various components are. Unfortunately, the conversation turned to the school that was proposed and how much it differed from other schools in the district. The proposed school serves a more affluent population than some of the other schools, including mine. Some of the members of the committee had either worked in my school or were familiar with the mentality of the teachers in my building. They conveyed a message that said that no one else would buy into the plan because the school it was piloted on had a different population than some of the other schools. For some reason, if it works in the affluent school, it won't work in the working-class schools. I don't get this mentality. But hearing these teachers talk about how hard it would be to convince teachers in some of the working-class schools to buy into the program, made me think that there is little optimism in our society-which is disappointing on several levels.

For those not familiar with RTI: It is a system for determining special education eligibility for a learning disability. It's a system, a protocol if you will. You set up how it will run, and you do it. (This is really simplified, and I'm not doing it justice. That's why I linked to another resource. Consult the link to get a better understanding of what I'm glossing over.) As long as the people are in place, and everyone is doing progress monitoring properly, then it should work. I don't get why people are so convinced that things won't work, especially because of where initiatives are implemented. Why should that matter? Maybe I am naive, or am I just hopeful? This mentality is so pervasive in education and I'm realizing how much has to change in order for real change to occur.

BBC