2020 School Board Candidate Answers to SEPTA Questionnaire – Question 3

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Question 3

What steps should APS take to improve the identification, education, overall welfare of students with disabilities in Arlington? 

Answers are listed in alphabetical order by the candidates’ last names.

Cristina Diaz-Torres 

First, APS should improve awareness of the systems we have, especially ATSS. As it stands, nearly 1 in 5 APS staff members do not feel knowledgeable about ATSS (p 24), which means that a significant portion of our students are not getting the services they deserve because of a lack of awareness. In conversations with staff, I have heard that ATSS is complicated and unwieldy. This means we should improve training on what ATSS is, why it supports students, and how staff should access it.  

Secondly, APS should increase awareness and use of high-yield co-teaching strategies. In the 2019 Program Evaluation, staff reported inconsistent use of co-teaching models, particularly high-yield models like team-teaching (p 84). During that evaluation, teaching staff explicitly requested guidance around co-teaching and inclusive practices. Additionally, I personally have heard from staff who believe and care deeply about incorporating inclusive practices but lack the support to do so. This will likely necessitate increased staffing and program shifts, and I look forward to having those discussions as part of revisiting our planning factors. 

Finally, APS should develop a coherent, systematic pre-referral process that is predictable and effectively communicates student needs to parents and caregivers. Given the current COVID-19 crisis, we will need to personalize and differentiate instruction like never before.  We know that students with and without disabilities are going to come back to school with a wide range of learning gaps and trauma that we will need to remedy. It’s an excellent opportunity to pause and revisit our current procedures around documenting student needs, communicating those needs to parents and caregivers, and tracking growth or regression.

Steven Krieger

Parents report that special education services are not consistently available to all students and their families. They report that a gap exists between families that have access to external resources, such as testing, and can advocate for and obtain services for their children while others who rely on APS systems receive less support.

There are a multitude of steps that APS can take to improve delivery of service to students with disabilities.

a)   Identification

Currently, APS does not have a universal screening tool or related practices for the identification of students. APS needs to progress to a universal screening method that would include valid, reliable, and evidence-based assessments conducted with all students or targeted groups of students. This is crucial in order to identify students who are truly at risk of academic failure and, therefore, likely to need additional or alternative forms of instruction to supplement the conventional general education approach.

An alarming example of why this is necessary is in the review of the data regarding identification of students with 504 Plans.

The data suggests that the appropriate consideration and usage of Section 504 is limited, with consideration for eligibility most often occurring when parents brought in outside evaluations. There is historical concern that this circumstance frequently involves relatively high performing students and that similar advocacy does not exist for lower performing students with less involved parents. This fear is corroborated by the low proportionality of economically disadvantaged students identified for 504 referrals compared to their district average. It’s also alarming that white students are overly represented in 504 Plan referrals, particularly when further data suggests that the largest number of students referred for a 504 Plan is in the 11th grade, with referral rates substantially higher at some high schools than others.

With the predominance of white students with 504 Plans, APS needs to review its eligibility practices and analyze student demographic data, at the school and grade levels, to determine

which students have qualified for 504 Plans and what trends exist. A tested and confirmed equitable universal screening process with sufficient monitoring would alleviate these issues.

Another way to support better identification is to improve early childhood outcomes and expand the continuum of services. APS already has comprehensive, inclusive Pre-K programs, including VPI, which provides quality preschool programs for at-risk four-year-olds in the county. APS can continue to improve outcomes by working with the county to ensure that these families actually know about and utilize the VPI program, thus enabling the school system to begin identification of these children with disabilities as quickly as possible in order to produce earlier and betteroutcomes.

b)  Education

APS must develop a consistent, high quality special education program in every school, further close the opportunity gaps, and prepare students with disabilities for post-secondary success. In terms of educational improvement for SWD, there are several ways that APS can improve.

Currently the access to advanced courses is limited for students with disabilities. One of the reasons that this exists is the lack of co-teaching in key courses at the secondary level, including World Languages. It is very difficult for many special education students to succeed in the language classes necessary for advanced diplomas without the additional teaching support. For instance, Yorktown does not provide any co-taught intensified courses to students with disabilities, including 2E students, unless specifically indicated and agreed upon in advance in a student’s IEP. In addition, YHS only offers one of their 23 AP courses in a co-taught setting. This has a significant impact on students with disabilities and their ability to have equal access to accelerated courses in high school.

Likewise, while students with disabilities in APS perform higher than the state average on reading and math Standards of Learning (SOLs) they perform below district and state averages for students without disabilities. APS needs robust cultural competency and professional learning opportunities and training for all staff, not just special education teachers. Nowhere has this point been made more obvious than in the recent Department of Justice settlement agreement regarding support for English Learners. APS needs to fulfill those requirements specific to students with disabilities, and schools need additional support to understand how to provide services to meet the needs of twice exceptional learners.

Presently, APS lacks a system of accountability that aligns with its policies and procedures and would help the school system achieve its vision for high expectations, greater consistency, compliance, and results. As an example of this, in 2015, APS authorized a Dyslexia Task Force, which provided important recommendations on literacy and effective methods for teaching all children to read. A year later the district hired a consultant to assess the district’s work with dyslexic students. Even though APS has these results and recommendations on their website, to date there has been very little follow-through in order to put these guidelines into practice in every school. If APS cannot implement the required systemic changes to better serve dyslexic students the time and money spent on these evaluations means nothing. Systemic best practices and accountability are necessary to realize APS’ vision of inclusivity. Without it APS will never create the robust special education program that the community deserves.

c)  Overall Wellbeing

Our Inclusion Policy is designed to embrace multiple aspects of diversity and inclusion not just for students with disabilities. Professional learning and cultural competency training must be mandatory for all teachers and staff, not just special education specialists. As a community we need to acknowledge the bias and able-ism that exist in our system and creates inequitable outcomes for our children.

There is currently no district-wide tiered approach to behavior management. Instead, the adoption of a school-wide behavior framework is at the discretion of each building principal. While over the past few years, APS has added approximately 6-7 more school-based psychologists and social workers, social-emotional interventions and school-wide behavior frameworks are still at the discretion of each school. This is shown very clearly in the disproportionality in suspension rates. It is unfathomable that students with disabilities represent 19% of the student population but make-up 42% of the secondary suspensions.

We need to look to streamlined behavioral management procedures in all of our schools and look to restorative justice initiatives to build empathy, leadership, and community. These initiatives will keep more students in school and disrupt culturally incentives processes and mentalities that create these types of disparities.

Sandy Munnell

APS needs to work together as a school system to improve the process of identification, education and welfare of students with disabilities. A unifying vision that is embraced by all the schools unanimously is step one. How do we get there?

You will read in the presentation to the school board made in Feb. that the Office of Special Education recognizes the need for “streamlined processes” and “building capacity to impact student success and well-being.” I believe that this is not lip service, but a sincere statement of need. Unpacking “building capacity” will make this clearer. In order to get to success, APS needs to continually develop teacher skills and knowledge. This doesn’t mean sending teachers after school to a one-shot training or a 3-day training, and then reporting out that we have highly trained teachers and assistants. To retain highly qualified teachers, there has to be a commitment to professional development among all staff, including administration. It is a commitment to establishing a division-wide culture of inclusion. The role of Student Support Coordinator who is on site providing modeling, working side-by-side with the gen ed teacher and special education teacher will build that capacity.

As a School Board Member, I would prioritize building such capacity at each school.

Each school should have the same overall vision and implementation plans as every other school. Yet we need to recognize that some schools may have different resource needs, such as nurse aides for specific children, or more speech therapists, or assistive technologies, but these needs can be addressed school by school.

A welcoming school climate is essential to ensure the well-being of students and their families. The Office of Special Education has made course corrections to provide more information to parents, especially through the Parent Resource Center.

David Priddy

We can take three steps immediately to address these needs:

1. APS needs to disseminate the message and understanding that every child learns in a different way. We need to teach the students in the way they need to learn.
2. Special education needs to be embedded in the general education classroom.
3. If we can accomplish the first two, than we will be on the path to change the culture.

Terron Sims

APS needs to take two primary steps – RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming) literacy screening for all prekindergarten and kindergarten students; Fully and properly implement the Arlington Tiered System of Support (ATSS). Having our pre-K and kindergarten students taking RAN allows educators to early identify those students who may need additional assistance in learning how to read. Plus, identifying them at such a young age is much easier and cheaper to manage than identifying them when they are in middle school.

ATSS, when properly implemented, is a phenomenal framework for applying resources to students and parents. APS must create policy measures to ensure that every school utilizes ATSS, and when a school does not, swiftly deal with why. These measures must be clearly identified.

The entirety of the curriculum and its materials ought to be evidence based. Reading [comprehension] and math are the foundations of education. The instruction and materials applied to the teachings of these subjects must be such that our students are actually learning how to read and do math, not learning how to go through the motions or “tricks” to get past the difficult aspects of learning. Learning ought to be fun. I do my best to make my tutoring sessions fun, when appropriate. But, learning is not a game. At the end of the day, APS has to ensure that the instruction and materials meet the requirements of truly teaching our students how to read and do math.

S. Symone Walker

APS needs to aggressively get on the front-end of identification and intervention. Doing so would yield more favorable outcomes fiscally for the district (over the long run); emotionally for students and families; and professionally for teachers.  APS needs a paradigm shift from one of avoidance to one of prevention. The paradigm shift is to make the investment up front to properly and effectively identify and remediate students with disabilities, which will yield a return on investment of fewer students in SpEd, fewer behavioral problems (usually, but not always), fewer disciplinary matters, and significantly less burden on our teachers who end up with students who were missed with diagnosis and/or intervention. The status quo of avoidance just isn’t working and the end result is that APS ends up in a vicious and never ending cycle of triaging special education issues, which winds up costing more.  One prime example of how APS avoids a problem then ends up in a cycle of  “triage,” is the Department of Justice Settlement regarding English Learners.  This then saps all the resources so that other problems fester to the point of investigation, and the triage cycle starts all over again. The longer APS delays addressing problems up front, the longer the and more costly the intervention or remediation in both financial and socioemotional costs.