Educators tout early intervention
A program to help struggling elementary school students before they fail has seen success in the Coeur d’Alene schools and is spreading throughout the state and nation.
Called Response to Intervention, the program involves monitoring a child’s progress in daily classroom activity and through testing in reading, writing, speech and general behavior to see where improvement is needed. Once problem areas are identified, an improvement plan is crafted and meetings are held with parents, informing them of their child’s struggles and detailing the school’s plan to help.
“What it is is an early intervention model to get kids the help they need sooner,” said Brandi Meade, a fifth-grade teacher at Dalton Elementary. Meade is considered an expert on the program. “In the old model, it was a wait to fail – they weren’t getting a lot of support,” she said.
Meade has spoken at education conferences regarding the program and will travel to Washington, D.C., at the end of the month to participate in a national conference sponsored by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education.
Dalton has had the program in place since 1999 and is considered a pioneering school in the nation, said Pam Pratt, director of elementary education for the Coeur d’Alene School District. Meade estimates that about 10 percent to 15 percent of Dalton’s 400 students are on an improvement plan.
Kim Robbins said the progress her daughter made on an improvement plan at Dalton has been remarkable. Robbins moved to North Idaho from Oregon a few years ago, when her daughter was in second grade. The girl struggled with reading and math in Oregon, and Robbins said it was difficult to jump through the bureaucratic hoops in the school system and get her child the help she needed. At Dalton, things were different, she said.
“They just went right to work on her and really got the whole thing going,” Robbins said. “It was just a godsend, really.”
The program is basically a more organized way of doing what most teachers have always done: give the kids who are struggling additional instruction and attention, said David Miller, principal of Sorensen Elementary School, which is implementing the program this year. The nine other elementary schools already have the program in place.
“It’s what’s been done by good teachers forever,” Miller said.
But it’s also more comprehensive in that it involves more than just the teacher. The principal, counselor, special education teacher and parents all have a hand in drafting an improvement plan.
“It’s a team approach, because one person doesn’t think of the number of interventions that we come up with,” Pratt said.
Parents can seem overwhelmed the first time they sit down with school officials to discuss their child’s struggles and what can be done. But Pratt, Meade and Dalton Principal Kathy Liverman said most leave elated that so many people are giving their child so much attention.
“What we’ve found is typically they’re so thrilled that so many people care about their child,” Liverman said.
The improvement plan can consist of as few or as many additional intervention steps as the child’s needs warrant. Progress is monitored and additional meetings between school officials and the parent are scheduled as needed. Adjustments are made to the improvement plan if the student doesn’t improve. If the improvement steps taken over an extended period of time still don’t work, the student could be targeted for special education.
The program gives school officials a more accurate way of assessing who needs special education programs and who doesn’t, said Jim Topp, a psychologist at Fernan Elementary School, one of the first to adopt the program. School officials agree that programs like this help prevent students from being mislabeled as in need of special education.
“It’s based on the curriculum rather than some standardized testing,” Topp said. “It’s really oriented toward problem-solving.”
The state Department of Education offers grants to school districts to pay for the training needed to get the program going, and Pratt said it’s likely that all elementary schools in the state soon will be required to offer it.
“At Coeur d’Alene we don’t like to wait until that happens,” Pratt said. “We like to take advantage of that grant money and be ahead of the game.”
Response to Intervention can seem bureaucratic because of the loads of additional paperwork and meetings it can pile on a school, Meade said, but the results make it all worthwhile.
Student achievement at Dalton has improved since the program’s implementation, she said, and the number of students needing special education has dropped.
“It may be more work at first, but it’s what’s best for kids.”