Featured Speakers:
- Tori Ballew, Program Manager, Director of Multi-Tiered System of Supports and Special Education System Review Services, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Leading Together webinar series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, “Leading for Better Outcomes: 10 Recommendations for Stronger Special Education Systems.” Our featured speaker today is Tori Ballew, program manager at WestEd and director of Multi-Tiered System of Supports and Special Education System Review Services. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Okay, and now I’d like to take a moment to introduce WestEd. As a nonpartisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with schools, districts, states, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning services, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. And now I’d like to pass the mic over to Tori. Tori, take it away.
Tori Ballew:
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be here. I’m really excited to talk to you all. So yes, like Danny said, I’m Tori Ballew. I’ve been with WestEd for a number of years now. I live in Missouri. So I saw someone from Illinois. I see another few more Midwesterners there. It’s great to see you all. I’ve been working with WestEd in the areas of MTSS and special education program reviews. And what I’m gonna share with you today is about some of the revelations that we’ve had doing a number of these reviews over the past decade or so.
So, what we’ve discovered is although districts differ across the nation, we do these reviews all across the nation and we do them on all different sizes of districts, and regardless of that, we’ve noted the same systemic gaps seem to surface again and again. But one thing is always the same: districts rarely lack effort or good intentions. Most of the time, folks are working as hard as they possibly can and just churning away, doing everything they can to make things work and get the best outcomes for students. However, we see the same systemic issues and gaps surfacing over and over again.
But what consistently separates very strong programs from those that are struggling are systems, whether or not you have them in place or not. So, one of the big recommendations we’ll be talking about are your systems and how they’re aligned and integrated. So, five things we’ll go over. First of all, we’ll talk about really about why reviewing your system matters and why what we do is grounded in data. I’ll talk a little bit about the process of doing a review so that you have a little insight in how this happens and how you can look at your own data and look at your own programs.
Then we’ll talk about what we consistently find, the challenge areas that surface nearly in every district over and over again, our top 10 areas that move the needle, and then what you can kind of look at yourself in your own district. So when we do a special education review for a district, we look at five system domains. We start with policies and procedures. In this area, we’re looking at accountability, procedural guidance, IEPs. We’re looking for manuals, documentation. How does your system work? What guidance are you giving out? We’re also looking at that compliance piece and ed benefit piece of your IEPs, your programmatic descriptions and how those are functioning.
We also look at inclusive practices, your learning environments. What does that look like in how are you operationalizing what you say your policies and procedures are? What are the instructional practices and supports? And we always do this in combination with general education. We look at it as a collaboration. Special education is a system within a system. It’s really important that we don’t look at ourselves as a silo and we look at it as existing within an even larger system. So that brings us to the next one, that systems integration. Is there communication and shared responsibility across the district between special education and general education?
Are we using data and problem solving to make decisions based upon no more “I think, I feel, I kind of think that this is happening, or I feel like it’s doing this.” Are we using data, and do we have problem solving procedures in place? We also look at human and fiscal resources. How are we selecting staff? How are we retaining staff? What are we doing for staff once we have them? How do we onboard staff? How do we provide them their high-quality professional learning? How do we budget? How do we allocate resources throughout the district?
Every district we talk to has a different process, but how does that happen for your district? And then finally, we look at family and community engagement. How do you support families within your district and advocate for them? Post-secondary outcomes. What’s happening for students to prepare them post-high school, and then what’s happening after high school? And then of course, pre-K integration. What’s happening before they come into kindergarten? So, we look at all of those different domains to get one full picture of a district. And that seems really overwhelming and comprehensive, and it is whenever you decide that you wanna do a comprehensive evaluation or program review.
All of our reviews, when we do a comprehensive one, we try to answer basic questions. First of all, we wanna know how your program compares to your state and similar districts. So we always look for peers, both demographically, size and students. We wanna compare you to folks that are similar, but also the state. Where do you sit in comparison to what the state overall is? We also wanna look at achievement for students with disabilities compared to the state and also within their non-disabled peers. We wanna look at how effective your current programs are and what evidence-based changes might help.
And then how can findings become real, actionable, an implementation plan? It’s really important that all along, whenever we do a review, we do this as a partnership so that nothing is a big surprise and that we’re planning meaningfully for those recommendations. So, there’s just three phases. The first is planning and preparing, building communication, timelines. We take the next step to collect and analyze the data. And then the third and final phase is reporting and acting. Our process, we have a huge team that comes in to do these reviews, and we can do a fairly good-sized review in about six months, but that’s us.
What we’re gonna talk about at the end of this is kind of like how could you do this for yourself? Six months would be kind of pie in the sky for you to do any kind of review for yourself and implement recommendations unless you have a dedicated team to do that. So whenever you think about this, think about us, we are a dedicated team working on that. So benchmarked data. We always do, we get multiple voices. We pull in for this through those peer districts, but we also do surveys and we survey district staff, site-level staff, families.
We provide it in multiple languages. We do that typically through SurveyMonkey. We do interviews and focus groups with teachers, support staff, students, family members, and we also do observations. We do walkthroughs in classes, and we do those interviews with site leaders. We do that so that we have an opportunity to see what it looks like for students with disabilities on a regular basis within the classroom environment, both in special education and general education. We like for site leaders and for special education folks from the district to go with us so that they have an opportunity to see that too.
So, what do we consistently find in this long process, this very intensive process? There are six areas that consistently emerge. The first one is communication: breakdowns between departments, schools, and families. This is an area that we see all the time where people report that one department doesn’t speak to the other. One school doesn’t hear from the district. They don’t know what a new policy, a new procedure is. Families report that they don’t hear from the school, they don’t hear from special education. Communication is a huge area that is reported as an issue. I always talk to people about you say you’ve said it five times; say it five more times because it’s hard to ensure that everybody heard it those first five times.
You can’t communicate enough in enough ways. I know sometimes we feel like we’re over-communicating, but we do hear a lot of times that folks don’t feel like they are communicated with. And that’s both internally and externally. So we hear that among departments, between teachers and staff, the staff and administrators, and we also hear it from family and community. The next area is training and support. We often hear that there’s inconsistent professional development across staff roles, meaning a couple of different things. A lot of times, there is not enough special education professional learning for general education staff.
We do ask in our surveys what kind of professional learning you feel like you need. And over and over again, we hear from general education teachers, they need to know how to help students with disabilities in their classroom. But we also hear that paraprofessionals and other adult support roles need more professional learning. And we also hear that people need more professional learning on how to collaborate better, how general education and special education could collaborate better. So, learning, having more opportunities to focus on that level of professional development between general education and special education is a hotspot.
Additionally, we do hear a lot from special education teachers that they do not receive enough professional learning on the general education curriculum. That is a request quite frequently. Another area would be policies and procedures. Many, many, many times, we do not find policies and procedures are written down or current, or if they are, no one knows where to find them. And so that is an area that I would… It’s low-hanging fruit. If you have them, make sure they’re accessible to everyone, that they’re updated frequently, referred to, used, kept current, and operational all the time because that is definitely one that, that’s like the first thing that we start with, is we need your policy and procedure manual.
We ask that question in focus groups. We talk to teachers and site administrators about policy and procedures. But many, many times, we hear, “I don’t know where that is. I don’t think we have one.” And then we’ll hear from administrators, “Yeah, we have one, it’s right here. I’ve worked on it for two years.” So, that’s always an easy place to start. The use of data. So, data collected. Sometimes we’re data-rich, we got lots of data, but we’re not systemically using it to make decisions. So, data doesn’t do us any good unless we are literate about how we’re using it.
So, we do a lot of data collection and then interpreting it with districts about this is what this data means. One of the biggest data points that we show districts is their enrollment versus their percent of students with disabilities. If your enrollment’s declining, your number of students with disabilities should most likely be declining too. But what we find is enrollment will decline and then their percent of students with disabilities will stay the same or grow. The other thing is, you know, looking at those trends, longitudinal trends over time in category of eligibility, watching your disproportionality numbers, things like that.
So, the use of data is another area. And going back to the professional learning collaboration, we do find frequently there is a limited partnership between general and special education. Unfortunately, we’re still seeing special education sitting on an island in many places and not enough collaboration between the two. We would love to see more collaboration, and so would they. We see a lot of requests for more time for special education and general education to collaborate, especially during planning times for shared students. For co-teaching, you know, they need to have planning time together, and so a lack of that is definitely affecting the quality of the co-teaching.
So it’s not just at the teacher level, but it’s also at the district level. Curriculum and instruction. Having collaboration time with district special education is also just as important as a co-teaching collaboration time. And finally, the finance. We do do fiscal recommendations and fiscal audits. Sometimes we find unclear fiscal procedures and staff allocation processes, not really knowing who’s allocating what or how to go about obtaining an additional staff member and not having who has control over who’s allocating getting a new teacher, or special education pays for it and then the building is the one that gets to add teachers.
So having really clear fiscal procedures, having a solid understanding of things like maintenance of effort, because if your funding might be declining or you need to make some cuts, you need to really take into consideration maintenance of effort. Those of you that are special education, you know these things, but we wanna make sure that there is good communication between the business office and special education, especially if some of you may have business office people who don’t have a special education background. So having solid fiscal procedures and having good communication about that is really important. So, top 10 recommendations, I’m gonna start with number 10, is from policies and procedures or IEP-related issues.
We find those IEP-related issues can be resolved from having your policies and procedures. Those are just things of, like, making sure boxes are checked and Ts are crossed and Is are dotted. IEPs, we often find not measurable goals, making sure goals are measurable, checking your IEPs. Number nine, guidance on adding and removing adult support. We find that districts need to have some level of guidance on how do you discuss adding and removing adult support? Number eight, collaborating across general and special education. Ensure that’s happening. Make it happen. Find ways to make it happen. Number seven, training and PD for all staff.
It’s essential that everyone across the district, not just special education, gets a chance to be a part of special education professional learning, and about general education curriculum. Number six, those fiscal procedures and competencies. It’s really important that there’s a solid understanding of those. Number five, one of my favorite recommendations. If there is not a clear shared vision of what special education is for the district, that is a number one place to start. I often ask if I’m doing an interview or a focus group, “What’s it mean to be in special education in your district? What is the vision for special education in your district?” Or if they say, “We do inclusion in our district,” well, tell me what that means.
What’s the vision for that? Everybody needs to have the vision. Like, what does that mean? And rarely can people tell me. Well, so there’s nothing tangible about it. No one really knows what that actually means. Well, it doesn’t just mean that we’re putting students in the classroom. What does it mean to be inclusive? So, having a really clear shared vision, everybody’s on the same page, everybody’s in the same boat, we have the same rows, we’re going in the same direction, we’re all going to the same island together, everybody’s rowing together, okay? So having that shared vision that everybody is going together is a super great place to start.
It’s a great way to kick off the school year, and it’s a great way to emphasize that communication piece. The next one is an inclusive climate and culture. That kind of goes back to the silo piece I mentioned earlier, removing the “us and them” type of mentality and having shared responsibility for all students. You know, all students are general education students first and foremost, 100%. So, reminding and ensuring that everyone has that shared vision, that every student is a general education student first and foremost, and we all have responsibility for all students at all times.
So, inviting and building that inclusive climate and culture. And then number three, program descriptions and having a full continuum of services. Regardless of whether you consider yourself an inclusive district, you still need to be able to provide a full continuum of services because, regardless, if the IEP team determines that a student needs a service, we need to be able to provide it. And oftentimes, every district we go to, they have different programs and different services, different classes that they’ll talk about, but many times what happens is they build a program and then that program morphs over time.
So, what they originally intended this classroom for students with autism to look like, they’ve snuck other types of students with different types of disabilities or different needs in this classroom, and now this whole program’s morphed and nobody really knows what types of students this classroom will best serve. And so it’s really, really vital that if you have a program, if you want a program in your district, that you have a very solid description of that program and you stand behind it, because if you’re not very careful, it morphs over time and then nobody really knows what that program is, and it’s not really being successful and you’ve got all kinds of students in there with different needs, and no one is really benefiting from the services of that program.
And I already brought it up, number two for me is that living policy and procedure manual. It needs to be living. It needs to be accessible. Folks need to use it. If I walked into any special education classroom and I said, “Hey, do you have a policy and procedure manual?” that teacher should say, “Oh, yes, let me show you.” Whether it’s online or it’s a book or wherever it is, it should be something that they feel confident in using and it should be like, “This is the best thing in the world because I use it all the time to help me.” And finally, a multi-tiered system of supports.
And yes, I know that is not the sole responsibility of special education, nor is it even the responsibility of special education. However, we derive great benefit from having a system of supports for all students, and I’ll talk a little bit about that in just a second. So, spotlight number one, that multi-tiered system of supports. That is all about what happens to students before they are identified or are eligible, may become eligible for an IEP. It’s about building that community, that communication and shared responsibility, building in tiered instruction and intervention for students. It’s building reliable data systems and problem solving.
It’s building up this general education system for students who are struggling so that special education is not the ones with the pixie dust. We’re not the only people on the block. We’re not the only ones who have the ability to help students who are struggling. This is so all students have something, that we can work with all students and give them supports. That doesn’t mean that a student with an IEP doesn’t get intervention, because they are general education students first and foremost. They are a student with an IEP, but they’re still a general education student.
So, having a multi-tiered system of supports, that is for everyone and it benefits everyone greatly. Number two, that living policy and procedure manual. It is the single most common gap in guidance that exists. And a lot of times, they’ll say, “Well, we tell them to do this.” But it’s not written down anywhere, or it is, it’s not current, or it’s just not being used. And again, those program descriptions. A full continuum of placements. You need every placement option that you have clearly defined, and you need staff calibrated on how to use it. Of course, we need to be flexible enough that we do what’s right for students and we make decisions in IEP teams, but we also need to have a full understanding of what we have in the district.
And we also need to routinely audit that and make sure that we’re calibrated. So, what does this mean for you? So, what I always recommend for districts: doing a comprehensive special education review on your own is incredibly overwhelming. What I think is more important is that you look at these areas and you set yourself up on a revolving process. Set yourself up so that you’re looking at these areas on an annual basis. What do you wanna look at this year? Do you wanna focus on policies and procedures and a shared vision this year? How could you self-assess on an annual basis so that you don’t get to a point where you need a comprehensive special education review?
So you could realistically take, for one first step, what could you do just as a first step? Where would be your pressure point, or what’s your low-hanging fruit? And, you know, if we could help, that would be wonderful, but I think the single most important thing would be to be proactive and do something on a rolling basis to keep yourself from getting to the point that you feel like, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much.” We need to look at the whole big picture and roll out a five-year action plan on how we’re going to line things up.
So, if you’re interested and you wanna know more, we do have a webpage that gives you more details about our review. We are working on a form of self-assessment, and Danny’s gonna talk to you in a second about how you might be able to get a copy of that once we’re ready to roll it out. But before I turn it over to Danny, I just wanna say thank you guys so, so very much for spending time with me today. I know I talked a lot. So, if you do have questions that didn’t get asked today, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
I would really appreciate that. So I’m gonna send it back over to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Tori, for your wonderful insights today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. And please feel free to reach out to Tori via email if you have any questions about the work that we discussed today. You can reach Tori via email at [email protected]. And as Tori mentioned, to learn more about our special education systems review services, visit us online at wested.org/sesr. And to request access to the self-assessment tool that Tori mentioned, simply use the request form at the left column of the special education systems review page. You can check out recordings of our past Leading Together webinars online. We’ve covered a range of topics, including language, literacy, and learning, generative AI, assessment, special education, mathematics, and other topics. To access our Leading Together webinar series recordings, visit us online at wested.org/leading-together. And finally, if you’re interested in learning more about WestEd and staying connected, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.