Chapter 7 - Ethical and legal issues in school based interventions

Multitiered systems of academic and behavioral support

• School psychology: A blueprint for training and practice III - goals is to improve capacity of systems to meet need of all students

• Three - tier model of service delivery

Three tiers

• Tier 1 - focuses on providing effective instruction within general education

• Tier 2 - targeted interventions are for students who do not succeed in response to Tier 1 and address specific academic or social - emotional skill deficits

• Tier 3 - Involves more intensive interventions delivers by specilaist’s with a small students - to teacher ratio.

Classroom interventions

• Prereferral interventions were found to be safeguards against unnecessary referral to special education and miss-classification

• IDEA allows states to use up to 15% of their federal special education funds to develop early intervening services. These services are for all students who require additional support to succeed in general education.

• Response to intervention (RTI) is used in many districts as part of early intervening services

• RTI generally means providing effective instruction for students within general education, monitoring students progress, providing different or more intense services for those who do not demonstrate adequate progress, again monitoring progress and as appropriate referring those who still do not succeed for evaluation of special education eligibility.

Obligations within a multitude model

Is it ethical permissible for a school psychologist to participate in academic screening an progress monitoring of individual students without parent consent?

Answer = YES

Services outside the scope of an established school psychologist - client relationship

School psychologist encourage and promote parental participation in school decisions affecting their children. However, where school’s educational support staff, not all of their services require informed parent consent. It is ethically permissible to provide school based consultation services regarding a child adolescents to a students assistance team or teacher without informed parent consent as long as the resulting interventions are under the authority of the teacher and within the scope of typical classroom interventions.

Handbooks

It is recommended that a school district parent handbook informs families thats school psychologist routinely and monitoring its effectiveness, and that district policy does not require parent notice or consent for such involvement in student support.

Is it legally permissible for a school psychologist to participate in academic screening and progress monitoring of individual students without parent consent?

A= YES

Legal issues ; IDEA

• “The screening of a students by a teacher or specialist to determine appropriate instructional strategies for curriculum implementation is not considered to be an evaluation requiring parental consent under IDEA”.

• The question of who is considered a “specialist“ is left to the discretion of the school district

Legal issues : IDEA

Under IDEA parents must be notifies RTI’s is being implemented as part of the process to determine whether their child is suspected of having a disability. More specifically, the parents should be notified about:

• The amount and nature of student performance data to be collected,

• The general education services that will be provided

• Strategies that will be implemented for increasing the child’s rate of learning and

• The parents right request an evaluation of their child for IDEA eligibility at any time

Legal issues: IDEA

Furthermore, if parents request a special education of 504 eligibility evaluation during RTI process and the school decides not to evaluate the student, the school must provide parents with written notice of its refusal to evaluate along with information describing parents rights to challenge that decision.

Selecting classroom interventions: Ethics code

NASP Standard 11.2.12 “best practices“ and education law to obligate practitioners to:

• Use evidence - based academic and behavioral interventions.

• Give preference to interventions described in peer-reviewed literature and found to be effective.

• Strive for treatment fidelity but at the same time adapt interventions to the unique characteristics of the student and setting.

Selecting classroom interventions: ESSA

In the every student succeeds act of 2015 the term evidence based generally means a state or school activity that;

• 1. demonstrates a statistically significant effect on improving students outcomes