Rising up: Special education—The view from Langley PreK-8

2022 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Most teachers know before they return to school in the fall which classroom will be theirs and what grade level they will teach. Tammie Jones doesn’t know. She is a special education learning support teacher at Pittsburgh Langley PreK-8, and the instructional program is driven by student needs. “Sometimes I might be third through fifth grade. Sometimes I might be third and fourth,” she says. “It just depends on where the needs are” each year.

Langley is located in Sheraden, on the district’s western border. Like other public schools, Langley is legally responsible for offering a “free, appropriate” education in the “least restrictive environment” for any enrolled student who qualifies for special education. This means providing whatever accommodations and modifications students need, as much as possible in the “regular education” classroom. Which services will be provided, and how they will be provided, are spelled out in a legal document called an Individual Education Plan (IEP), created in partnership with parents. To serve students in special education programs, who made up 31% of the school’s enrollment last year, Langley’s staff includes five learning support teachers, two life skills teachers (who teach basic functional skills for daily life), two emotional support teachers, and three who support students with autism. Jones is the Instructional Teacher Leader (ITL) for the special education team.

After the learning support teachers have divided up the workload, how they teach students, and in which setting, are determined by individual student needs. Jones might work with some students in the regular education classroom to adapt lessons for them—known as “push in.” When the teacher breaks students into small groups, Jones might teach a group that includes students identified for learning support and students in regular education who are learning the same skill. She also works with some students outside of the regular education classroom—known as “pull out.” Every aspect of her work with students involves collaboration with the classroom teacher, to coordinate schedules, plan push-ins and pull-outs, and modify classwork, homework, and tests as needed for each student she supports.

Jones gives an example of the way a teacher can use IEP goals, an intervention, and an assessment to help a child move to another level. She worked with a student who started at Langley in 4th grade. “He came from another school with goals of letter and sound fluency, which is the very beginning of the oral fluency spectrum,” she says. They met every day, one-on-one, for lessons from the intervention program Reading Horizons, and evaluated what he was learning using the DIBELS screening assessment, given to all district students in the younger grades to measure how fluently they can read out loud and how much they comprehend. Working diligently, she says, “he went from letters and sounds all the way to a second-grade oral fluency reading level” by the end of the year.

Identifying a student for special education

The path that leads to a student being referred for special education testing can begin with a teacher bringing a concern to the school’s Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) team. MTSS is a decision-making framework that is intended to help teachers identify students who need more academic help, and to provide that help more quickly and intentionally. At Langley, the team includes the principal, special education and regular education teachers, literacy and math specialists, and social workers and psychologists.

“If a teacher recognizes that a student is struggling, they collect as much data as they can,” Jones says. “They present it to our team and the team looks at the data, [and] tries to find interventions that could possibly work for the student. The teacher goes back and implements those interventions. They [collect] data, they bring it back. It’s like a progression where they’ll bring it back once or twice a month and see if the student is making progress. And if there isn’t much progress made, then they will probably go to the referral for special education testing. But they want to see if interventions will work first before they go to that next step.”

When the team’s analysis of the data suggests testing is warranted, the school psychologist decides which tests are appropriate, and the social worker talks a parent through the paperwork that will need to be completed. Parents are asked to contribute a range of information, including whether there were any issues with the child’s birth, whether the child reached developmental milestones (such as talking by a certain age), and whether the child has been evaluated by a professional outside of the school. Jones says, “All of that is taken into equal consideration with what the teacher provides.”

Ideally, the teacher communicates closely with the parent throughout the process. Jones says a teacher might say, “‘Your child is struggling in this area. So we are thinking we are going to move to the next step of interventions. And if that doesn’t work, possibly a special education evaluation.’ So they do keep the parents informed along the way of what could possibly come about. And I think that communication makes the process go a lot smoother and it doesn’t send a shock to a parent if you’re in that testing process.” Rather than thinking, “Oh my goodness, there’s something wrong with my child,” she says, the parent might think something more like, “How can we work as a team to implement an IEP that will work for my child?”

When teachers are absent, Jones says daily or long-term substitutes should find information about student supports ready-at-hand. For example, a student with a behavior support intervention would have a daily tracking sheet, and the classroom teacher should leave instructions for how to complete it. Last year, quite a few Langley teachers took medical or maternity leaves, Jones says. Many held regular phone calls with substitutes. For students with IEPs, teachers made sure the substitutes “knew the goals, where they could access the paperwork, and who they could go to for help and support.”

When schools closed

As a group, children with disabilities had an especially difficult time when schools closed due to the pandemic. Nationally, information about these students’ achievement gains and losses is not yet fully available, but the evidence to date shows that students with disabilities were absent more often, failed more courses, and completed less of their schoolwork compared to students in regular education.

Jones saw those difficulties firsthand. As a person who describes herself as “old school” and “hands-on,” she had to learn to use the technology herself. Meanwhile, parents were calling or texting to ask if she could give their children step-by-step directions, one-on-one. Like other students, Jones’ students also had to cope with changed conditions at home. One girl could only meet Jones online in the early evening because she was taking care of her siblings during the school day. The student so appreciated Jones’ flexibility that she began calling her on weekends just to say hello. With others who faced similar barriers, Jones began to schedule appointments for whenever the student was free. “And they were available,” she says, which came as a surprise. “I thought, oh, I’m going to call them [and] they’re outside playing, or they’re doing something. They were right there.”

When she noticed a trend of students failing to log back on after lunch, she and another teacher started an incentive program they called Prize Patrol. Students were eligible for prizes if they showed improvement in attendance, completed work, and grades. Saturday prize deliveries often grew into long, doorstep conversations. Both Jones and her students had missed seeing each other face-to-face.

Langley is a “community school,” meaning staff takes responsibility for connecting parents to resources beyond what the school can provide. During the pandemic, teachers and other staff increased those efforts, and built trust with families, Jones says. “They’re reaching out for everything now, which is great.” She also saw the staff pull together to support one another, especially after a colleague died of Covid-19, stepping up without question to cover classes when a teacher was sick or quarantining, and checking in to make sure everyone was okay.

The staff has stabilized over the years, she says. However, student stability, at 90%, is two percentage points lower than the district average for K-8 schools. Jones would like to see that change, though she recognizes that there are different factors at play. She hopes that parents will recognize that teachers have stayed at Langley because they want to work with the families, and that parents, in turn, will keep their children at the school.

A+ Schools staff can coach parents/guardians through conversations with school staff about a child’s academic progress, a disciplinary action, a Student Assistance Program referral, a special education referral, and other issues. Contact us by emailing info@aplusschools.org or calling the PLC Family Hotline at 412-256-8536 if you need help supporting your child.