Ector County ISD’s Special Services Department is facing a lot of challenges from trying to clear up a backlog of referrals to the way it handles discipline.
At a recent ECISD Board of Trustees workshop, the board discussed discipline for multi-racial special education students. This is called significant disproportionality. Mark Gabrylczyk, executive director of special services, said they went over the risk ratio for discipline of a population of ECISD students compared to other students in the district.
When a district goes over the risk ratio, the state tells them they are being flagged for a disproportionality issue. The district has three years to fix it. If a district has three continual years of significant disproportionality, which ECISD has, the state puts the program in Targeted Assistance.
Gabrylczyk now has a meeting with the Texas Education Agency once a month to talk about how they are going to improve the risk ratio within that group of students. TEA had Gabrylczyk put together a plan that includes professional development for administrators and teachers where certain milestones have to be met.
“In addition, there’s a financial element to it. The state is going to take 15 percent of the special education budget and it is now being allotted to fixing the issue of significant disproportionality. So 15 percent of the special education budget is significant in our case because it’s close to $1 million. That $1 million needs to be spent on fixing that issue instead of being reinvested into another strategy or project that we need to tackle. So it’s a big deal,” he added.
The special education budget is about $6 million and it is separate from the general fund. It is made up of state and federal funds, which is “very controlled by the state, which is very controlled by the federal government,” Gabrylczyk said. They have to use all 15 percent to fix the risk ratio.
He added that special education is very regulated and it’s a complex part of the district.
“Because you’re dealing with legal issues, you’re dealing with financial issues, you’re dealing with programming issues, you’re dealing with eligibility issues. On top of that, you’re dealing with kids who may have a learning disability to kids who are medically fragile,” Gabrylczyk said.
Special Services also faces a backlog of evaluations. Gabrylczyk said they started the year with a carryover of 706 evaluations from last year. That didn’t include any new evaluations that they were getting for this school year.
“This school year … to date, we have received 726 new referrals. When we combine the carryover with the new referrals, we’re sitting at over 1,400 referrals that we need to get done,” Gabrylczyk said.
They have 570 referrals that had been completed and 436 referrals that are currently being evaluated. That means that the diagnostician, licensed specialist in school psychology, or the speech pathologist has the file folder and they’ve started the evaluation process, he said.
They have 900 of the 1,400 evaluations done. They have 21 diagnosticians, some of whom work virtually for the district, the others work on ECISD campuses. They have one licensed specialist in school psychology currently,
“Yes, we’ve done a lot of work in this area, but we still have a lot of work to do,” Gabrylczyk said.
He added that the evaluation process takes a long time.
“When we receive a referral, we have 15 days to determine whether or not we’re going to evaluate a student. If we decide to evaluate the student, we move forward with the evaluation and getting the consent signed to evaluate the student. If we decide not to evaluate the student, we inform the parents that we’re not going to evaluate the student. So there’s a 15-day window that we have for parents,” Gabrylczyk said.
Special Education Supervisor Amanda Napolean said when a parent requests an evaluation, they have 15 school days to offer consent or decline to evaluate.
They have 45 school days to complete the evaluation and get the report written. They have 30 calendar days to meet on the results of the evaluation, Napolean said.
Gabrylczyk said they will be conducting evaluations over the summer. Napolean said they did them over spring break. The office was open for nine days, including weekends.
The state recently changed eligibility requirements for special education in the area of dyslexia, behavior and autism.
“It’s a huge increase to what has been done in the past, not only in our school district but also throughout of the state of Texas,” Gabrylczyk said.
Special Services has a process it uses to determine if students are eligible for special education.
“For example we will look at attendance, does the student have attendance issues? What are the student’s academic strengths and what are their academic concerns? This is where the teacher will provide us information,” Gabrylczyk said.
“We look at their MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) scores, which is really, really important. We look at their STAAR results, which is really, really important. We also look at their basic reading, math, spelling and writing scores on assessments that we give our kids. Are they weak or are they really strong?” he added.
They use a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being the strongest and one the weakest.
“We look at for an example if the student is bilingual, or multilingual, we look at their TELPAS scores. We want to make sure that we’re making consideration for both English and the Spanish language. We look at their vision screens. We look at their hearing screens. If it’s a student who needs physical therapy or occupational therapy, we will go ahead and look at that,” Gabrylczyk said.
“In the areas of speech, we look at their language fluency, their articulation, and also their voice,” he added.
Schools use Mult-tiered Systems of Support. This replaced Response to Intervention, which focused on a student’s academics.
The Multi-tiered Systems of Support looks at the whole child, including academics and behavior.
“What we also do is we look at the behavior of the kid; we look at the grade level of the students, and then we take all of this information … and it goes to what we call a referral committee. Amanda (Napolean) sits on the referral committee,” Gabrylczyk said.
Napolean said the referral committee includes the two lead diagnosticians, the two lead speech therapists, Napolean and another special services supervisor.
Napolean said she was previously a diagnostician and the other lead special education supervisor was previously a school psychologist.
The six review committee members review every file that comes in from campuses and parent requests. They take the information and make a recommendation of where to start the evaluation. If the data supports a possible learning disability, the information will be funneled down that path. If it supports autism, the information will be funneled down that path.
“From there, then we distribute them out to the evaluators to get consent and get rolling on the evaluation as quickly as possible,” Napolean said.
What makes them decline to move forward with an evaluation is when, for example, a parent says their child was commended on the STAAR test last year and they just approached this year and the parent is worried about a disability, Napolean said.
When she looks through the data, Napolean said she can see that the data does not support a disability.
“It’s in those those instances where … it looks more of like a fluke than a pattern.That’s what we’re looking for is that true incidence of disability because that is something we take very seriously. It’s a label that stays with a child forever. Anytime we see potentially that there is a disability, we will absolutely investigate to make sure,” Napolean said.
Gabrylczyk said the law gives the special services department the opportunity to say they are going to evaluate a student, or they’re not.
“That’s why I think school districts throughout the state of Texas are really struggling, is because we have many of those types of situations,” he added.
Napolean said when a student is declined, the department has to produce a notice of refusal.
“In that prior written notice, we have to outline the reason we are not accepting the request and that is exactly what we do. We say STAAR scores were this; MAP scores were this. In comparison to grade level peers, this student is not functioning below level and so we outline that very clearly and we send that to the parent. But yes, that takes a lot of time and effort as well,” she added.
Parents and teachers can refer students to special services.
Napolean said teachers referring is the preferred way.
“When I say preferred, I’m not discounting anything that a parent would do. But when we get teacher requests for evaluations, we get a lot of data from the campus where they have compiled efforts of different strategies that they’ve tried and so as an assessor, when I get a referral that shows that they tried to teach it this way, realized the student didn’t get it; tried to teach it this way, realized the student didn’t get it. That is great data for me,” Napolean said.
“As I start to evaluate, it helps me determine which battery would be a good measure for that student. It also tells me that it’s not a knee jerk reaction … They have tried some things first, and so it allows me as the evaluator to include that information in my report. There is a path to eligibility in the state of Texas that is lack of response to intervention. That is data in my report that I can include that says, we have formally evaluated but we also have evidence of lack of response to intervention and we feel this student needs additional supports. When I have a teacher request versus a parent request, I get all of that data and it helps me get to the bottom of that student’s learning difficulties,” she added.
Gabrylczyk noted that a lot of things happen in students’ lives that may throw them off their academic progress.
“We know that kids have significant challenges in life, so when we see a student that, again, is doing really well, and they’re scoring and then all of a sudden we see this difference. It is a concern and we take those concerns very seriously. But on the other hand, we also do have students who do have legitimate learning disabilities, and we want to do whatever we can to help them be successful in school. That’s the thing about special education. Special education isn’t a placement. It’s a service that we provide and we all need to remember that all students are general education students first, with special education as a service, not a placement,” he added.
Gabrylczyk said things have really changed over the years.
“There’s been tons of court cases that went up to the Supreme Court that have really established precedents in what we do and how we do things and school systems in the area of special education. It’s a very complex program in dealing with some of the situations that we deal with,” he added.
Special Services serves 4,134 students and that figure is increasing.
“It’s climbing because what we’re seeing is about 80% of those referrals that we receive are kids going into special education and that’s alarming. People always ask, why is that? Why is that happening? Nobody really has an answer and I wouldn’t even feel comfortable addressing it,” Gabrylczyk said.
He added that when a student is referred for special education and the decision is made to evaluate that student, that student is afforded specific protections under Section 504 of the ADA law. What those protections are, for an example, the student needs to be receiving accommodations, the students need to be receiving modifications. Even though the student hasn’t qualified for special ed services yet there are protections that still need to happen with the student. What we tell our schools is this, you have a referral and yes, we’re going to evaluate the student, but you need to have a plan moving forward and how you’re going to accommodate and modify for this particular student,” Gabrylczyk said.
The Texas Education Agency website says, “Section 504 requires that school districts provide a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to qualified students in their jurisdictions who have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
“People always wonder what percentage of students should be what we determine is eligible for special ed services in school districts. Usually that number is between 10 and 12%. We’re now above the 10% threshold … so that’s concerning,” Gabrylczyk said.
He added that there has always been a push and pull between the federal and state government.
“If you remember back to 2016, the federal government came into the state of Texas and said, you’re not qualifying enough kids. You’re at 8%. Then all of a sudden, as Amanda told you this morning, there’s been a change in the regulation. Now we’re looking at the number is swinging to the other side of the pendulum where there’s probably going to be a time where the feds come back into the state saying, well, now you’re over identifying kids. So there’s kind of that sweet spot, again, between 10 and 12% where we really want to be with eligibility,” Gabrylczyk said.
On behavior, he said, the district has students with significant issues with behavior and they do things that are not aligned with district expectations. Gabrylczyk said there has been an increase in behavior issues, but there is no one reason for that.
Special education students fall under district policies and procedures for up to 10 days.
“A principal can discipline a student for up to 10 days for violation of policy. Once they get to that 10th day there’s a mechanism within special education law called Manifestation of Determination. What we do with that Manifest Determination mechanism is call a meeting with parents, school officials and sometimes if the student is for an example, at the high school level, they will be invited to the meeting to review what is happening with the student in the areas of behavior,” Gabrylczyk said.
“For an example if we are seeing a trend with the behavior, that meeting is established not for discipline, consequences but for change of placement. Is this the correct placement for the student who’s having these issues? Because we’ve suspended the student for 10 days … Maybe this environment is not the right environment for the student, so we have that MDR meeting, manifest determination review meeting, to determine the placement for that student. Do we move a student from a less restrictive environment to a more restrictive environment? That’s what we do with that meeting. That team looks at all the data and makes that determination whether or not that student’s disability had an effect on why that student did the discipline,” Gabrylczyk said.
There are cases where the disability did not have an effect on the behavior. If that’s the case, the student is disciplined accordingly to district policies.
“If the student’s disability had an effect on the behavior, then this student is placed right where they’re at and stay put. Then what we have to do as a school system is develop a plan — a better plan — to curb and eliminate that behavior and to make sure that that student is making progress in that particular area,” Gabrylczyk said.
He added that no special education students can be expelled.
“What ends up happening is we have what we call special circumstances. If you have a special education student, for example, who was trafficking drugs on a campus, that is considered a special circumstance. Another special circumstance is a student who brings a weapon on campus. That is a special circumstance and then the last special circumstance deals with whether or not there was bodily harm done to either a student or a staff member,” Gabrylczyk said.
“That would be a special circumstance. For an example, when you’re looking at that particular special circumstance, the law says that that student assault on an individual has to have had severe bodily harm on that student. We’ve been advised by our attorneys who interpret the law for us …,” it’s like a hospitalization; a near death experience, he added.
Gabrylczyk said a fight doesn’t necessarily constitute a special circumstance.
“Even if a student is taken to a hospital or staff members taken to a hospital, that still may not be good enough, but what we’ve been told by our attorneys is if there’s an ambulance that’s involved, there could be some issues within that element of that special circumstance,” he added.
Students that fall under special circumstances are placed in the Alternative Education Center for a certain amount of days.
“But with that discipline, they can’t go over 40 days without having another hearing, and so more than likely the student is going to have their due process rights heard and then a decision will be made within that meeting,” Gabrylczyk said.
“School discipline, and judicial discipline are two separate things. We tend to like to integrate it. So you could have a student who assaults somebody and they could end up in the judicial system … But the only thing we’re responsible for is what the law is pertaining to schools and school districts,” Gabrylczyk said.
