Hi everybody, welcome back to the Empower to Advocate podcast. This is Dana Marie and I am here today with the start, the beginning, the first episode of a multi episode series on behavior and discipline. So this is part one. Next week we will be coming to you with part two. This is a topic that takes a little bit of time to dive into.

So we wanna make sure that we cover as many of your questions as possible. We have heard from parents and caregivers quite a bit in the last couple of weeks around struggles they're having, challenges they're having, especially when it comes to their child and school behavior, but also school discipline. So through these next couple of episodes, we're gonna try to answer some of the questions that we've been getting and share some information with you, some data, some statistics, a little bit about the law and the law that sort of governs behavior and school discipline for children with disabilities. So there's a lot to cover here and that's why we're going to chunk it out in the next few weeks, over the next couple of episodes. So I'm actually going to dive right in and I'm going to start by sharing, like I said before with you, some data, some statistics, just to sort of set the stage for what we're going to be talking about today.

So recently, the US Department of Education put out a blog series, the Office of Special Education Rehabilitative Services blog, and it's, I think, a four or five part blog series by Valerie C. Williams, who is the director of the Office of Special Education Programs, and covers multiple different topics under the umbrella of discipline, but as I was reading, there were some statistics, some data that really stuck out to me. So I'll start with this. 1,591,473 disciplinary removals for students with disabilities in the school year 2017 and 2018. That number really just set me on my heels. I was reading and that number was shocking, not that I didn't know that the number was high, but that number was so large that it really, like I said, really stopped me in my tracks. And then I kept reading to find out that 11,205,797, those were the total number of school days missed in the 17-18 school year for out-of-school suspensions. 11 million school days across children in the United States. Out of school suspensions. So those two numbers, obviously, in of themselves are pretty staggering. But then I kept reading. Students with disabilities served under IDEA represent 13% of total enrollment, but receive 20.5% of one or more in school suspensions and 24.5% of one or more out of school suspensions.

Black students with disabilities accounted for 2.3% of total student enrollment, but received 6.2% of one or more in-school suspensions and 8.8% of one or more out-of-school suspensions. Of all expulsions from school, boys received 72.5% of expulsions with educational services and 73.8% of expulsions without educational services.

The numbers are alarming. We know that there is disproportionality in terms of school discipline when it comes to students with disabilities. We know that for students of color with disabilities, those numbers are even more alarming and even more staggering. In the show notes today, I am going to drop this blog series that I am talking about. And I'm going to drop these where you can access these statistics and this data to dig a little bit more if you're interested, but that really just sort of sets the stage for what we wanna talk about over the next couple of weeks. In today's episode, I'm gonna just start with five frequently asked questions that we get from parents and caregivers about both school behavior, school discipline, but also the intersection of the two. So these are questions that we've gotten since the beginning of the school year from our current clients, but also from folks who reach out to us for initial consultations or just to ask one-time questions. So these are questions that we've received in some way, shape, or form just since the beginning of this school year. So I'm going to go through those five FAQs and then some tangible sort of next steps that you can take some action steps that you can take if you're wondering the same thing or if you have the same question. So let me start with number one.

My child is having challenging behavior. They are not on an IEP. What can I do?

Under IDEA, any child who is experiencing challenging behaviors that could be related to a disability that child has, it is a requirement, it is on the school, it is on the public school district to evaluate that child to see if they have a disability that is impeding their access to their education and contributing to challenging behaviors inside their classroom, inside their school. As a parent or caregiver, you can also request that your child be evaluated if you are noticing that you're getting lots of reports of challenging behaviors, both maybe at school and at home, or the teacher's continually reaching out to you, you're getting lots of emails, maybe calls from a principal or assistant principal. If this is happening for you frequently, and your child has not been previously diagnosed with a disability, or they do not have an IEP, you can reach out to the school district and say, hey, I have concerns about my child, their challenging behavior, what we've been doing up to this point hasn't helped, I would like to start the initial evaluation process, I would try, I would like to have them evaluated to understand A, if there is a disability but be if they do need services to help support them in school, especially when it comes to challenging behavior. So just because your child is not on an IEP right now does not mean that it is possible that there is an underlying disability or an underlying reason why they're experiencing challenging behaviors in school. We often hear this question from young kiddos, parents of young kiddos who perhaps have had questions or thoughts about the evaluation process or thoughts about whether their child might actually qualify for special education but have not initiated the process yet. So that is one thing that you can do if you're starting to have these questions about whether your child's school behavior might be related to an underlying disability.

The second sort of FAQ question that we've been getting from parents is my child is on an IEP. They even have a positive behavior support plan. In the past, they've had what's sometimes referred to as a BIP. An FBA was conducted maybe a couple years ago or three years ago. Maybe they even have a consultation on their IEP from a BCBA. So, presumably has services, is getting accommodations for their behavior, but you've noticed an uptick in behavior, or maybe the school's reaching out more, or like I said, you're getting emails from the teacher, from the principal, from the assistant principal, or perhaps you're seeing new behaviors, behaviors that did not exist before, or maybe some of the strategies or interventions that worked before just don't seem to be working anymore.

At this point, it is well within your bounds and your rights to say, we need to get everyone back together. We need to discuss this. We need to maybe do an updated functional behavior assessment. We maybe need to do an updated positive behavior support plan. At the very least, we need to reconvene the IEP team to see what's going on here, to see what the challenging behaviors in school are what might be leading to them, what strategies and interventions maybe have been tried but haven't worked. Maybe there are a couple that have worked. We've got to get everyone back together, the parent or parents and caregivers, the school team, the teacher, the BCBA, so on and so forth, to all get on the same page about updating the plan, updating the IEP to help support your child who needs the services, who needs the services of a positive behavior support plan need specific accommodations for their behavior in school. Which kind of leads me to my next FAQ. Unfortunately, this has happened and come up a few times recently. But number three, we hear from parents who have, quite frankly, been blindsided in meetings, whether they're IEP meetings, whether they're just sort of informal reconvene meetings. Maybe you have quarterly meetings scheduled with your school team.

What can sometimes happen is as a parent or caregiver, you sit in the meetings, you maybe haven't heard from the teacher, principal, assistant principal, BCBA, other support staff much, but you sit in the meeting and you're hearing that your child has increased challenging behaviors or they're seeing different behaviors or they're seeing different things come up that haven't come up in the past and it's the first time that you've heard of it. Nobody likes to be in that situation. Nobody likes to be in an IEP meeting and be getting information that's difficult to digest and hard right in that moment without having time to think about it beforehand. So if this feels like something that's happening to you that you're going through right now, one of the things that we recommend, maybe you can't avoid, maybe you've already sat in that IEP meeting, maybe that's already happened to you, maybe you've already been blindsided with new data and information.

After that meeting, once you take a beat, you can say, you know, there's a way to say it where you can say, it was hard for me to get that information all at once. One way that I can be kept abreast of the situation. Moving forward for the rest of the school year in a more consistent way, I would like to request maybe bi-weekly data, behavior data and graphs from the BCBA. So if your child has a BCBA on their team, requesting weekly, bi-weekly maybe even monthly would feel appropriate and good to you, data, data graphs. Then when you enter into those meetings with the entire school team, you have the information already. You can see the trends. You can see when your child's behavior maybe has increased or maybe when the challenging behavior has decreased or maybe you notice an intervention or a strategy that's working. Perhaps there's something going on at home, a medical intervention, sleep schedule off things like that you can look at that date and be like, oh that week makes sense We did a lot of traveling or nobody was sleeping or everyone at home was sick or something like that That can just give you and the school team a more holistic Understanding of what's going on and then it gives you the information you need to go into those meetings Like I said, nobody wants to be blindsided in those meetings so reaching out, asking the school team to share that data with you more consistently, more frequently, so that you don't find yourself in that situation. Number four, what if the school keeps asking me to pick up my child early? This is a big one. We're gonna dive a little bit deeper into informal removals in a future episode. So we're not gonna go super deep into that right now. But having you pick up your child early from school consistently because of their behavior is considered an informal removal. It is a informal placement change, right, without reconvening an IEP team, without having a meeting, without an IEP meeting, so on and so forth what we can say to you to begin with if this is happening consistently. Now, if this happens once, of course, make sure it's documented, make sure you keep your eye on it. But what I'm talking about is parents who reach out to us, and this is happening a few times a week. They're getting a call at 11 or noon. So-and-so's behavior is really challenging. We would like you to pick them up early for school.

This brings about a whole other slew of issues. If you are picking up your child early from school and your child has the support and services of an IEP, it is very likely that not only are they missing general education instruction, they are also missing services, right? If you pick them up at 11 or 12 every day, or like I said, three times a week, they are not getting the full support of their educational program and plan. The one tangible thing that you can do as a parent to begin with, and like I said, this is a longer conversation moving forward, but the one thing that you can do is document it. You can ask the school to document it. You can put it in an email. Once you get home send an email. I just wanted to document that you asked me to pick up my child so-and-so at 11 o'clock today due to their behavior. The next day. Just wanted to document that you asked me to pick up my child at noon today due to their behavior.

Quite frankly, like I said, this is a longer conversation. This should not go on for much longer than that without reconvening the IEP team, which you can ask for, but the school should certainly be asking you to attend, documenting it, making sure that you know on your end what days this was happening, what time, and asking what services they missed during that time, what supports they missed, what ancillary services. And like I said, that's just the beginning. We'll get deeper into this in a future episode. But if this just has happened once or twice, making sure you document it, the date, the time, as kind of a starting place, and then certainly reach out to us if that's something that you have further questions about.

Number five FAQ, frequently asked question. I'm getting reports that my child is experiencing challenging behaviors at school, but I don't think that their school team is following the IEP. I'm hearing from somebody that the special education teacher is out and there's no substitute. I'm hearing that there isn't a BCBA in the school, but my child has BCBA services on their IEP. I'm hearing they haven't had speech in a couple of weeks. My maybe older child reports that they're not getting the accommodations they need for maybe a quiet space or a break, so on and so forth.

In those moments, the best thing that you can do is ask to get the team together. Reach out to your child's liaison and say, I understand that my child's is experiencing challenging behaviors. I wanna try to get ahead of it. I wanna see what we can do as a team to support them, to update their IEP, to see if there are other accommodations that we can be adding, to see if there are new strategies and interventions. Let's get together and let's make sure we're all on the same page because quite frankly, same from our perspective over here, we hear a lot of things, right? From little birdies and parents and caregivers and kids and so on and so forth about what's going on. Getting everyone in the same room at the same table can help eliminate some of that hearsay about which parts of the IEP maybe are being followed, which parts are not, which accommodations don't seem to be being implemented appropriately, which services seem to be being missed so on and so forth. So if you have any concerns that your child is experiencing challenging behavior, but, and, you don't feel like the IEP that everyone agreed to and that you signed most recently is being followed in the way that it should be followed, ask to reconvene the team. Send an email to the point person, to the liaison, and say, can we please get together in the next week to 10 days? Check in, update, see what can be added, changed, et cetera. And honestly, that's kind of a good rule of thumb. Anyways, if you have, maybe it's not behavior, maybe it's some other area of need for your child. If you have concerns, if you feel like something is missing, if you feel like there's a personnel issue at school, we know there are staffing issues quite literally everywhere. If you feel like accommodations that would be supportive of your child just aren't happening, reach out before it becomes a runaway train. Reach out, ask to get the team back together to discuss what can be implemented, what can be changed, what can be updated in the IEP to support your child and their very, very specific needs. Like I said, this really just scratches the surface. This is something that we've been deep diving with quite a few parents over the last few weeks since we've been back to school. We're gonna get a little bit more in the next couple of episodes into functional behavior assessments, positive behavior support plans, like I said, removals, informal removals, suspensions, manifestation determination meetings so on and so forth.

So if this is a topic that you've been curious about, maybe not even for your own child, but just in general, stick with us, listen to the next couple of episodes. We're gonna be sharing lots of information. I will drop in the show notes, some of those data points that I talked about at the very beginning. And then stay tuned, like I said, for next week, where we kind of go off in a couple of different tangents. We're sharing as much information as possible over the next couple of weeks around this topic as we head towards the end of October, which for many folks is, believe it or not, the first reporting period, the first report card period, progress report, so on and so forth. So if you have specific questions about behavior, about school discipline as it relates to children with disabilities, please do not hesitate to reach out, send us an email, drop us a note, a comment, because like I said, we're gonna be deep diving this conversation, this topic in the next few weeks and we hope that you will stick with us. With that, thank you so much for listening today. We hope that this was some valuable information to get you started. If you have specific questions, do not hesitate to reach out. We do have openings for initial 20-minute free consultation calls if you have a specific question about your own child, and you can find that link in the notes as well. Otherwise, have a great rest of the week, everybody, and we will be back here next week with another episode. Have a good day, everyone!