Supporting Inclusive Practices - The Special EDge Newsletter: Winter/Spring 2023

The Special EDge Newsletter: Winter/Spring 2023

The Special Edge Volume 37 Number One, Winter through Spring 2022 through 2023

Letter from the State Director

Heather Calomese, Director, California Department of Education, Special Education Division

The stories in this issue of The Special EDge are about changes in California’s educational landscape. They are stories of process. Each narrative captures a moment in time that emerged from our past successes and even (or especially) our failures. And as you read this, the events and efforts the stories recount are already directing and shaping the future. I am convinced that the changes explored in these pages promise remarkably improved conditions and opportunities for students with disabilities—and thus for all students.

It’s especially worth celebrating the fact that even the way we are changing has changed, thanks ironically (and in part) to a piece of federal legislation from the first decade of this century. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act mandated that “all students hit arbitrary scores on standardized tests.[1]” That legislation also took a punitive approach to school improvement—an approach that simply did not work. While NCLB has been banished to the dustbin of failed educational imperatives, California took the lesson seriously: an arbitrary, checklist approach to improving student outcomes is doomed before it begins. The corollary message: a respectful and customized approach just might work. Enter California’s Local Control Funding Formula with its State-wide System of Support guided by the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence.

From there has flowed so much that is good—and that promises to get even better. General education and special education, once rigidly separate in most schools and districts—both physically and pedagogically—are collaborating more and at more levels than ever before, thanks to such efforts as the SUMS Initiative. But it is preschool expansion coupled with inclusive settings that may have the most lasting impact on the school success of our students with disabilities. The kind of quality early childhood education that the state envisions will ground all children in two fundamental beliefs: that they belong and they can learn. The power and permanence of these experiences will soon be available to every young child in the state. The positive effects across a lifespan are incalculable.

Education doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Connections with parents and families are critical components of a child’s learning. And while COVID, school shootings, economic hardship, language barriers, and challenges that I can’t even imagine all make the family-school connection difficult, people are figuring out a way to get and stay connected.

We have much more to figure out. But as a state, California is starting to create schools that are more than places to learn reading and math. Our schools can and are starting to serve as community hubs for the whole child and for strengthening families. As we work to sharpen and strengthen this vision, we can all take hope and inspiration from the stories in this issue — stories of strength, determination, commitment, and caring.

— Heather

[1] Eskelsen García, L., & Thornton, O. (Feb. 13, 2015). ‘No Child Left Behind’ has failed. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-child-has-failed/2015/02/13/8d619026-b2f8-11e4-827f-93f454140e2b_story.html

Change: An Introduction

Change: An Introduction

When Thomas Jefferson wrote Bill 79—A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge—in 1779, he launched the country’s system of public education. That system has been changing ever since.

Many of the changes that schools have seen in the last two-plus centuries came from teachers responding to their instincts about what worked for their students. And many other changes reflected the pendulum swing of politics and community preference. Special Education has not been immune to these rhythms. From the first implementation of Public Law 94-142 (later reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA) in 1975 to now, there have been efforts to create separate, clinical settings for students with disabilities and then to replace those settings with schools that include all children.

But in every case and with every change, school board members, families, administrators, policymakers, and teachers have all put great effort into discovering and applying pedagogies, structures, and methods that benefit every child. Research, however, had not always been consistent or clear on how to ensure the effectiveness of these efforts. Improvement Science is providing some clarity and direction.

A relatively new and evolving discipline, Improvement Science is the study of methods for improving large, complex systems. Together with the corollary discipline of Implementation Science—the study of introducing and sustaining within systems practices that work—Improvement Science is providing the field of education with a roadmap for school improvement and change.

California is taking full advantage.

BACKGROUND

Implementation Science first appeared in the 1940s in the health care sector as a response to centuries-old frustrations with the lag between knowing that a specific medical practice is effective and then adopting it. The use of citrus fruit to prevent scurvy on long ocean voyages is one example. Physicians in England knew of the benefits of using limes in the diets of sailors to prevent the disease as early as 1601. British merchant ships didn’t adopt the practice until 1865. While medical practice in recent centuries reflects more efficient adoption schedules, studies show that “evidence-based practices [still] take on average 17 years to be incorporated into routine general practice in health care.”

Ongoing efforts to close this persistent research-to-practice gap provided the impetus for charting out a coherent and reliable process for implementing change. This process—Implementation Science—involves:

Understanding the specific needs of each setting
Determining the best practice to address each need
Creating an efficient way to incorporate and sustain the practice—while eliminating or at least lessening such stumbling blocks as “competing demands on frontline providers; lack of knowledge, skills, and resources; and misalignment of research evidence with operational priorities.”

Implementation Science gained widespread traction in the medical world around 2006. As the study focuses on securing best practices in complicated systems, it’s easy to see why the discipline attracted educators.

Improvement Science, on the other hand, emerged from the world of statistics and manufacturing in the late 1940s and 1950s. The genesis of this discipline can be directly traced to W. Edwards Deming who believed in the value of “cooperation, mistakes as opportunities for improvement, and striving for continual improvement.”

The healthcare sector adopted this discipline as well. Don Berwick, founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), lauded one particular aspect: how it focused on the system rather than the people.

In his experience, relying on “inspection”—that is, holding individuals accountable for their performance and getting rid of “the bad apples”—does little to improve systems and does even less to ensure lasting change. Berwick is famous for , “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets.” So if members of an educational system don’t like what they’re “getting,” Improvement Science creates a strong argument for changing the system, not blaming the students or firing the teachers.

Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets.

Specifics steps of this discipline include:

Clearly articulating a system’s goal and purpose
Making sure that all people involved understand that goal and purpose, why they should embrace the purpose, and how they can reach the goal
Mustering all resources toward that goal

The coherence that results from this work helps to create “a shared understanding about how systems work, where breakdowns occur, and what actions can be taken to improve overall performance.”

Berwick was one of the first to see and encourage the application of Improvement Science to education and then to finding and adopting, with fidelity, the most appropriate evidence-based interventions and practices to improve systems so that the people in the system—e.g., teachers and students—can do their best work.

COMMONALITIES

The two sciences have a great deal in common. Neither is prescriptive. Efforts are guided by what is already working well and what isn’t in each location. The exact focus of improvement work emerges from a process of study and discovery, since the underlying or “root” cause of a problem is not always readily evident. The strategies for addressing any problem simply depend on the root cause, on the needs of each place, on the expertise and dispositions of the people involved, and on the resources available. The process of change becomes a process of discovery.

Both sciences also hold the following activities as central to improvement efforts:

Directly involving teams of the people most affected by the problem and those who will most benefit by addressing it
Starting small and building with proven successes that are easily repeated
Engaging in continuous inquiry and curiosity (e.g., what are the root causes?)
Using rapid cycles of improvement/implementation (e.g., “Plan, Do, Study, Act” or PDSA cycles). In effect, if it’s not working, you make changes and try again; do it more, or differently. If what you’re doing is working, you know quickly, keep doing it, broaden the effort, and make sure it lasts, while continuing to evaluate and adjust efforts based on data.
Collecting data and using it (the “Study” part of the PDSA cycle) to show what is happening in response to a change or how the change is working

THE CALIFORNIA APPLICATION

The California Advisory Commission on Special Education
The California Advisory Commission on Special Education advises the California Department of Education, the California State Legislature, and the Governor on policies that influence and guide the education of children and youth with disabilities. Any member of the public is invited to attend ACSE meetings in person or virtually. To learn more about the meetings, the work of the commission, and its GOAL Award—Grazer Outstanding Achievement in Learning—go to: https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/as/acse.asp

The California Advisory Commission on Special Education

The California Advisory Commission on Special Education advises the California Department of Education, the California State Legislature, and the Governor on policies that influence and guide the education of children and youth with disabilities. Any member of the public is invited to attend ACSE meetings in person or virtually. To learn more about the meetings, the work of the commission, and its GOAL Award—Grazer Outstanding Achievement in Learning—go to: https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/as/acse.asp

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and its foundational principle of subsidiarity have laid the foundation for California’s use of both sciences. While California’s statewide System of Support for public education epitomizes the word “complexity” in its massive network of agencies, projects, and initiatives, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) is shaping and guiding the work of this system by engaging educators at every level in an ethos of curiosity, collaboration, and encouragement. The resulting resources and supports that California makes available to its local educational agencies (LEAs: school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools) are designed to “work with them rather than do things to them.” Story Here

By definition, the methods of these two sciences are applied differently at each level of the educational system (classroom, school, district, county office, etc.) and in every place. As a result, stories about how that application is playing out are as varied as the thousands of schools and districts themselves. What is present in every story, and as this issue of The Special EDge attempts to capture, is the state’s ongoing work to support schools to institutionalize continuous improvement, actively promote equity, and serve each child’s talents and potential.

One of the jewels in the state’s educational crown is the SUMS Initiative—California Scale-Up Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Statewide—as it has applied elements of both sciences to introduce and sustain a multi-tiered system of support throughout LEAs in California. The initiative is a model of how to take the methods of improvement and apply them at scale in order to support the school success of every child. Story Here

With the help of California’s System of Support, LEAs are using many of these same improvement methods to create, shape, improve, and sustain the kinds of programs and supports that promote optimal student outcomes at the local level and in every school. Strategies and methods such as coaching, using rapid cycles of improvement, and effectively managing data are being mustered to better serve all students. Story Here

The state has granted extensive funding to make early childhood education universal and inclusive. This work is in its early stages relative to the fully coordinated and articulated system that many parents and practitioners seek. But the impending reality of universal prekindergarten and the increasing numbers of inclusive early childhood education opportunities together represent a culmination of decades of work and advocacy on the part of thousands of committed teachers, practitioners, and invested partners. Story Here, Here, and Here

Essential to student success is family engagement. Yet barriers to this engagement can seem insurmountable—economic, linguistic, and cultural challenges among them. And then there was COVID-19. But schools and committed educators are finding success, especially when they have the full support of their district, county office, and communities. Story Here

Whether they are teachers seeking to improve classrooms, principals wanting to improve schools, or superintendents planning to improve their districts, committed educators need information and resources. The internet is awash with both, but the choices can be overwhelming, and the amount of time needed to sift through the number of hits for any one search request can take days. The California Special Education Technical Assistance Network (CalTAN) is curating available resources to make the task easier. Story Here

In the wake of COVID-19, evidence of trauma and mental health challenges among students has reached crisis proportions. The state’s new approach to Educationally Related Mental Health Services (ERMHS) funding, while complicated and perhaps controversial, reflects an effort on the part of the state to think creatively about how to shape the most effective system for providing critical and sometimes life-saving mental health services for students who qualify for special education and their families. Ron Powell, one of the state’s true champions of coordinated mental health services in schools, may have framed the goal for everyone through his motto: “Relentless Pursuit of Whatever Works in the Life of a Child.” Policymakers and providers are working tirelessly to find the best approach to disseminating funds and ensuring this care. Story Here

“The work of improving education is never done,” says Matt Navo, CCEE director. “It just keeps changing.” With the relentless pursuit on the part of committed educators, and with the tools of Improvement and Implementation Science, California’s efforts to respond effectively to ongoing challenges and ever-changing landscapes are only getting stronger.

RESOURCES

Learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s A Bill for the General Diffusion of Knowledge at: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/bill-more-general-diffusion-knowledge/
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, chartered by an act of the United State Congress in 1906, explains the six foundational principles of Improvement Science.
The Center for Education and Policy Research at Harvard University highlights implementation and improvement strategies on its School Improvement & Redesign website.
The Coherence Framework in Action: Promising Practices for Developing and Implementing LCAPS, a California State Board of Education Governance Brief, explains the design of the Local Control Funding Formula and how Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPS) are tools that can effectively transform education at the local level.

California’s System of Support

How Change Happens
California’s System of Support

When Matt Navo started working in the Sanger Unified School District (USD) in 1999, resources were limited, students were struggling, and teachers were discontented. Navo remembers driving into town and seeing a billboard that read “Home of 400 Unhappy Teachers,” paid for by the local teachers’ union.

The problems grew. In 2002, the district was identified as “underperforming” and faced possible state interventions. Tech Tree

Navo has a clear memory of other details from his first years at Sanger. “Teachers had good intentions and good ideas,” he says, and they were “hard-working people. But they were pulling in all the wrong directions.” He saw “random acts of improvement” but little collaboration and a general lack of focus or clear direction. Through all of this, he also saw opportunity.

In 2010, Navo took over as director of special education for the district. He says, “special education across the state, like in Sanger, was facing incredible challenges—struggling academic outcomes, increased pressure for due process, and state complaints in hopes of finding special education solutions.”

Just one year later, Sanger USD was thriving. Educational news outlets were trumpeting the district’s successes, and the American Institutes for Research was lauding the district for the exceptionally strong academic performance of its students who receive special education services. Today, Sanger is considered one of California’s “positive outliers,” a district that, given its demographics and resources, shouldn’t be doing nearly as well as it is.

What happened?

Aligning efforts toward the same goal is part of the answer. So are transparency and clear communication. One of the first things Navo did when he became district superintendent in 2013 was sit down with parents and teachers to explain what the district’s financial limitations were, what challenges the district faced, and what he hoped to accomplish. Then he asked about their concerns and ideas for making improvements.

Also central to the kinds of changes the district eventually made is the fact that Navo did not assume he knew how to fix things. Instead, he invited everyone affected by the challenges facing special education into conversations to help solve the problem, a fundamental principle of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and a guiding principle of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE).

What concrete changes came from these conversations? Sanger found and implemented evidence-based instructional practices and built a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS)—both made possible through intentional efforts to build trust and create a common goal and identity for the district. Over time, and because of these changes, the district found itself with higher than predicted achievement levels for all of its students.

Navo now directs the CCEE, which works to improve thousands of schools for millions of students — a daunting task that can only begin with the kind of humility that Navo put to good use when he drove into Sanger more than two decades ago.

CALIFORNIA'S SYSTEM OF SUPPORT

The LCFF created the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) in 2016 to partner with the California Department of Education (CDE) and the California State Board of Education (SBE), with the purpose of shaping and directing California’s System of Support. This system serves to provide local educational agencies (LEAs: school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education) with the guidance and resources they need to meet their goals for educating all students, but especially those who have been historically marginalized or undeserved, including students with disabilities.

From the beginning, the CCEE was a state agency with a difference. Carl Cohn, the agency’s first director, grounded his approach to leadership in the LCFF’s fundamental principle of subsidiarity; simply put, “if we want to rescue all kids, it starts with those closest to where the kids are.” In addition, local improvement efforts “can’t be about fear of Sacramento or catering to DC,” says Cohn. “It must be all about coming together in the interest of the community to better serve students. . . We want to work with them, not do things to them.”

Navo continues this work in the same spirit.

The System’s Structure

The structure of California’s Statewide System of Support has grown and evolved during the past six years, but the plan has always been to provide three levels of support to LEAs—universal support for all, targeted support for some, and intensive support for a few. That support is customized based on the degree and nature of need. To most effectively provide this support, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) has coordinated and leveraged the structures and expertise that already exist in the system—through County Offices of Education (COEs), for example, and Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs)—so that existing entities are better equipped to guide local schools and school districts in developing their own capacity to continuously improve. According to Matt Navo, director of the CCEE, any district, charter school, and COE can directly approach the CCEE for support. “And we’re an even better conduit, a hub of resources—on strategies and structures such as UDL and multi-tiered system of support (MTSS), for example—depending on where the districts are and what they need in their journey toward improvement.”

THE APPROACH

The phrase “below the green line” holds little meaning for most people, but for some it invokes the work of Margaret Wheatley. A leadership consultant, Wheatley acknowledges that every complex organization has its structures, operations, and processes (those things “above the green line”[1]), and each of these elements is important and can be strengthened. More importantly, she insists that no system can improve unless those things “below the green line”— relationships, information, and identity—are addressed and nurtured.

Navo is convinced of the importance of attending carefully to those things below the green line — especially relationships — for school improvement efforts to be successful. And to attend to them effectively, he says, “humility and vulnerability are essential.” While not often taught in leadership seminars, Navo says that these qualities make it possible for educational administrators “to see their organization honestly, to hear and share painful information, and to acknowledge that you’re just not good enough.”

By removing the blinders of pretense—of pretending that things are working when they’re not—these same qualities then make it possible, says Navo, for LEAs to imagine “what they have the potential to become.”

From there, LEAs can “create a new identity as places of success for all students. But you’ve got to work below the green line to create that transparent, vulnerable space where change can happen,” says Navo.

SUSTAINING CHANGE

The goal of California’s System of Support is not just to guide change among LEAs. It’s to introduce improvement and sustain it. Certainly “putting the user of the work that you’re trying to design as close to the design thinking as possible,” says Navo, gives schools a fighting chance of finding effective improvement strategies.

This approach, however, does more; it ensures that staff turnover doesn’t stop progress. Too often, a committed leader will originate and advance a successful program or practice, but when that person moves on, says Navo, “so goes the incentive and commitment to sustain that change.” But if the practitioners themselves are involved in introducing and implementing change, says Navo, “they are going to own it.”

COACHING

A critical strategy for introducing and sustaining change involves coaching. Decades of research back up its benefits for classroom teachers (see chart below); its importance for leaders and administrators has been more recently examined, especially how it can contribute to the health of an organization and improve school outcomes for students.

Humility is essential here as well, says Heidi Hata, director for the System Improvement Leads (SIL) Project, which is a part of the System of Support that builds the capacity of district teams to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Hata leads a statewide team of 11 improvement facilitators who coach teams to explore root causes of poor student outcomes and determine effective strategies for addressing the challenges they face. In that role, she coaches educators and trains others to become improvement coaches as well.

There are specific skills to coaching, Hata says, “but you can teach skills. I think what’s more important is the stance that we take” as coaches, and that stance first requires humility.

“We are all educators,” she says, referring to herself and others who serve as coaches in the System of Support. “We were teachers, service providers, and principals who lived the thorny, messy, layered challenges [of education] as practitioners, and none of us created the perfect experience for our kids, as much as we wanted to.”

This experience, not of failure but of “infinite challenge,” says Hata, engenders an attitude of curiosity and possibility. She may not have all of the answers, “but I do have the continuous improvement methodology to deeply understand problems and, with discipline, move through testing ideas to see if the changes we make are resulting in the improvements we hope for. We walk alongside teams as they engage in this work, helping to build improvement cultures and mindsets as they learn their way into improvement.

“At first, it can be really disappointing to teams when they see data [showing] that their ideas weren’t effective. But we have to learn to fail forward, to strive for the outcomes we desire and to simultaneously embrace the learning that comes from testing our ideas and being willing to let them go when they don’t work.”

THE LONG GAME

A focus on outcomes creates its own tension for Navo. While he acknowledges the value of scores and school dashboards as indicators of progress, he would like educational leaders to place them in a larger context. Education, he says, is not a game to be won by just reaching the right scores or by “creating a perfect instructional platform for students. That will never happen”; and this “scorecard approach” will only place school administrators “on a hamster wheel.” Navo is guiding California’s System of Support to help educators see that “the wealth and the value of an organization is in its ability to think about that long game.”

Navo gives an example of what that long game might involve. District superintendents, he says, often focus on literacy as a way of “winning.” It makes sense, says Navo. For many students, if they can’t read, “they can’t achieve and be successful and accomplish their dreams. But if literacy is the key,” he asks rhetorically, “why can’t we crack the nut on literacy in the state? It’s because the idea of the scoreboard pushes these superintendents to try one curriculum and then try another curriculum and then another. But nothing gets enough time to work because they get pounded every year because the scores aren’t where they need to be.”

Practitioners, says Navo, must develop a healthy indifference to time. Education, he says, “is a game that goes on forever. It never ends. It only continues to evolve.” Navo calls this attitude “infinite mind.”

While a philosophical underpinning, “infinite mind” also represents a gutsy strategy. “If the aspiration is infinite minded,” Navo says, “then you are always shooting for the ideal: that 100 percent of your kids—whether they’re students with disabilities, English language learners, socioeconomically disadvantaged, homeless—will read at grade level by the end of third grade. If that is the vision, it is never accomplished.” But if that is the vision, then every educator is called to work daily to make it possible. And if that is the vision, the district is keeping faith with every student.

With an infinite mind, says Navo, and “success for every student” as the goal, “now the literacy scores that you see are just a reflection of the work you’ve done over the last nine months, not a reflection of who you are or who you are going to be.” The definition of “who you are” is instead wrapped around your commitment to every student—and it’s that commitment that guides all decisions.

Coordinating Resources

The work of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence is as much practical as it is philosophical. Deputy Executive Director Stephanie Gregson embraces both as she focuses on coordinating improvement efforts at all levels of the state’s system. Through this lens she has seen “a huge disconnect between what happens at the state level legislatively and what happens in the classroom and at the school site.” For example, there are “numerous initiatives around literacy,” she says, “probably ten to twelve, and all with great intentions.” Typically, however, no single initiative is designed with the others in mind. “That creates confusion at the local level.” Busy school principals often can’t keep up with every program that might be available for their schools. The lack of coordination also can create competing priorities, says Gregson, which adds stress to the system. Recent COVID-19 funds provide another example of uncoordinated resources that place unnecessary stress on school systems. Suddenly available federal or state monies that come with tight timelines and little guidance on how to “be thoughtful and intentional around how to spend the money” create not just stress but confusion, along with a likelihood of misspent or unused funds. Gregson and others at CCEE are working with those who craft initiatives and legislation to help them become more aware of the realities that educational leaders face. California’s System of Support also provides guidance to school and district administrators on how to coordinate their efforts and effectively deploy educational dollars.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

When an infinite mind is applied to educational reform, acknowledging the need for improvement becomes the opposite of acknowledging failure, since it is simply an acceptance of the fact that “there is always more work to do,” says Navo. That iterative process is what the System of Support uses to help districts envision the long game, commit to it, and define “the measures that will tell us we’re on the right track.”

Stephanie Gregson works with Navo as deputy executive director at the CCEE. She too would like to rid education of any belief in a “quick fix.” Too many people, she says, want immediate results whether changing systems or improving student outcomes. “That’s what wins the elections, but that’s not education.”

While there is “no endgame in education,” says Gregson, the one constant involves “holding ourselves internally accountable for how we show up. If we are making decisions based on student need and experience, and if we are working collaboratively and collectively as a team, then naturally student experiences and the quality of instruction will improve.” That improvement is the goal of the entire network of resources and coaches within California’s System of Support.

MEASURE OF SUCCESS

If there is no winning in education and no endgame, “the measure of success for us,” says Navo, “is the positive feedback that we receive from the district leadership and the sites that we’re working with. We’re helping them get better,” he says, by providing them with “the basic infrastructure—a foundation of collaboration, trust, and cooperation.” That creates a solid ground, says Navo, for lasting improvement.

He still uses his first “turnaround” experience at Sanger as a touchstone. “At Sanger,” he says, “we didn’t get $750,000 a year to improve. We got zero dollars.” But Sanger USD improved, he says, “because we came into those tough conversations not with the aspiration of proving to anyone that we’re doing the right work. We were no longer on a ‘proving’ journey. We were on a learning journey. We wanted to learn what we could do to get better.

“Getting there took time, energy, humility, transparency. But at the end of the day, it built a foundation on which any improvement effort now will be successful.”

This is the goal of California’s System of Support: to provide every school district, county office of education, Special Education Local Plan Area, and charter school in the state with the kind of support it needs to build a foundation on which any improvement efforts will be successful. It’s a foundation that starts with humility.

Resources:

California’s System of Support is a central element of the state’s accountability system as well as of California’s system of continuous improvement. Learn more about how it helps LEAs and their schools meet the needs of each student at https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/sw/t1/csss.asp
Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs) are an important part of the System of Support. Read more about their contribution at https://systemimprovement.org/uploads/pages/State-System-of-Support-One-Page-Handout-7-14-2021.pdf
Learn about the California School Dashboard as a central source of accountability data in the System of Support at https://www.acsa.org/application/files/1515/1501/6629/DASHBOARD_Key_Points.pdf

[1] The color of this line was selected, explained Wheatley at a presentation in California, simply because of the green felt-tipped marker that was available during one of her seminal working sessions.

Scaling Up Statewide

Scaling Up Statewide

California has nearly 12,000 schools and almost 6 million students. The SUMS Initiative—Scale-Up MTSS (Multi-tiered System of Support) Statewide—has its sights on them all.

SUMS began in 2016 with a grant awarded to the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) and the Butte County Office of Education (BCOE). From the beginning, the SUMS vision was “to meet the needs of each and every student [and to allow] all students to participate in the general education curriculum, instruction, and activities of their grade-level peers.”

Even getting close to realizing this vision requires a massive and complicated undertaking that is beyond the scope of any one story. What can be readily captured, however, are the specific ways that SUMS has from the beginning used methods of Improvement Science and Implementation Science to navigate the landscape of school improvement.

These practices include:

Identifying and building on existing strengths and successes
Evaluating the system rigorously and continuously
Coordinating efforts
Starting small and scaling up
Providing sufficient information, training, and coaching to educators so they are all equipped to create and sustain cultures of continuous improvement.

California Multi-tiered System of Support

California MTSS creates equitable learning opportunities for all students by prioritizing “inclusive practices to increase access to high-quality education and resources for all students,” including students who receive special education services as well as “underserved populations such as children living in poverty, foster youth, juvenile-justice involved youth, charter school students, and rural schools.” An additional goal is to help schools redress the disproportionate rates of suspensions and expulsions among students with disabilities and from certain ethnic groups.

CA MTSS uses high-quality, evidence-based instruction, intervention, and assessment practices to ensure that every student receives the appropriate level of support to be successful.

The work supports LEAs to create aligned systems of tiered academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports that are provided to students when and as they need them, including special education, Title I, Title III, and gifted and talented programs. The first tier features high-quality first instruction for all, operating from the belief that all students can learn and all students will be served well. This system is comprehensive and data-driven. The goal is to effectively meet the needs of California’s students in all of their diversity and in the most inclusive environment possible.

CONTEXT

The state’s focus on MTSS did not emerge in a vacuum. Educators have struggled for decades to determine what predictably works in the classroom and how to close the research-to-practice gap for all students, including those with disabilities.

A seminal moment in California’s efforts toward this end was the 1974 publication of its Master Plan for Special Education, which articulated a commitment to “improve the quantity and quality of the program offerings,” to “work cooperatively to identify the strengths and weaknesses ”of the existing system, to “equalize opportunities for all students” [emphasis in the original], and to see every student “as a unique individual whose curiosity and potential deserve the special attention of all of our combined adult energies”—and to accomplish all of this by “not labeling children by categories.” In 2015, California’s Statewide Task Force Report on Special Education offered a more recent iteration of these commitments, arguing in favor of a concerted effort to create one coordinated system of education that is designed to serve all students. MTSS is a significant outcome of these years of effort.

Rindy DeVoll has been part of SUMS since its beginning and serves as director for CA MTSS Rural at BCOE. She is quick to point out that MTSS belongs squarely on the general education side of the school improvement ledger. While it shares similarities with special education’s Response to Intervention (RtI)—for example, they both use multi-tiered structures to address students’ needs—the difference in scope and reach is substantial. RtI represents an approach to identifying and responding to the specific individual needs of students with learning disabilities or behavioral challenges, ideally through early intervention. MTSS is a whole-system model for supporting all students, while also addressing systemic barriers to excellence within a school or a district, for students and educators alike.

At the same time, says DeVoll, while California’s MTSS framework and approach to implementation come from the general education side, “that doesn’t mean to divide us. It means to help support all of our colleagues that have been fighting the fight for students with disabilities for years. It’s part of that equity piece.”

MTSS has seen several of its own iterations; and currently Florida, Kansas, and Oregon have developed their own models. California has as well.

California MTSS (CA MTSS) incorporates the Common Core State Standards, social-emotional learning, positive behavioral interventions and supports, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and other key components of successful schools. As such, CA MTSS is a true whole-system model.

Rhonda Marriott is an administrator in the Learning Support Services team at OCDE and another CA MTSS leader. The work of SUMS, she says, begins with the belief that all students can succeed. As such, the initiative is grounded in equity, with the foundational principle that every student in California’s schools has a right to quality instruction in the core curriculum and to equal access to resources and services. The initiative uses an umbrella in its signature image to invoke this commitment that “all means all.”

FINDING A COMMON PURPOSE

When a task is large and complicated, getting started can be its own challenge. CA MTSS work begins when “people start to reflect on the question ‘Why?’” says DeVoll. “Why do you do what you do?’” Answers to this question, she says, lead schools toward articulating a purpose that can unite the efforts of everyone on staff toward that purpose. DeVoll also likes to ask educators, “‘Would you send your own child to this school?’ That really gets people thinking,” she says, “and gets us moving forward” to answer other questions, such “What do you want for your students? What do you want to create?’”

BUILDING ON EXISTING STRENGTHS AND SUCCESSES

All local educational agencies (LEAs: school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education) and schools have created systems and processes for educating students—with varying degrees of success. Most, says Jami Parsons, have “silos of excellence.”

Parsons is the director of the Learning Supports Unit at OCDE and is part of the original SUMS leadership team. CA MTSS, she says, “allows people to take stock of what they have in place and put it to work for the good of all kids in a seamless, integrated fashion.” The framework then helps schools and LEAs design and create “comprehensive programs that address the needs of every learner.”

In 2016, LEAs with elements of this kind of program already in place were chosen to participate in Phase I of the grant. These Knowledge Development Sites gave that first phase of SUMS a proving ground for what works and how to focus both local and statewide “scale-up” efforts. Fresno County Office of Education (Fresno COE) was part of that phase.

“Even before we started this work with the SUMS initiative,” says Brad Huebert, “educators throughout his county really embraced that idea of ‘all means all.’ But we were just not sure how to define the work, how to go about accomplishing it.” Huebert is the executive director of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Fresno COE and a member of the SUMS leadership team there. “Marrying the work that we were already doing to an initiative that had grounded evidence and resources behind it, like SUMS,” he says, allowed Fresno COE to begin comprehensive school improvement efforts.

The SUMS approach—working through a whole-systems lens to identify existing and unique improvement opportunities—made it possible for Huebert and other county leaders to “then very methodically craft a plan that involves new learning for teachers, following it up with in-class coaching and shoulder-to-shoulder coaching with administrators.” SUMS gave Huebert and his colleagues “form and function to the work we were already doing. It wasn’t another thing on the plate. It was the plate.”

RIGOROUSLY AND CONTINUOUSLY EVALUATING THE SYSTEM

SUMS helps LEAs to “define the work” in part through assessments. The Fidelity Integrity Assessment, or FIA, helps school leadership teams determine what they already have in place that they can build on and what they need to add or change. This tool was developed by the SWIFT Education Center, a national technical assistance organization that partnered with SUMS in its first three years to guide the model’s initial launch.

“Then we have the LEA Self-Assessment (LEASA),” which is conducted by district leaders, says Parsons. Like the FIA, the LEASA asks teams “to look at their system” to discover what elements of CA MTSS already exist and can be leveraged.

Both tools also focus on the practical steps of laying the foundation for change, implementing the change, and then creating conditions for continuous improvement and sustainability, establishing benchmarks, and charting progress over time. Parsons says “these are great tools” that also allow schools and LEAs to track the important indicators of attendance, discipline, and disproportionality.

These tools then shape the conversations that lead to discovery. When the results of the FIA and the LEASA are reviewed in a facilitated conversation among invested educational partners, “the light bulbs come on,” says Marriott. These light bulbs make visible “all the different perspectives,” says Parsons. “That is the beauty of a team self-assessment. When you get a team together representing primary to upper elementary grades, the school counselor, the school psychologist—all of these” invested partners, “we also discover great strengths.”

Gail Paradeza is a CA MTSS and Special Populations Coordinator for the Learning and Leadership Division at the San Diego County Office of Education. She started with SUMS in 2016 as a Regional Lead and highly values the opportunities that the initiative affords to connect people from disparate parts of the educational system. “Having people from special education be part of the conversations around the FIA has really helped the improvement efforts in San Diego County,” she says.

While the FIA gives team members a chance “to share their perspectives and realities,” DeVoll says, the assessment also forces important questions that “get people to start looking, for example, at things like master schedules, where students are and when they are being included.” Or not. The FIA, she says, “exposes the inequities” so they can be addressed.

DeVoll has seen real success in the way the FIA has directed CA MTSS implementation. In response, schools are creating equity teams, finding and using research-based interventions for students with disabilities, and forming Family Networks “to hear from voices that have historically been missing in conversations,” according to the 2021 SUMS report.

COORDINATING EFFORTS

While schools are “that place of transformation” for students and families, says Marriott, “the school needs support from the district” in order to be successful. “The district or LEA is that point of intervention, to remove barriers for schools, for example. And then the county office, the region, and the state can provide other layers of support. In effect, it takes a village, and part of the SUMS challenge was to figure out how all systems, within and encompassing the school and the district, could be leveraged to ultimately best serve all students.”

One fulcrum of the SUMS effort lies in its extensive network of regional CA MTSS leaders. Paradeza and Huebert are part of this network of educational leaders who are given rigorous training in CA MTSS, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and the many methods of Improvement Science.

Fred Cochran and Sally Glusing have been SUMS leaders in San Joaquin County since 2016. “Once trained,” says Cochran, he and his colleagues “schedule time with schools to help them with the various activities that are required through the SUMS grant work, any activity that helps them in the tiered structures of support,” including facilitated conversations with district leadership teams—about the FIA and the LEASA, for example—that then guide the teams in their plans for improvements.

In their respective counties, regional leaders use these conversations to “push at belief systems and current structures,” says Paradeza. “People would like to say that they do equity. But often they don’t have anything that backs it up. The actual know-how or framework hasn’t been discussed. Without a framework for equity, you can’t monitor or change anything. You have to be able to see your system and see if it’s effective or efficient. The CA MTSS framework is perfect for doing this,” she says. It provides this starting point for “seeing your system.”

These regional leaders also guide local improvement efforts. One of the school districts Cochran works with wanted PBIS but couldn’t afford the training. “With the SUMS grant,” says Cochran, “we were able to work with our SELPA [Special Education Local Plan Area] and special education department to co-lead PBIS [training] for all eight schools.” While this training took place four years ago, Cochran continues to work with these schools “when they need a boost, when they have new employees, and when they need to re-ground themselves in the PBIS framework.”

SCALING UP

“We’re spreading and scaling” CA MTSS, says Parsons, “building capacity for supporting LEAs throughout California. In Phase I, we identified 11 region leads, worked with them, trained them. We also worked with 56 of the 58 counties, training staff and building capacity through coaching.” The work is no longer primarily the responsibility of the SUMS leadership team, she says. “Other counties have come along, and they’re also coaching,” she says. The goal is to build sufficient expertise and knowledge throughout the state so that every school and LEA can develop its own CA MTSS.

Marriott leads the meetings for regional coaches. Operating as communities of practice and networked learning communities, the monthly coaching meetings bring regional lead coaches together to get and share information, which they “can then modify and use for their area coaches,” says Marriott. In a state as diverse as California, these agendas look different from one LEA to the next. For example, the needs of a one-school rural district can be significantly different from those of a large urban district. Since the system of coaching and support is regional, the area-specific knowledge that the coaches have allows important personalization and customization of the features of CA MTSS and of the way these features are applied in schools and LEAs.

The initiative’s emphasis on coaching is solidly supported by research. For years the vast majority of teachers (and the data) have reported that learning and even participation in professional development is “by and large useless” unless it’s accompanied by practice, coaching, and feedback.

Online Learning:

Resources for Implementing CA MTSS: https://ocde.us/MTSS/Pages/Implementing-CA-MTSS.aspx
MTSS Pathways Certification for Schools: https://vimeo.com/470384706

PROVIDING INFORMATION AND TRAINING

The SUMS Initiative has also created a comprehensive library of materials, online trainings, and certifications so that all school and LEA staff have access to the information and skills they need to implement CA MTSS with fidelity. Online courses “can be done either individually or in groups” as part of the CA MTSS pathways certification, says Parsons. “We also have stakeholder pathways—courses for teachers, administrators, school counselors, school psychologists, school-based mental health professionals, and paraeducators. They all receive training, build their capacity, and then all come back together and do some action planning toward next steps” to strengthen CA MTSS in their schools.

Cochran is currently supporting “about 100 teachers who are going through the certification process.” He even has “a three-day MTSS series for schools that don’t want to participate in the [SUMS] grant but want to learn more about MTSS. We’re a clearinghouse for whatever the needs are.”

INCLUDING STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

CA MTSS can be particularly supportive of students with disabilities, says Paradeza. “The structure of MTSS helps school leaders and staff understand that students with disabilities are general education students first,” she says, and that most students with IEPs have “average to above-average cognitive ability. They may just learn differently. And by providing access to these kids that learn differently, you’re actually benefiting students who are not identified as having a disability.”

The work is also particularly supportive of teachers, says DeVoll. “It says that we understand that [special education teachers] have been fighting for equitable practices for their students for years.”

The tools and the instructions within the MTSS framework, DeVoll says, are designed to expose and address inequities—disproportionate suspensions and expulsions, for example, and the over-identification of certain groups for disability overall. Building the capacity to identify and then to rectify inequitable practices “is in these tools,” she says, referring to the FIA and LEASA.

The initiative has acted on its commitment to equity and support for students with disabilities from the beginning. Incorporating special education into MTSS, however, is still not easy, says Paradeza. “We’re so used to having these separate kingdoms” of general education and special education.

At the same time, what the participating MTSS sites learned from Phase 1 of SUMS “supported schools and districts to do their work during the pandemic,” says Paradeza. District superintendents told her directly how much SUMS made it possible for them to navigate those difficult months.

The SUMS work continues. DeVoll also acknowledges the challenge of addressing issues of equity in schools. “Even if we’re really versed in social justice and racial awareness, there are still a lot of areas where we need to have those conversations about the structures and practices that we need to change and the ones we need to sustain.” The SUMS initiative has created a sturdy platform for these conversations.

“I think we’re getting there,” says Paradeza. “Slowly.”

Harnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement

Local Change
Harnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement

Educators faced numerous challenges when students returned to the classroom after COVID-19—learning loss and mental health challenges among them. The high staff turnover rates in schools didn’t help. California’s statewide System of Support, however, is doing more than just supporting local educational agencies (LEAs) through these challenges. Using the methods of Improvement Science and Implementation Science, the projects that are part of this system are working alongside LEAs to reframe challenges as opportunities—all in the service of improved outcomes for students.

Heidi Hata directs the System Improvement Leads (SIL) project at the El Dorado County Office of Education, one of the lead agencies for California’s Statewide System of Support. She explains that when the pandemic hit, “There were a lot of meetings to be held, and a lot of services to sort through” as schools determined how to move forward. Yet she also says the pandemic disrupted a system that wasn’t working well for a lot of students, including students with disabilities. Since schools were organizing student services in a new way and training entire new groups of staff, Hata says there was an opportunity to start with a new lens and purpose for their efforts in the classroom. Many of the LEA teams that SIL supports chose to maximize the opportunity and re-engineer their systems to better support students with disabilities.

Shasta County Office of Education (SCOE) is taking advantage of these opportunities. Jeremy Sawtelle, director of Specialized Student Support at SCOE, calls this county office an “improvement-heavy organization.” For him, this is a point of pride. Formal training on the methods of Improvement Science—through the System Improvement Leads, the Improvement Collective, and the Carnegie Foundation—has informed and guided Shasta’s improvement efforts, which the county has coupled with its work with the Supporting Inclusive Practices (SIP) project. Shasta’s leadership team has used this training to examine many practices, but none more than the individualized education program (IEP), the cornerstone of education for students with disabilities.

Hata emphasizes the importance of including teachers in any effort to figure out what the problem is and what’s causing it—and then of including them in the work of developing ways to address the problem. This participation and feedback is central to Shasta’s SIL work. In fact, the team gathers ongoing feedback from students and families as well as staff to help determine the starting point for small improvement cycles targeting the IEP process.

Through another technique called process mapping, Shasta staff discovered that there was no local alignment in IEP practices. In addition, no single case manager shared a start-to-finish IEP process with anyone else. Staff attrition rates, new hires, and a lack of clear protocols contributed to the misalignment. Through SIL, however, Shasta staff started working with one of their districts to codify the process and make it consistent districtwide. Then they developed a document with steps to guide all new staff. “It is a phenomenal concept that did not exist anywhere that we are aware of,” Sawtelle says.

“IEPs are intended to meet the needs of students, but there are lots of steps; there are lots of folks involved, and that means there are lots of places where it could break down,” says Hata. For example, “we might not have all the right people” involved in the IEP, she says, or the IEP team may “not have all the information we need.”

Prior to the pandemic, Shasta had reached out to the System of Support’s Equity, Disproportionality, and Design (ED&D) project to support the re-design of professional development through the lens of equity and inclusion. Sawtelle says that SCOE had started ED&D’s empathy interview trainings so that teachers in Shasta County would know how to get helpful feedback from their students using open-ended questions. Teachers would then use that information to develop lessons and customize how they supported each student. These interviews also helped to inform Shasta of the kinds of improvements it needed to make in the IEP process.

One of the things we’ve learned through Improvement Science is to start small and test our ideas. . .

This helps us learn much faster.

IMPROVEMENT CYCLES

With initial feedback and information in hand from process mapping and empathy interviews, the team used Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles to try new approaches to strengthening the IEP process. Since September 2021, Sawtelle’s team alone has run 30 of these cycles to evaluate the process and improve it. At the same time, he says, “We are coaching teachers and seeing the change in data from the student level. For two districts—and moving into a third—we are looking at outcomes for students based on the quality of their IEP goals.”

As California’s schools examined the lessons from distance learning and pandemic-related learning loss, several obstacles emerged in efforts to improve student outcomes. First, the data. Hata says that California’s special education systems were not built to quickly generate reports. Finding data on student outcomes often required time-consuming manual searches, which obstructed efforts to experiment with new ideas. This barrier was exacerbated by the pandemic. The PDSA process, however, helps sites try out new ideas in real time, quickly gather data on effectiveness, and pivot as necessary.

Kate Hogan is a program specialist at West Contra Costa Unified School District, which is also working with SIL to improve student performance. She says that these small PDSA cycles allow educators to learn from any outcome and generally lower the stakes on trying something new. In the past, she says, school staff would conduct longer-term projects, and they sometimes got to the end of a year only to realize that they were not seeing the outcomes they had hoped for. “One of the things we’ve learned through Improvement Science,” Hogan says, “is to start small and test our ideas. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But this helps us learn much faster.”

NETWORKED IMPROVEMENT COMMUNITIES

Hata also directs the SIL’s Networked Improvement Community (NIC), another feature of the Statewide System of Support. The network is made up of COE, SELPA, and LEA teams across the state that come together with a shared purpose of improving IEPs for students — a previously uninvestigated area of focus for a statewide NIC. This community has helped West Contra Costa examine its IEP processes and improve the quality of IEP goals.

This larger network of professionals is strengthening her efforts, Hogan says. “We can rely on our coach or the network of improvement teams to workshop an idea or help analyze our data to reach even better outcomes for our students.” Through this community, her team can reach the point of having enough confidence in an initiative to fully implement it because the teachers involved have worked together to improve the idea. “SIL is instrumental to this process,” says Hogan, and provides “much needed supports to our team along the way.”

The West Contra Costa leadership team is working in this community to develop “high-quality individualized [IEP] plans that the teachers feel really proud of,” says Hogan, plans that also ensure important points of compliance.

Shasta is also part of the NIC. “Many of our learnings and PDSA ideas,” says Sawtelle, “have come from NIC conversations” that have provided helpful perspectives from outside of the county. “We learn so much from our partners,” he says. At the same time, Sawtelle cautions against a “one size fits all” approach. “If you just come in and say, ‘Do these steps,’ without any level of co-creation, the initiative won’t hold.”

Shasta also uses an IEP Goal Quality Rubric to evaluate the goals for students. This tool generated conversations about if and how each member of an IEP team—teachers, parents, students and others—has been meaningfully involved in the development of the goals, or whether the case managers have been working to the best of their abilities but in isolation.

“Is a draft coming to that table pretty much complete, with one user’s view? Or are you collectively developing an IEP in a way that’s going to be relevant to what’s happening in general education?” asks Sawtelle. In the end, he says, the main question is: “With this IEP, will this student have a stronger sense of belonging and [an opportunity for] success in the classroom?”

REGIONAL SHARING

Hogan says that the System of Support has been “a gift,” one that makes it possible for LEAs to benefit from each other’s experience and share information. She refers to what happens as “a generative process” for ideas and solutions and is grateful “to not just be operating in our own little bubble.”

Hata agrees. “It’s just so critical to share within and across regions,” she says. “We don’t need to solve all these challenges on our own.” Facilitating this shared learning is a big part of SIL’s work in the System of Support. When the SIL staff find district teams that are working to address similar problems, SIL brings them together into networks, provides improvement coaching, and connects them with other System of Support agencies. This allows everyone to learn faster than they would by trying to solve problems in isolation.

As a result of its work with the SIL, West Contra Costa is providing families with more education about the IEP process and their role in it, and staff are using new tools to strengthen and encourage this involvement. And parents are pleased. “We’re even seeing their body language improve in meetings,” say Hogan. She points out that this increased satisfaction is especially important when working with parents of preschoolers with a disability. Early childhood education is often “the beginning of their journey” with special education, she says. “We feel like it’s really important for it to be a positive experience.”

The strongest tool we have for special education is the IEP.

ROOT CAUSES

As Shasta focused on improving the IEP, the leadership team wanted to know the root causes of problems within the IEP process. The team used an “affinity protocol process” as part of its discovery efforts, a tool that organizes large numbers of brainstorming ideas into themes. Staff pulled together whole departments that included special educators, psychologists, and others to ask, “What is it like to be a case manager?”

Sawtelle saw three themes emerge:

Case management is either overwhelming or emotionally exhausting.
There is a lack of direction within the process, and case managers are not sure what to do.
There is a lack of time to complete the paperwork required to be a case manager, or to schedule the meetings, or to hold the meetings.

“There’s just not enough time to do the work,” he says, “AND to be present, show your heart, and be available to the students that you are there to serve.”

The Shasta team found that case managers were spending, at a minimum, 12 hours per week writing IEPs, on top of their other work—and most case managers didn’t share an IEP development process with the next case manager. “So a root cause is that the case manager role is not sustainable,” he says, and case managers are struggling to keep up with their “day-to-day whirlwind.”

“The strongest tool that we have for special education is the IEP,” says Sawtelle, and “we put all of our faith” in the IEP and in the belief that it is going to lead the student to success. “But we’re finding that there’s no alignment between case managers.” In addition, he says, there’s a substantial amount of missing data. Sawtelle adds that this state of things is not going to lead to better outcomes for students with disabilities.

But with the resources available through California’s System of Support, Shasta is finding solutions. Sawtelle says that developing consistent procedures, along with realistic expectations for case managers, and collaboration from the team, will lead to success. “If you feel you’ve got the time and you know where you are going,” says Sawtelle, “then we believe that that emotional exhaustion will at least be lessened.”

CREATING EFFICIENCES

Hata says that when teams identify a root cause, such as unsustainable workloads or lack of reliable data, the SIL Networked Improvement Community gives educators a forum for examining how to truly solve the problems they see—“not to get caught in the endless loop of launching new initiatives.” NIC coaches help these teams “to really dig into those root causes and find meaningful long-lasting interventions.”

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Shasta has been addressing issues of equity for years. As with many county offices of education, the inequities that the pandemic revealed and exacerbated only made this work more important, and Shasta came to realize that “all our materials needed to shift,” says Sawtelle, “from the lens of capturing some students to the lens of capturing all students.” He credits ED&D and Kevin Schaefer with the SIP Project with supporting Shasta in this conclusion.

Sawtelle explains that Shasta’s efforts “really scaled out from supporting students with IEPs to supporting all learners from all marginalized groups—and understanding that you don’t need the same identity to be in support, to be a strong ally and stand with the students.” These equity conversations highlighted the need to closely examine outcomes related to students with disabilities but with the understanding that these outcomes needed to be viewed through a whole-system lens.

UNDERSTANDING THE "WHY"

Educators must connect to the purpose of their work, says Hata, especially special educators. “We can get so caught up in paperwork, and [in asking] are all the boxes checked, and are all the timelines met? It can be easy to lose [a sense of purpose] in all of the tasks that have to be done.” Hata and others in the SIL refer to this purpose as the “why.”

To get disentangled from all the requirements and compliance measures inherent in special education, Sawtelle points back to the students at the center of these efforts. “If you’re developing your direction with those students in mind, and with [the goal of] them reaching general education, then you’ve got your ‘why’ and you’ve got your steps.”

In his mind, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “I’m watching our next generation of homeless people. . . and I’m identifying them as students who used to have IEPs in our school system.”

Hogan agrees that the System of Support is vital in giving educators a new and innovative approach to solving the challenge of ensuring a quality education for her students with IEPs. Her team has gotten a great deal of guidance “on understanding the problems that we are looking at before jumping to solutions, which is something that has been really beneficial for our students—and the teachers that we’re working with, as well.”

“We have to be looking to see if there are students who are just historically not meeting their goals,” Sawtelle says, “and why we think that is, and what the data is saying.” By gathering data from case managers, for example, and exploring how and why students are not being successful, Sawtelle and others are finding answers to the all-important questions: “Where can we disrupt this cycle?” and “How can we support students to be successful?”

California’s System of Support is helping to find answers.

Early Childhood Programs

Expanding Options and Challenging Practitioners
Early Childhood Programs

Ninety percent of growth in the human brain happens before children go to kindergarten, and the experiences they have from birth through their fifth year shape them for life. These established facts have made indisputable the importance of quality early care and education.

In California, however, access to high-quality early learning programs for all young children has been inconsistently available and often unaffordable for many families. Adding to the challenge of access is that of complexity. Eric Sonnenfeld, assistant superintendent in the Early Childhood Education Program at the Tulare County Office of Education, compares California’s system of early childhood education to the famous Winchester Mystery House. “It looks pretty good on the outside,” he says, “but once you get inside, it’s very hard to figure out where you’re supposed to go.”

The many and potentially confusing “rooms” in this house include Head Start, the California State Preschool Program (CSPP), transitional kindergarten, and kindergarten itself, along with countless other public and private early care and education options. These programs were developed in the state at different times and with different sets of standards, funding streams, and guidelines.

Sonnenfeld knows this history well: from the 1940s, when child care centers were created so parents could work in airplane and munitions factories during the Second World War, to the 1960s, when Head Start was created as part of the country’s War on Poverty, to 1972 when the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) was created by the Child Development Act, and beyond. Through the years, Sonnenfeld says, “Governors of both [political] parties saw early education as important, but just not quite as important as advocates wanted.” What many of these advocates wanted was a system of carefully coordinated and universally available programs. What evolved instead was a patchwork of inconsistently available and disconnected options.

Until just recently.

Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced hundreds of millions of dollars for expanding, enhancing, and coordinating early childhood education programs in the state in ways that are leaving many current early childhood education advocates positively giddy.

DEFINITIONS

Any discussion of California’s rapidly expanding system of early education requires clear definitions of two terms in particular: “prekindergarten” and “transitional kindergarten.”

Prekindergarten (a word often used interchangeably with “preschool”), or PK, is an umbrella term for all the educational programs that a three- or four-year-old child might attend before kindergarten such as, Head Start, CSPP, private early childhood programs, and transitional kindergarten (see below). Universal prekindergarten, or UPK, refers to the state’s plan to make prekindergarten options readily available to all four-year-old children in the state, and to all three-year-olds who are socio-economically disadvantaged (through Head Start[1] and CSPP[2]). See the graphic to the right:

Transitional kindergarten (TK) is part of this UPK vision. A program provided through local educational agencies (LEAs), transitional kindergarten is designed to give four-year-old children an age-appropriate and school-based opportunity to develop the readiness skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. Until recently, TK has been available only in some parts of the state and only to some children. But in 2021, Governor Newsom announced a $2.7 billion initiative to expand transitional kindergarten to all four-year-olds by the 2025–26 school year (see chart below), creating free, universal transitional kindergarten, or UTK in California.

INCREASING OPTIONS AND EQUITY

Joe Nieto directs several early education programs and grants for the Riverside County Office of Education. He sees the expansion of TK as especially good news for socio-economically disadvantaged families, as their children often benefit most from access to free, high-quality preschool. In addition, “Parents now have choices,” says Nieto. “If a parent has a child in Head Start or state preschool [CSPP] when they are three, and the next year they’re TK eligible, the parent now has TK as an option. It comes down to what’s best for the child and their family and what meets their needs.”

Transitional Kindergarten Expansion A child will be eligible for TK…
In school year…	If the child turns 4…
2022–23	Between September 2–February 2
2023–24	Between September 2–April 2
2024–25	Between September 2–June 2
2025–26	By September 1, when all 4-year-olds are eligible

BENEFITS FOR ALL

Nearly all children stand to benefit from quality PK, and none more than children with disabilities. Children who are born with a disability or who are at risk of developmental delay experience improved language development and social skills when they attend PK with their same-age and typically developing peers. High-quality early childhood education gives them important opportunities to learn, make friends, develop independence, and establish new routines, all of which create the best start in life.

In general, PK settings that welcome children with disabilities or developmental delays (often called “inclusive settings”) boost learning outcomes for children of all abilities, skill levels, and backgrounds.

Currently, however, not all PK programs in the state include children with disabilities or developmental delays. That, too, will change, says Stephen Propheter, director of the Early Childhood Division at the California Department of Education (CDE).

Propheter is especially pleased that the state’s current-year budget includes “a categorical eligibility for children with disabilities” in PK. In addition, by the 2024–25 school year, PK programs will be required to hold 10 percent of their enrollment for children with disabilities, virtually ensuring them a place in these programs and the opportunity to learn and develop alongside their peers. This percentage will be phased in gradually over the next few school years, giving programs time to develop the infrastructure they need to accommodate and support all children.

To fund the necessary infrastructure changes, the state has granted $250 million through the Inclusive Early Education Expansion Program so that schools and classrooms can be universally designed to accommodate children who, for example, use wheelchairs or feeding tubes. These funds will also contribute to training and professional development for teachers and staff so they are prepared to support all children through such approaches as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and co-teaching practices.

“But it’s not just LEAs and TK that have this requirement to enroll children with disabilities,” says Propheter. “It’s also community-based organizations. My fondest hope is that, as we get to that ten percent [of enrollment of children with disabilities], every child is receiving services in the least restrictive environment.”

The California Preschool Learning Foundations, on which the TK curriculum is based, will also be updated. Propheter is eager to see these foundations “revamped to be more inclusive of children with disabilities and multilingual learners, addressing racial bias and other areas.”

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL AND MENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGES

For the past few years, the Governor’s budget has earmarked funds for social-emotional learning and mental health supports for PK students. Before COVID-19, the skyrocketing numbers of young children getting expelled from PK more than justified these funds. Post COVID-19, Sonnenfeld sees an even greater need for social-emotional learning. “Many three- and four-year-olds have spent most of their lives in some version of a COVID lockdown,” he says. “When these children show up at preschool, they’re going to behave in ways that teachers might not recognize,” in part because of the isolation and stress the pandemic caused for them and their families, which, he says, created a “huge glitch” in their development.

Sonnenfeld has seen this phenomenon manifest itself in “children with delayed speech and language, children with problems self-regulating, children who need attention 24–7, children who are behind in potty training, children who are behind developmentally in general.” These children, he says, “are exhibiting behaviors that, prior to COVID, would have caused them to be considered for identification” for special education services. But “they do not have a disability. They’ve just had this shared trauma.”

The first and best tool for addressing this challenge, he says, is to understand it and not be too quick to label a child. Identifying a child as having a disability when the cause of puzzling behavior lies somewhere else can further harm the child’s development—and flood an already taxed special education system. The second tool, he says, is a workforce of educators trained to understand child development, social-emotional learning, and trauma-informed care. Equally critical are healthy partnerships with families.

California’s Definition of an English Learner:

A student who enrolls in a California school beginning in any grade level, transitional kindergarten through grade twelve, has a language other than English identified on the Home Language Survey, and upon assessment, obtained a level of English proficiency that indicates programs and services are necessary. Students identified as English learners receive programs and services until they meet the reclassification criteria pursuant to Education Code (EC) Section 313.

BENEFITS FOR DUAL LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Sixty percent of young children from birth to age five in California are learning to speak two languages at the same time: their home language and English. Called “dual language learners” (DLLs) in PK settings, that DLL designation changes when they start attending kindergarten. In the kindergarten-through-grade 12 (K–12) system (including TK), if students are not proficient in English they are classified as English learners (ELs).

An EL designation qualifies students for school-based services to help them progress toward English proficiency. As soon as they become proficient in English and demonstrate that they have acquired the necessary English skills to be academically successful without specialized support, they are “reclassified as fluent English proficient,” or RFEP. Too many students, however, never acquire sufficient English skills to successfully engage in classroom learning and the core academic curriculum taught in English; as a result, they are never reclassified.

Adding to the complications, many students who are classified as an EL are misidentified in disproportionate numbers as having disabilities. The persistently poor learning outcomes of both ELs and students with disabilities (and students who are dually identified) are most commonly why LEAs are directed to seek improvement help from their county office of education or state agencies.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of the CDE’s Multilingual Support Division, sees TK expansion as an opportunity to change this picture. Data back her up. A study conducted by the American Institutes for Research showed that California’s TK program strengthened the English language skills of English learners as well as their early math skills, compared to the skills of their EL peers who do not attend TK. In effect, the experience of TK contributes to the K–12 success of children who are dual language learners. Moreno-Ramirez is optimistic about the many ways that TK will contribute to improved school outcomes for this cohort.

A commitment to the state’s multilingual population is not new. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) gives LEAs with high numbers of English learners more money to improve rates of English proficiency. The LCFF also gives LEAs a great deal of flexibility in how they use these educational dollars, an approach that has seen some success.

During the past decade in general, there has been “more support for dual language implementation,” says Moreno-Ramirez. That support comes in part from the English Learner Roadmap, which provides guidance to LEAs on how to welcome, understand, and educate the diverse population of students who attend California’s public schools and who are English learners. This policy, she says, “elevates the importance of home language and home culture.” Valuing both contributes to improved student outcomes.

Moreno-Ramirez underscores the practical challenge of recognizing the difference between language development and disability—and the critical importance of distinguishing between the two. In 2019, the CDE published a comprehensive guide for practitioners to support ELs with disabilities in the classroom. The state’s plans for UPK also promise to make the work of these practitioners easier. “When PK settings are developmentally appropriate and inclusive, particularly for multilingual learners who might be experiencing learning difficulties,” she says, their chances of school success are improved greatly. Decades of research show that early identification and intervention can favorably alter an entire life trajectory for a child.

BUILDING CAPACITY

This plan to develop UTK is often referred to as “TK expansion,” which is part of the larger effort to develop universal prekindergarten (UPK). “And any time you look at expansion,” says Propheter, “you’re going to put pressure on the existing infrastructure. But then you’re also going to create the imperative to build capacity.”

Finding the necessary classrooms and upgrading existing facilities are important parts of building that capacity. The state’s greatest challenge, however, may be in finding the workforce to staff classrooms, especially when teacher shortages have plagued the state for decades.

Attracting new early childhood educators and strengthening the competencies of current teachers are central to California’s expansion efforts.[3] The state is providing billions of dollars to make this happen, with millions more expected for 2023–24. The Early Educator Teacher Development Grant, the Teacher Residency Grants, the Classified School Employee Teacher Credentialing Program, and the Educator Effectiveness Block Grant together represent more than $2 billion to attract, train, and retain PK teachers, and that list does not include the Golden State Teacher Grant Program or the California Prekindergarten Planning and Implementation Grant, both of which have PK workforce development components.

But education and training, says Propheter, aren’t enough. “We also know that coaching is necessary.” As a vehicle for providing appropriate coaching, he says, the CDE is looking at the “state preschool QRIS [Quality Rating and Improvement System] Block Grant, which is geared to providing training and workforce development for state preschools.” By using these grants, “LEAs can ensure that their TK teachers also have access to that training”—and coaching.

LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

LEAs are the sole recipients of the money; they also hold the mandate to create UTK, which makes some early childhood specialists wary. Inclusion advocate Linda Brault directs several statewide training projects for the Child Care and Development Division of the California Department of Social Services. She fears that LEAs may be tempted, especially with the teacher shortage, to assign, for example, a third-grade teacher to a TK classroom. The problem, says Brault, is that most teachers with multiple-subject credentials are not sufficiently knowledgeable about early childhood development, nor are they trained in the unique pedagogies of early childhood education to create developmentally appropriate learning environments for four-year-olds.

Sonnenfeld agrees. These children, he says, don’t learn “with a teacher standing in front of the room talking. And they don’t learn by going through workbooks.” Sonnenfeld and his early childhood colleagues all seem to agree that TK teachers must know how to activate the power of play.

Play in an early childhood classroom, however, doesn’t mean a disorganized “free for all,” says Sonnenfeld. A high-quality, play-based classroom for three- and four-year-olds can “support science, math, other cognitive abilities, all of the basic skills that educators want to teach children,” he says, in addition to social-emotional self-regulation. He describes a well-designed TK classroom as having “different stations for different topics.” While children follow their own interests, these stations, he says, “are structured in a manner that promotes learning—in math or literacy and reading, for example.” In general, TK classrooms “should not look like a traditional kindergarten classroom,” says Nieto.

Since instructional competence is especially important for children with disabilities and those at risk of developmental delay, the need for the unique skills requiredfor quality learning puts even more pressure on the system to ensure that schools have well-trained teachers. Nieto is eager to take on this challenge. Making sure teachers can create quality TK settings “is part of our job,” he says. “This falls on our district and county offices of education to support our TK teachers and administrators.”

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) is another important player. For future PK teachers, the CTC is currently developing a new PK–3 [prekindergarten through third grade] Early Childhood Specialist credential, which includes an emphasis on UDL and the skills needed to create inclusive settings. Advocates across the state are anticipating rigorous standards for this credential with specific competencies that focus on early childhood development and play-based learning.

CREATING A UNIFIED SYSTEM

California’s K–12 system has been working for years to coordinate and unify its various parts—special education with general education, for example—to ensure that the system is coherent and its efforts align. That work will continue for years, given the complexity of the challenge. Retrofitting the early childhood sector along similar lines may prove to be even more challenging. The goal of improved coordination and alignment, however, is one of the reasons that LEAs have been given the responsibility of executing the UPK vision. Aligning curriculum and instruction to ensure seamless transitions from UPK through twelfth grade may be more logistically possible when all of the players belong to the same system.

Propheter is part of a coordinated effort at the CDE to realize this seamless, articulated prekindergarten-through-twelfth-grade (PK–12) vision. “Our Deputy Superintendent Sarah Neville-Morgan has started a preschool-through-third-grade alignment [P–3] initiative,” working with the divisions within the CDE’s Opportunities for All Branch, says Propheter.

Moreno-Ramirez is also involved in this work. One of the most important conditions for effectiveness, she says, is “alignment and articulation within and across systems,” an effort that she says runs counter to “historical approaches,” where early education, elementary education, and secondary education were treated as distinct and separate entities. “We need to be aligning services and curriculum” across all ages and grades, she says, “having conversations, thinking about responsiveness and assessment across the continuum of years for the child.” The timing of this message, she says, couldn’t be better with the state’s current focus on “UPK, UTK, and the P–3 experience. We’re thinking about how to intentionally and deliberately bridge from that early learning setting into the K–12 space.”

Paying for Itself

Economist Arthur Rolnick and researcher Rob Grunewald, in Early Education’s Big Dividends: The Better Public Investment, write about the “high returns that investments in early childhood development have garnered,” especially among disadvantaged families. This return, they found, “far exceeds the return on other economic-development projects.” In Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return, they write that “the quality of life and the contributions a person makes to society as an adult can be traced back to the first few years of life.” The investment California is making to enhance the quality of the first years of its youngest citizens promises to reap many benefits.

WHAT'S NEXT

Many practical challenges lie ahead in creating coordinated, inclusive UPK in California. “There are sections of the Education Code in California,” says Sonnenfeld, “that dictate how early learning programs operate, similar to what happens in K–12.” However, unlike the K-12 system, he says, “We do not have a totally dedicated funding stream.” He describes early childhood education funding as coming from a hodgepodge of sources: Prop 98, the general fund, and the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant money among them. These conditions and differing state and federal guidelines, he says, “make it difficult for our programs to move forward in a relatively cohesive manner because you have multiple masters to serve when you use multiple funding sources.”

There are other challenges that are logistical and practical. Some TK classes last for six hours, others for three, making scheduling and staffing difficult for working parents and school administrators. Only some schools have extended learning programs that a child can attend after their class is finished for the day. And since children are not required to attend either TK or kindergarten (as they are required to attend first grade), some LEAs do not provide transportation to school for these younger children—and transportation itself can pose a challenge for children with disabilities and families with low incomes.

While California works to address many of these challenges, Sonnenfeld is himself close to giddy about the possibilities inherent in UPK. In addition to the opportunity for thousands of California’s young children to reap the benefits of a quality early learning experience, he says, education will improve because early childhood educators “will permeate the system. Ultimately, those teachers will move into administrative positions, becoming principals, superintendents, and educational leaders as they advance in their careers. And those foundational things of PK—social-emotional learning, inclusion, and the importance of play—will eventually be interwoven into the entire K–12 system.” Their early childhood ethos “will influence the entire system for the better. If you’ve ever been involved with people in early learning, there’s a contagious fire and a passion in them.”

Practitioners, leaders, and policymakers alike are generally gratified at the direction the state is taking. “We have to pinch ourselves sometimes,” says Propheter, because this attention to and expansion of early childhood education “is something that for years and years and years many of us have worked for. And to be able to get to do this, not just get UPK but to include children with disabilities in early childhood programs—it’s just incredible.”

RESOURCES

Universal PK FAQs offers helpful answers to many questions about universal prekindergarten in California.
Transitional TK FAQS provide helpful answers to questions about transitional kindergarten in California.
California’s Master Plan for Early Learning and Care: Making California For All Kids articulates the state’s vision for the early childhood education sector.
The California Practitioner’s Guide for Educating English Learners with Disabilities provides helpful information and examples for the field, especially about reclassifying English learners.
The Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center features research and studies on the benefits of inclusion in early childhood education settings for young children with disabilities.
TK California is part of Early Edge, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes quality education for young children. TK California provides policy updates and information for parents, teachers, and administrators.

[1] Head Start serves families with incomes under the federal poverty line ($21,000 for a family of 3).

[2] CSPP serves low-income families (earning less than $54,000 for a family of 3).

[3] These are central tenets of the California’s Master Plan for Early Learning and Care (see page 17 of the plan).

Working Toward the Promise of Inclusion

Working Toward the Promise of Inclusion

By Cindy Arstein-Kerslake, M.A., Coordinator of WestEd’s MAP to Inclusion and Belonging Project, parent of three young women (one with a disability), grandparent of a three-year-old, and life-long facilitator of inclusion

The benefits of educating all children together—those with and without disabilities—have been clearly established. “Through experiences of playing together, children with a diverse range of abilities develop a sense of equality and togetherness that is impossible to achieve in segregated settings,” writes Jani Kozlowski in her book Every Child Can Fly: An Early Childhood Educator’s Guide to Inclusion.[1]

The benefits of inclusion go far beyond the positive developmental impact on children with and without disabilities in early care and education programs. Inclusion in a neighborhood school provides the opportunity for children without disabilities and their families to gain experience interacting with children with diverse abilities and appreciate the gifts that they offer.

For families of children with disabilities, being welcomed as part of the larger school community eliminates the sense of isolation that comes with attending a segregated school or classroom. With school as common ground, interactions with children without disabilities and other families open the door to a network of supportive relationships for children with a disability and their families. Carpooling, babysitting, play dates at the park, participation in community events, and being invited to birthday parties are all easier and more likely with full inclusion.

Since 1986, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has guaranteed the right of children ages three to five with disabilities to be educated alongside their nondisabled peers in the least restrictive environments (LRE, which has been the legal right of children ages 6–21 since 1975).

Despite that 40-year mandate and the established benefits, most preschoolers with disabilities in California are served in segregated settings. Data from 2019 show that only 27.3 percent of these preschoolers in the state received services in regular early childhood settings at least 10 hours a week.

Conditions, however, are changing.

THE HISTORY

In April 2009, a Joint Position Statement of the Division for Early Childhood (DEC—part of the Council for Exceptional Children) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) provided the first shared national definition of inclusion:

Early childhood inclusion embodies the values, policies, and practices that support the right of every infant and young child and his or her family, regardless of ability, to participate in a broad range of activities and contexts as full members of families, communities, and society.

The position statement goes on to enumerate “the defining features of inclusion”:

Access: ensuring that all children have physical accessibility as well as effective learning environments; typical routines, activities, and settings and general education curricula.

Participation: ensuring that all children are active, independent participants in their environments. Use of individualized accommodations, modifications, and adaptations promote active participation and a sense of belonging for all children in typical settings.

Supports: ensuring that infrastructure-level supports are in place, including access to high-quality professional development, ongoing support, and time for collaborative teaming. Effective policies are developed to promote inclusion.

In 2015 the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Department of Education (ED) used the word “inclusion” for the first time in their Joint Policy Statement on Inclusion of Children with Disabilities in Early Childhood Programs. Prior to this, the field used the related concepts of the LRE for children with disabilities age 3–21 and services in “natural environments” for infants and toddlers.

This federal policy statement was built upon the definition and vision for inclusion in the DEC/NAEYC Joint Position Statement. The federal statement provided the institutional commitment and scientific evidence for the benefits of inclusion. The statement also identified some of the challenges of creating quality inclusive settings, as well as the need to build a national culture of inclusion. Finally, the federal policy statement recommended state action: increasing the inclusion of infants, toddlers, and preschool children with disabilities in high-quality early childhood programs.

The Changing Landscape

California has not been idle. For decades, practitioners and policymakers have worked to promote inclusive settings, and their efforts have contributed to the landmark developments of the past few years. On March 18, 2019, the California Department of Education (CDE) affirmed its support for inclusion and specifically referred to the federal Policy Statement on Inclusion in a joint letter from the directors of the Special Education Division (SED) and the Early Learning and Care Division (now titled the Early Education Division). This letter of affirmation, entitled “Access to Inclusive Early Learning and Care Programs for Students with Disabilities,” declared support for inclusion and promoted a common definition of the concept:

“Inclusion in early childhood education programs refers to including children with disabilities in early childhood programs, together with their peers without disabilities; holding high expectations and intentionally promoting participation in all learning and social activities, facilitated by individualized accommodations; and using evidence-based services and supports to foster their development (cognitive, language, communication, physical, behavioral, and social-emotional), friendships with peers, and sense of belonging.” — from the 2015 federal policy statement on inclusion

California’s renewed commitment to inclusion is more than a statement. In recent years, governors and state legislatures have granted considerable funding to create new preschool options and to build the capacity for inclusive early learning and care programs. Also, the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction has expressed his commitment to inclusion.

Projects and Resources from California

The CDE’s joint statement emerged from years of work and commitment from the early childhood and special education sectors. Within the past decade, the CDE’s Opportunities for All Branch has supported and promoted inclusion via the following grant programs and projects:

The Embedded Instruction Grant, coordinated through the Desired Results Access (DR Access) Project, connects the Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP) assessment (which measures children’s learning and developmental outcomes) to curriculum and instructional practices. This grant provides planned and intentional instruction for children with disabilities during everyday activities (i.e., embedded instruction). Local educational agencies (LEAs) in the state work with experts and researchers to pilot techniques and practices of embedded instruction that are effective for young children with disabilities. The national-level project includes training and coaching to give teachers the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use these practices.
The Supporting Inclusive Practices (SIP) project, a technical assistance project funded through the CDE’s Special Education Division, has expanded its professional development offerings to include a focus on preschool-age children. SIP has been a steady presence throughout California, providing training, conferences, and resources on early childhood inclusion.
California is in the early stages of revising its Preschool Learning Foundations to support high-quality early learning environments and inclusive settings. The revision is expected to be completed in 2023. The state’s Master Plan for Early Learning and Care was released in late 2021 as part of a commitment to develop a research-based roadmap for building a comprehensive and equitable early learning and care system over the next decade.
The Inclusive Early Education Expansion Program (IEEEP) has been funded by the state legislature since 2018 to prepare California’s early care and education sites for inclusion. In addition to funding, the IEEEP provides guidance and recommendations for high-quality inclusive settings through the training and resources endorsed by the program. The IEEEP funding can be used for:
Facility construction, repairs, and renovations to increase access to inclusive programs
Adaptive equipment to improve accessibility to indoor or outdoor environments to increase participation of children with disabilities
Professional development to ensure that early learning and care staff are prepared to serve children with disabilities
The cross-sector Impact Inclusion Workgroup was formed through the IEEEP grant legislation and provides an opportunity for state and local representatives to share challenges, barriers, and best practices for inclusion.
As part of its commitment to inclusive early education, the CDE has compiled resources to support early education professionals and families of children with disabilities.

Additional Projects Supporting Inclusion

Throughout the years, projects and initiatives supporting and promoting inclusion in early childhood have been funded by the Child Development Block Grants. These grants, originally managed through the CDE, are now under the purview of the California Department of Social Services. Among them are three that together comprise Supporting Inclusive Early Learning: Working Together for Inclusion & Belonging at WestEd, a research, development, and services agency that works with education communities to promote excellence, equity, and improved learning outcomes for children, youth, and adults.

The Teaching Pyramid, which has supported early childhood educators since 2009, promotes the social and emotional development of all children in California. The project provides early childhood programs with training on a framework (the pyramid) of universal practices that support healthy social-emotional development for all children, practices that assist in preventing challenging behaviors in some, and interventions that address individual problematic behaviors in a few. WestEd is currently conducting research showing that when the Teaching Pyramid is implemented with fidelity, children demonstrate greater social competence, increased emotional literacy, and fewer challenging behaviors.
Beginning Together: Caring for Young Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Settings provides training and technical assistance in support of inclusion through a “training of trainers” institute (which is designed to bridge the theory-to-practice divide for inclusion), regional outreach activities, and general support of inclusive practices.
The MAP to Inclusion and Belonging: Making Access Possible (MAP) project provides a clearinghouse of information and resources on inclusion for early care and education providers. The November 2022 newsletter provides information about the success of the Beginning Together Inclusion Facilitator Institutes.

Through these and other initiatives, the CDE is moving quickly to support LEAs to develop the knowledge, infrastructure, and staffing necessary to build transitional kindergarten (TK) and (UPK) programs that are inclusive

INCLUSION IN UNIVERSAL PREKINDERGARTEN

UPK is an umbrella term that describes what’s referred to as California’s “mixed delivery system” of early education options: the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) and TK at the CDE, along with Head Start, district and local community-based preschool programs, early learning services for students with disabilities (as guided by Individualized Family Service Plans [IFSPs] and Individualized Education Programs [IEPs]), private-pay preschool, and expanded learning options to support access to a full day of services.

Legislation passed in 2021 requires any local educational agency that operates a kindergarten also provide a free TK program for all four-year-old children by 2025–26, as part of California’s public education system.

The 2022–23 California State Budget Act also expands access within CSPP programs by guaranteeing 24 months of eligibility to all three- and four-year-old children with exceptional needs and expands eligibility to all families with incomes up to the state median. This budget act also allocates new funding for the IEEEP and establishes the California Universal Planning and Implementation Grant Program, with the goal of expanding access to all three- and four-year-old children through the state’s mixed delivery system. In addition, it provides $2 million for the CDE to develop a process and tools for early identification of children at risk for developmental delays or learning disabilities.

Challenges

The expanding range of and options for early education in the state is welcome news for the families of children with disabilities and holds out great promise for the children themselves. And while the state’s commitment and finances seem to align, challenges—and a great deal of work—remain.

Research identifies attitudes and beliefs as the most common barriers to inclusion. In Every Child Can Fly, Kozlowki cites a 2015 national survey that revealed many fears about inclusion:

That it would cause some children to “lose out”
That staff weren’t prepared, that children with disabilities needed to be “ready”
That parents don’t want it
That it would be harmful to typically developing children
That blended funding to support inclusion was illegal
Even that children with disabilities didn’t belong in general education programs

Addressing Challenges

To address these fears and ensure the success of the work ahead, both parents and professionals know that the following must gain central focus: partnerships with families, systems change, social-emotional development, quality settings, statewide standards, professional development and support, and successful transitions.

Partnering with families is essential for inclusion to succeed. Shared decision-making among family members and practitioners is key when placing children with disabilities in regular education classroom settings. Trusting relationships, mutual respect between parents and educators, collaboration, and ongoing communication must be established and supported.

Experience and research have proven the benefits of early childhood inclusion for children with and without disabilities.

Changing the system by moving from a segregated model of education to an inclusive model of service delivery requires a new infrastructure. Any new framework for supporting this change must also include new kinds of planning and collaboration, support from leadership, and trusting relationships.

Social-emotional development and social skills must be central to inclusion and high-quality environments for all children. Resources such as the California Teaching Pyramid have elevated the quality of early childhood classrooms and made inclusion easier.

High-quality early care and education settings make inclusion possible. Continued efforts to improve the quality of early childhood education settings with training and resources will help move classrooms toward inclusion. An updated version of the Preschool Learning Foundations is expected to be completed in 2023. Training on and promotion of this tool will help promote quality preschool environments.

Statewide standards must be established. Currently there are no agreed-upon statewide standards for high-quality inclusion. The Inclusive Classroom Profile (ICP) is a classroom assessment that the IEEEP grant recommends for training. The Early Childhood Technical Assistance (ECTA) Indicators of High-Quality Inclusion are also a recommended resource. In the future, it will be helpful to have a process of evaluation and oversight to promote consistent standards of inclusion for all programs. The Impact Inclusion Workgroup is currently gathering resources and developing trainings to support the field in this area.

Ongoing professional development and support for implementing inclusive practices is needed to ensure quality and sustainability. The Beginning Together Inclusion Facilitator Institute is a high-quality launch for inclusive practices and an introduction to systems change, but local leadership and ongoing support for teachers in the classroom is needed to sustain the work.

Support during transitions is critical. Transition from Early Intervention to Preschool is often the door to inclusion for children with disabilities. The partnership between early intervention programs and LEAs must include education and support for families before, during, and after transition to a preschool learning environment. LEAs need to be able to invite and welcome children with disabilities into inclusive settings. California’s State Personnel Development Grant (SPDG) will address these issues with the new Partnerships for Effective Practices in Transition and Inclusion over the next few years. (This grant was awarded to the CDE in collaboration with the California

Department of Social Services. Find out more at https://www2.ed.gov/programs/osepsig/index.html)

Of these many challenges, perhaps the most pernicious involves attitudes and beliefs, which are often most effectively changed through first-hand experience. Stories are also powerful tools for change, especially when they show disability and inclusion from a new perspective and are told by the families and individuals with disabilities themselves (see the following story).

Conclusion

Laws mandating LRE have been in place for 48 years; the law mandating early intervention services for infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families has been in place for 37 years. Both experience and research gathered during all of these years have proven the benefits of early childhood inclusion for children with and without disabilities, families, early care and education providers, and the community.

The state and federal governments have developed policies and recommendations to move inclusion forward. With UPK on the horizon in California—and the possibility of inclusive preschool options in Universal TK, California State Preschools, and other state and federally funded programs—more children with disabilities than ever before in California may have the opportunity to attend preschool with their peers in the very near future.

The challenges of inclusion can be daunting when they are combined with the challenges of building the UPK system. The leadership, fiscal resources, and guidance provided by the CDE, the California Department of Social Services, and other state agencies, however, currently offer statewide early childhood inclusion the best possibility for success that the state has ever had.

Resources

The California Department of Education Universal Prekindergarten FAQs document https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kinderfaq.asp identifies how the CDE is supporting inclusive practices and providing resources to help teachers deal with challenging behaviors. The FAQs cite the revision of the California Preschool Learning Foundations to be released in 2023, as well as the CDE’s Preschool through Third Grade (P-3) Alignment initiative to address inequities and bias and to promote equitable opportunities for all children. (FAQ #1 points out the legislation that sets forth specific steps that must be taken when a child exhibits serious challenging behaviors before a California State Preschool Program can expel or disenroll a child.)
Universal Prekindergarten Planning and Implementation Guidance (Volume 1, February 14, 2022) introduces LEA leaders to early education concepts, agencies, and structures to support them in developing Universal PreK plans. The guidance specifically addresses children with disabilities as part of section 1b: “Research on Why Early Education Matters.”
Universal Prekindergarten Planning and Implementation Guidance (Volume 2, April 22, 2022), and its section 4c—“Prekindergarten through Third Grade Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment—Supporting Children with Disabilities”—includes an overview of select instructional practices to support children with disabilities in UPK, including descriptions of and resources related to implementing effective curriculum, instruction, and assessments for children with disabilities.
California’s Great Start web site features universal prekindergarten communications materials that were released in November 2022. Particularly useful is an easy-to-follow overview of UPK.
The Part C to B for CA Kids Workgroup published in 2021 its recommendations for improving the transition of three-year-old children with disabilities from early intervention services (Part C of IDEA) to special education services (Part B of IDEA). Since then, California was awarded a five-year, $10.5 million State Personnel Development Grant (SPDG grant) from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) that began in October 2022. The goal for this project is to improve all aspects of transition for children from the early intervention system to entry into preschool.

[1] Kozlowski, Jani. 2022. Every Child Can Fly: An Early Childhood Educator’s Guide to Inclusion. Lewisville, NC: Gryphon House.

A Family Inclusion Story

A Family Inclusion Story

Early childhood professionals and parents gathered in March 2022 to celebrate the accomplishments of the Beginning Together Institute graduates.

At this event, Lori Dotson shared a success story involving her son, Atticus, and her daughter, Phin. Atticus is typically developing. Phin has multiple and severe disabilities. One day, Atticus asked Lori if his sister could attend the same school that he attended. That request sparked a conversation that eventually included the principal of the school, and this conversation opened a door.

Could Phin possibly attend school in person? After much preparation and planning, Atticus’s wish came true. In the fall of 2022, Phin started second grade with her brother. She began attending one day a week—two hours a day during library time. That expanded to twice a week for two hours a day.

Phin’s first day was not without its challenges. One of the girls in the class screamed when she saw Phin. She was afraid of Phin’s eyes. In response, Lori created a social story to help set Phin’s classmate—and all the children—at ease. The social story—I See You, Do You See Me?—explains the unique characteristics of Phin’s eyes and how all eyes are different.

Lori then created another social story—I Hear You, Do You Hear Me?—to help Phin’s classmates communicate with her. Not long after the social stories were shared—and after the frightened girl had time to get to know Phin—that same girl was complimenting Phin on her outfit and asking if she could push Phin’s wheelchair.

Now classmates take turns pushing Phin to the library, where everyone is allowed to select and check out one book. But Phin gets to check out two books to make sure that all of her classmates eventually get the opportunity to help her choose.

Lori says that Phin loves going to school. She wakes up early and eagerly cooperates in getting ready. She enjoys being with other children and she is starting to vocalize more. And Atticus enjoys having Phin at school.

In Phin’s class there was a reading competition, and the student that logged the most hours got a prize. Atticus wanted Phin to win, so he read to her every spare minute and instructed her mom, dad, and caregivers to do the same—even reminding them to log the hours. Phin won!

Together, Phin’s family and community are changing their world.

Family Engagement

What Happens
Family Engagement

When Amy Rovai Gregory was principal at Greer Elementary School in 2018, “Over 90 percent of our students qualified for free or reduced-priced lunches,” she says, “and the school was in a food desert, with no local grocery stores for miles. We also had many families who struggled to find work.” On top of these challenges, many of her students were part of refugee families. Gregory was acutely aware of how difficult it was for their parents “to navigate this new place,” she said, referring to the United States in general and the Sacramento area in particular. On the school side of the picture, achievement scores were lower than average and absentee rates were higher.

Seeing connections among these many factors, Gregory took her lead from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow showed that basic human needs must be met before people can attend to higher-level needs. In effect, if kids are hungry or emotionally or physically insecure, says Gregory, “then we’re up against a losing battle in the classroom.”

To help her students learn, Gregory concluded, she had to find ways to help the school’s families “connect to community resources and access education and enrichment opportunities” —in short, to create a family and community engagement program. The benefits from this effort, she believed, would “carry into the classroom. That is what I hoped to accomplish as a principal.”

PREPARATION

Starting with the school staff, Gregory and her vice principal, Kate Hazarian, provided education and training in trauma-informed pedagogy, restorative practices, and culturally responsive teaching. They shaped other trainings to focus on how “behavior is a form of communication, and how to get to the real root of what’s happening for students.”

The next thing they did was take an inventory of the resources, strengths, and potential partners that were already in place in the community. “We went to a lot of our faith-based organizations, the mosques and churches, and talked to people just to learn more,” says Gregory. They reached out to members of the community’s various cultural groups “to learn about the differences, but also our similarities and what we could build on to create a cohesive community within our schools.”

Sacramento is a sanctuary city.[1] As a result, many immigrants and refugees who come into California end up there. The city has responded to their needs, says Gregory, and there are a lot of groups helping to provide support. She contacted many of these organizations, such as the International Rescue Committee and World Relief, with an eye to coordinating their work with what could happen at Greer.

“In San Juan [USD] we also have a fantastic array of departments,” she says, referring to the help she received from the district, and she worked with district staff to brainstorm ideas for how they could launch and strengthen Greer’s family outreach efforts. Perhaps most importantly she surveyed the families themselves, assessing their needs to help determine what the school could do to support them.

“Talking with our community partners, talking with our district department staff, and then talking with our families—that started getting the light bulb going on,” Gregory says. These many conversations led to the creation of The Neighborhood Learning Project at Greer. The project’s goal was to bring learning and support to Greer’s families by literally “meeting them where they’re at.”

THE PROJECT

Many of Greer’s families live in apartment complexes, so the Greer team first contacted the owners of one complex to ask for permission to bring learning resources there. “They were a little hesitant at first,” says Gregory. “This was a new concept for them.” But the team got the go-ahead, and with ten staff members—teachers from different grade levels, bilingual instructional assistants, the school counselor—they planned and staged their outreach.

“We sent invitations to our families that we knew lived there,” she says. On the day of the event, the team showed up with other support staff along with books, resources, and learning games. “Our tech services got families connected to the internet.” Staff showed families how to access the school’s online Parent Portal, which houses students’ reports and grades.

The district’s Newcomer/Refugee Support Team, which works directly with immigrant and refugee families, was also there. “Many of them are bilingual and refugees themselves,” says Gregory. “They brought that important cultural awareness.”

These efforts grew. Special education teachers and case managers became important resources during these visits “to support families and make sure they had someone to connect to—and then to bring in resources like WarmLine FRC [Family Resource Center],” whose staff connect families to Early Start services, create awareness of the importance of early intervention, provide information about special education services and parental rights and responsibilities, and coach family members in how to participate in Individualized Education Programs [IEPs].

As the work expanded, the team looked beyond neighborhood apartment complexes. “We also had families that were in single-family homes,” says Gregory, “and many of them needed access and opportunity, too. So we would go to neighborhood parks, shopping areas, and local community events. We had all our stuff on carts,” which the team would roll in and set up. “People loved it.”

Customized Connections That Endure

The Greer staff studied each area they visited and customized the resources and services accordingly. Gregory and her team worked with the Black Child Legacy Campaign when visiting some neighborhoods. In others, she was sure to include partners from refugee resettlement agencies. They also partnered with the River City Food Bank to provide free food boxes, and with the Sacramento Public Library to make the bookmobile a regular feature.

As the events evolved, “each grade level would set up a table so that families could start building relationships with their child’s teacher. The students would be so excited to see their teachers,” Gregory says, and they would get a bag or a backpack to fill with different “goodies” that they could then take home.

Each event, however, was more than a meet-and-greet. The teachers taught the students games that would reinforce academic skills, and they showed parents how they could support their children’s learning at home.

Gregory wanted these events to build lasting relationships with families, so she included more than classroom teachers and direct service providers. “I would take my secretary. I would take anyone who would interact with the families at school. This is how family connections start.”

Results

Before The Neighborhood Learning Project, Gregory had seen a decline in family engagement at Greer. Fewer family members were attending school events and teacher conferences. Student attendance rates were also in decline. As the project got into full swing, she says, “we were tracking school attendance along with behavioral data, family involvement, and academics.”

Gregory knows that assigning direct cause and effect to complex sets of data “is a little tricky.” But through the project’s outreach efforts, she says, “families learned how they could help their child in school. I definitely feel that that contributed to the many improvements the school was seeing.”

The Neighborhood Learning Project started before COVID-19. The pandemic, she says, “added some barriers” by exacerbating the digital divide, for example, and adding to the ongoing challenges that many families face just to meet basic needs. “A disproportionate number of our students and families were not receiving any health care,” says Gregory. But her model didn’t change: If you help to strengthen families in whatever ways they need strengthening, children will do better in school.

“I saw so much success with what our team was able to accomplish at Greer,” she says, “and couldn’t have done any of it without [each team member’s] dedication and collaboration. Thanks to their support, we were able to address some of the major barriers that so many of our families were facing, come up with innovative practices to increase family and community engagement, and ultimately increase our students’ academic and social-emotional success. It was such a great partnership, and it’s still happening there.”

System Supports

Gregory is no longer Greer’s principal. She works now to support the entire district’s family engagement efforts. As the director of San Juan USD’s Family and Community Engagement (FACE) Department, she says, “It really does take a village to figure out how we can find this well-rounded, multilayered support for our families.” The Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE) was a critical force in this village.

Dave Gordon is SCOE’s superintendent and applauds San Juan USD’s efforts. “Access to high-quality education,” he says, “is every child’s right. Our family and community engagement programs are abundant with innovative approaches—and San Juan USD is just one example. Together, we are a transformative force with one goal: student achievement.”

The county office operates from this playbook. Connie Lee is a member of SCOE’s FACE Network, which supports departments such as Gregory’s throughout the county . Thinking back on the network’s genesis, she says, “Supporting the education of the next generation is a shared responsibility. And multiple departments [at SCOE] have for years provided services and training to support family engagement. But what was missing was a coordinated effort to leverage all of our internal strengths.” To bring together those existing organizational pieces, SCOE created the cross-departmental SCOE FACE Team. “It’s a true collaborative effort,” says Lee, “that’s rooted in our passion for the work—breaking silos to better serve our community.”

Robin Ryan, coordinator of the Seeds of Partnership Project at SCOE, is another member of this team. She agrees with Lee that “encouraging, strengthening, and partnering with families and those who provide service to them has been an important commitment” for SCOE. She credits “the administration, board, dedicated departments, and staff who champion this work. Their collaborative determination to support families and communities,” she says, builds the capacity of educators and families to work together to improve student outcomes.

Kristin Wright, executive director of equity, diversity, early intervention, and support services at SCOE, is also a member of this team. “Our purpose,” she says, “is to support Sacramento County districts and charter schools in whatever way we can.” One approach to providing this support is “to bring people together to learn from national and local family engagement experts and especially from one another. SCOE tries to create opportunities for colleagues across districts and schools to work with others who are grappling with similar issues.”

SCOE organizes learning summits and professional development events that address topics related to family engagement. In all of its efforts, however, the county office takes its lead from the districts themselves, surveying participants about their needs and interests related to family and community engagement. In response to their surveys, SCOE offers professional learning that supports the goals of the districts in the region.

CONTINUING SUCCESS

Gregory is taking full advantage of these supports. San Juan USD’s FACE Department writes monthly newsletters; partners with a wide array of family support agencies such as Warmline FRC; maintains its own online Family Resource Center; and more. But Gregory has not rested on past successes or habits. This year the district launched its first ever FACE Mobile.

“We just took a bus, gutted it, and created this mobile family resource center,” she says. “It travels from school to school and to family engagement events. It came from the same concept of meeting families where they’re at, not requiring families to come to the school office.”

The team at SCOE couldn’t be more supportive of this new feature. “It can be very complicated,” says Wright, “for parents to connect to the right services, especially parents who are not English language speakers.” And if they are new to technology, don’t have the necessary digital devices, or can’t afford internet access, “how then do they access what’s going on for their kids when it’s all online?”

The FACE Mobile provides one answer. A well-equipped, inviting, and physically accessible space, the bus serves as a hub for the services the district provides—registering for school, finding a tutor, getting internet access, and learning how to support school work at home. Families experiencing homelessness have gone there, says Gregory, as have families who need food or diapers or who face domestic violence. “We have a lot of families in crisis, especially after COVID-19, and they don’t know who to connect with.” The FACE Mobile makes those connections.

“In a district as large as ours with 64 schools and many, many departments” Gregory says the FACE Mobile is one way to “create alignment so that we’re not working in silos. We’re working together to provide all the supports that our families need to rebuild trust and get families connected.” And all of these supports and services come right to the families themselves.

EXPANDED OUTCOMES

Through San Juan USD’s FACE Department, Gregory is replicating the success she saw at Greer. This fall the department helped Starr King Elementary School launch its first neighborhood learning project. Following the original playbook, staff created a community asset map and then selected for its first outreach event “a community and apartment complex with the highest number of chronically absent students,” says Gregory. “The families were also immigrants, with many not knowing English.” As the school worked to develop its cultural understanding and competence, the school team brought in oral interpreters and cultural representatives. They also brought resources to support regular school attendance—including alarm clocks.

“The moms had never seen anything like that before,” says Gregory, referring to the gathering of school personal and resources at the complex itself. “They came out with tea and food to offer staff. What was even greater is that the translators could explain. . . the importance of attendance.”

Six weeks after the event, Gregory says she and the attendance team gathered data. “It was astounding. Not only have we now had a large percentage of students with perfect attendance from that apartment complex, but we had an 89 percent increase in attendance overall from those students.

“When staff see that and see the power in connecting and how that translates into academic performance in the classroom, it’s totally worth their time and effort.”

ENRICHED COMMUNITIES

Recounting her years at Greer, Gregory seems most proud of how family-community outreach efforts have changed neighborhoods. “Not only did [the owners of the apartment complexes] find value in partnering with us to help provide support for their tenants,” says Gregory, “but they found such value in it that they ended up paying out of their own pockets to hire a tutor for evenings and weekends” for the children who lived there. “They started putting family games in their community room. They contracted with Project Optimism, a culturally responsive youth program that provides leadership and mentorship to students.”

Gregory says, “I stopped by one weekend to drop off some books, and I saw kids writing positive messages with sidewalk chalk.” She took a picture. The children were writing, “Never give up.”

Enrichment opportunities expanded. “We started cultivating junior librarians at the apartment complexes,” says Gregory. With the help of the school, these students created a free book area within their community room so that students in the complex could “build up their home reading library. These were things that the students wanted to take on.”

And these were the benefits that grew from a school reaching out to its families and meeting them “where they’re at.”

RESOURCES:

Family Engagement Framework: A Tool for California School Districts. (2014). California Department of Education. https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/pf/pf/documents/famengageframeenglish.pdf
Family Engagement Practices in California Schools. (2016). M. Greenwald. Public Policy Institute. https://www.ppic.org/publication/family-engagement-practices-in-california-schools/
Family Engagement Toolkit: Continuous Improvement through an Equity Lens. (2017) California Department of Education. https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/documents/family-engagement.pdf
I Have a Question. . . What Parents and Caregivers Can Ask and Do to Help Children Thrive at School: A Parent Checklist. (n.d.). United States Department of Education. https://www2.ed.gov/documents/family-community/parent-checklist.pdf
Partners in Education: A Dual Capacity- Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships. (2013). K. Mapp and P. Kuttner. SEDL. https://www2.ed.gov/documents/family-community/partners-education.pdf
Strategies for Equitable Family Engagement. (2018). C. Jacques & A. Villegas. State Support Network. https://oese.ed.gov/files/2020/10/equitable_family_engag_508.pdf

[1] Sanctuary city: A city (counties and states can also own a “sanctuary” designation) that limits its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents in order to protect immigrants from deportation, while still turning over those who have committed serious crimes. Some prefer the term “safe cities.”

A Family Engagement Office

A Family Engagement Office

Parents are very descriptive about what they want from schools, says Lisa Borrego, director of the Whole Child Division at the California Department of Education. This division is in the process of creating a new Family Engagement Office to reflect and act on the state’s commitment to bringing parents into partnership with schools in ways that are authentic and equitable—and to respond to what parents want from schools.

Reflecting on a recent town hall forum she attended with parents, Borrego says that when children were at home during school site closures, parents had a “daily connection to what students were doing virtually, and they really want to continue that engagement.” They want a welcoming school environment, with “friendly, helpful, accessible, caring staff,” she says. They want the school community to be one in which “they as individuals are welcome on campus.”

The Family Engagement Office will support county offices of education and local school communities as they build connections with parents and caregivers to support children’s education and mental health needs.

These strengthened connections will include families of children with disabilities. “I have been amazed by the capacity and strength of leadership of our parents who are working to support their students with special needs,” Borrego says. “They are an incredible example of what true, authentic family engagement looks like, because they are walking with their students every step of the way.” She points out that their advocacy “comes with a great deal of passion, care, and love.”

Borrego notes that as part of the IEP process, parents of children with disabilities are already working closely with schools in making decisions for their student. “Our families who have students with special needs are warriors” and can help other parents learn how to engage with schools. The Family Engagement Office will support parents to advocate for their children and to become parent leaders who can then guide others in advocating for their children, both on and off campus.

Borrego’s goal is to create for parents of students with disabilities as many opportunities as possible to engage with schools in ways that feel authentic. Listening opportunities such as the recent town hall are beginning this work. Watch for the Family Engagement Office at https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/or/wcd.asp

California Special Education Technical Assistance Network

California Special Education Technical Assistance Network

Suppose a superintendent in Mendocino County wanted to learn how to encourage collaboration between school staff and families of students with disabilities. . . or a school psychologist in Alameda County was looking for resources to support social and emotional learning in the classroom. . . or a special education director in Los Angeles was searching for the latest research on assessments.

Until last year they would have conducted separate internet searches on separate sites to find the information they were seeking. And they couldn’t be sure which resources were best.

The Idea

“We were hearing from several sources that ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we had all the resources in a single place,’” says Leah Davis, executive director of the Riverside County Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA). Shiyloh Becerril was hearing the same thing. Associate Director of the Special Education Division, California Department of Education (CDE), Becerril says, “The LEAs (local educational agencies) were saying, ‘We have so many resources but there isn’t one place to go for questions on a specific topic. Could we bring all these amazing resources together in one place?’”

The answer was yes. With $1 million in discretionary federal funds administered by the CDE, the California Special Education Technical Assistant Network (CalTAN) was launched in January 2022 with the stated goal of providing California school districts with evidence-based resources to support positive outcomes for students who receive special education services.

The funds were divided equally between the Riverside and El Dorado County SELPAs, where Davis and Heidi Hata, director of the System Improvement Leads (SIL) project at the El Dorado County SELPA, are leading the project.

The Network

The CalTAN website is divided into five sections:

Assessment—emphasizing principles and practices relevant to special education
Collaboration—creating positive relationships that can increase positive outcomes for students
Instruction—designing and delivering instruction that is strategic, engaging, and culturally responsive
Social Emotional Learning and Behavior—creating and maintaining culturally responsive learning environments
High-Quality Individualized Education Programs (IEPs)—offering technical support and assistance

Each section contains curated, evidence-based resources. Depending on what information they are seeking, users are encouraged to browse the relevant section or use the search feature for specific content. To aid in the search, “We’re pulling out as many key words as we can,” Hata says. “It’s an opportunity for folks not to have to do their own digging.”

Each individual resource lists the applicable sections (e.g., Assessment and IEPs—there’s often more than one), the intended audience (e.g., instructional leaders, families, teachers), and the student population for which the resource is relevant (e.g., preschoolers, English learners). In addition to the online resources, the CDE granted funds to four SELPAs—East County (San Diego), Fresno County, Humboldt-Del Norte, and Riverside—to provide professional development, resource development, and direct coaching to LEAs on high-quality IEPs.

The Launch

Initially, the grant, which runs from July 1, 2021, through November 30, 2023, was used to develop the platform for the site. That work continues, Davis says, “along with making sure that everything we put on the site is accessible.” Davis describes having the site go live last year as “a baby launch. It is in its infant form, but it continues to get traction, continues to grow, and we continue to brainstorm how to get information about it out.” Word is spreading, she says, “from SELPAs to LEAs.”

Becerril says the CDE offered an information-sharing webinar for the field soon after the launch, and she emphasizes that CalTAN is an active site. “We are updating resources all the time.” Davis agrees: “The site is not all-inclusive; we continue to find some holes.”

Users of the site are contributors as well. Hata is always looking for “the high-quality sources people are using in the field,” she says. “We’re hearing from the field, and we can be responsive.” Adds Davis: “We could pull resources from the SELPA Leads Project, from SIP [the Supporting Inclusive Practices project], from Imperial County for its work with English language learners.”

The site has many technical assistance network partners, including the SIP, Open Access, the System Improvement Leads, and the Imperial County SELPA. Users can link to any of the partners.

The Catalyst

CalTAN was developed in association with the California Statewide System of Support, which, Davis says, “served as a catalyst for conversations about the necessity of having a single home for all resources. And then the CDE said, ‘Let’s do this.’”

While the site is open to anyone, the initial focus is on providing technical assistance to those who work with students with disabilities. “We were intentional about putting special education in the name,” says Davis. In time, she suggests, the site “could expand” its reach.

THE RESPONSE

Becerril says the feedback thus far has been positive. The site, she says, is being used primarily by SELPAs, LEA administrators, and special education directors. As word about CalTAN spreads, says Hata, “We hope that teachers will go there, too, especially for information on social-emotional learning. Teachers, principals, educators at all levels are so incredibly busy right now,” she says. “With CalTAN, we hope to offer them a ‘one-stop shop’ for locating resources to support their students with disabilities.”

Although the start-up grant expires later this year, Becerril says the CDE is “committed to ongoing funding for CalTAN. This is a growing project that will be maintained.”

Changes to Educationally Related Mental Health Services

Changes to Educationally Related Mental Health Services

The numbers tell the story: 37 percent of high school students reported they experienced poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 44 percent reported they felt persistently sad or hopeless, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In California, Governor Newsom’s office reported that one-third of seventh and ninth graders and 42 percent of eleventh graders experienced chronic sadness in 2020–21 when most school sites in the state were closed “and the things that kids were highly engaged in just stopped,” says Robin Gilligan, director of the North Orange County Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA). Children of all ages were reporting anxiety and depression at record rates, and rates for students with disabilities were often even higher without the routines and social-emotional support that schools provide.

With schools back in session, the numbers are playing out on the ground across the state. “We see a lot more kids expressing issues of anxiety,” says Monique Grove, program specialist at Elk Grove Unified School District. In rural El Dorado County, where displacement caused by fires added to the stress of COVID-19, “we are seeing students come to school after isolation experiencing significant delays in their social, emotional, and behavioral development,” says Tamara Clay, executive director, Special Services/SELPA. Veronica Coates, administrator of the Tehama County SELPA, sees a rise in “social-emotional needs in young students” under age five. And in Southern California, where the East Valley SELPA includes districts with high levels of poverty as well as high-income districts, “we are seeing the rise of mental health issues across all demographics,” said Chief Administrative Officer Patty Metheny.

These post-COVID issues “are not routine challenges for the staff,” says Ginese Quann, director of the El Dorado Charter SELPA.

EDUCATIONALLY RELATED MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

Government Code for Educationally Related Mental Health Services

Section 7576 of the Government Code (3) provides the following guidance when conducting ERMHS assessments by noting that the pupil has emotional or behavioral characteristics that satisfy all of the following:

(A) Are observed by qualified educational staff in educational and other settings, as appropriate
(B) Impede the Pupil from educational services
(C) Are significant as indicated by their rate of occurrence and intensity
(D) Are associated with a condition that cannot be described solely as a social maladjustment or a temporary adjustment problem and cannot be resolved with short-term counseling

There is a protocol to follow for accessing ERMHS. Sometimes students present with emotional, behavioral, and/or mental health needs that get in the way of their ability to access their educational program; and sometimes these students cannot be adequately supported through the general program. When this is the case, students are referred for ERMHS.[1]

In a multi-tiered system of support, if the student’s mental health needs have not responded to Tier 1 and Tier 2 interventions, the school (or its LEA) is required to assess the child.[2] The assessment can be requested by school staff or by a parent or guardian. “ERMHS is a third-tier intervention after a targeted assessment to supplement other supports and services,” says Clay. “It is intense and individualized.”

ERMHS goals and the services for meeting them are written into the student’s IEP and monitored by the IEP team—case managers, teachers, service providers and parents. The services can include individual or group counseling, social work services, psychological services, behavioral interventions, and/or parent counseling. “Sometimes parent counseling is the best service,” says Coates, and it can help parents understand their child’s unique social-emotional and behavioral needs. Services may be delivered in a school setting or, in some cases, in a nonpublic school or residential facility, as determined by the student’s IEP team.

Aubrie Fulk is the director of student, family, and district supports at the Tehama County SELPA. In a consortium model, she coordinates and oversees all ERMHS services for the 14 LEAs in the county as well as nonpublic school placements. While the SELPA provides the services, referrals for ERMHS “come from the LEAs to me,” says Fulk. There are five clinicians who serve all the districts. “Once I receive the referrals and have a conference to talk about the specifics of the case, I will assign a clinician to the child, and we will create an assessment plan.” Following the assessment, she says, “we will call an IEP meeting and determine goals and services.”

Some public charter schools, such as the California School of the Arts, San Gabriel Valley, are their own LEAs. Principal Gregory Endelman used the school’s ERMHS funds to create a wellness center on campus for a student body that includes 120 students with IEPs. The center is staffed with two full-time school psychologists and two paid psychologist interns. “And we have a partnership with a referral agency for families that need extra help.” He says he has seen students exhibiting “a lot of stress navigating social norms.” Following the ERMHS protocol, plans to address student mental health challenges “are all driven off an assessment,” Endelman says.

ERMHS support is time-bound and is not intended to be permanent. “Hopefully,” Fulk says, “ERMHS will be used for only a short time.”

She tells the story of a student who was experiencing significant anxiety. Following an assessment, the IEP team concluded that the student should be placed in a nonpublic school. After a year of services, he transitioned back to his home school while still receiving mental health services. “All was going well,” Fulk says. “He was meeting with the clinician, meeting his goals, using coping skills, and the clinician knew it was time to discontinue ERMHS. But the student was nervous and didn’t want to end the services. So we worked with his IEP team, his family, and the school psychologist, and we slowly transitioned ourselves out.” That student, she says, recently graduated with a high school diploma and is now working and volunteering in the community.

When mental health challenges impact the ability of students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) to learn or to gain meaningful benefit from their special education services, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that local educational agencies (LEAs) provide students with the special education and related services that each child with a disability needs in order to benefit from their education. These services include Educationally Related Mental Health Services (ERMHS). California Assembly Bill 114 (AB 114) supports federal law by mandating that ERMHS be specifically (and until recently, exclusively) provided for students with IEPs.

Since AB 114 was signed into law in 2011, the responsibility for delivering ERMHS has rested solely with LEAs. ERMHS funds, a combination of federal and state monies that totaled $450 million in 2021–22, are allocated based on average daily attendance across all the SELPAs in the state (although that funding mechanism is changing soon; see below). Some SELPAs distribute the funds directly to LEAs; in other SELPAs, under a consortium model, the LEAs pool all their funds and their local SELPA provides services across the districts. “Many SELPAs have been working with their districts for 10 years, and many have built rigorous programs,” says Quann.

Restrictive Placement and Intensive Services

Special educational classrooms, special schools, the home, and hospitals and care facilities all represent options on a continuum for students when the general education classroom is not the least restrictive environment (LRE). The purpose of any kind of more restrictive placement and/or intensive service is to support the student in acquiring the skills needed to return, if and when possible, to a less restrictive setting or service level, such as the regular education classroom.

With this goal in mind, IEP teams should define specific goals and criteria that, when met, ensure the student of transitioning to a less restrictive setting or service level, based on each student’s rate of progress and level of need.

Changes to ERMHS

Two significant changes to ERMHS–one enacted, one upcoming – expand the eligibility for the services and shift the allocation of funds.

“There’s a huge population of kids who have needs not covered by ERMHS,” says Ron Powell, former chief executive officer of Desert/Mountain SELPA and a long-time advocate for mental health services in schools. In Elk Grove, for example, lead psychologist Antonia Miloletti says, “We have a lot of general ed students who have mental health needs but don’t need special education.” Their needs were addressed in Senate Bill 98 in the 2020–21 education budget trailer bill. That bill lifted the restrictions that limited the use of general or state ERMHS funds to students with IEPs. (This change, however, does not affect the $69.0 million in federal IDEA funds for ERMHS, which are still restricted to students with an IEP.) Those general and state ERMHS funds are now available to aid any students whose mental health needs have impacted their ability to access and benefit from their education—students now don’t need an IEP to receive ERMHS.

It’s unclear how broadly the ERMHS funds are being applied. Metheny and Coates both say they currently are spending all of their ERMHS funds to support students with disabilities.

Changes to Funding

The second change to ERMHS began at the beginning of the 2023–24 fiscal year: ERMHS funds will no longer be allocated to SELPAs but will instead go directly to LEAs. This change was proposed in the governor’s budget and enacted in Assembly Bill 181, which reversed the previous Assembly Bill 114.

“The administration was interested in looking at different models for allocation of California special education funds,” says Tanya Lieberman, chief consultant to the Assembly Education Committee. The reasoning behind the change, she suggests, may be that “as ERMHS is no longer just special education money, why go through SELPAs?”

“The idea,” says Chris Essman, education programs consultant in the Special Education Division of the CDE, “is to give districts flexibility in the use of funds.”

Clay says that, while “LEAs will not have the option to continue to receive funding through the SELPA. . . the state has posited that they can group together under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to continue operating the services and programs developed through the SELPA.”

In districts like Elk Grove where, Minoletti says, “we are our own SELPA,” there will be no change. As the funds are distributed based on average daily attendance, large LEAs operating independently will likely fare well. And in Tehama County, Fulk says, “the LEAs voted unanimously to continue operating as we have been. They have trust in our SELPA.”

Quann says, however, that some of the charter schools in her SELPA “are not interested in having funds go directly to them.” She says they benefited from the allocation of pooled resources “and will see a decline in the amount of funds they are receiving moving forward.” Additionally, if LEAs are providing all the mental health services, says Gilligan, “There is going to be a huge challenge in hiring staff.” And “with 2,000 entities competing, there is no way each LEA will have its own staff,” says Metheny.

Help from the State

Last August, Governor Newsom announced a $4.7 billion Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health “so every Californian aged 0–25 has increased access to mental health and substance use supports” (p. 2). The plan calls for the hiring of 40,000 new healthcare workers and offers tuition assistance and loan forgiveness for those willing to work in the schools. It also includes training for teachers to identify warning signs of mental health challenges and calls for an increase of 10,000 school counselors.

The bulk of the money is yet to be spent, but it appears that the state is recognizing the need for mental health services for its young people. “And,” says Ron Powell, “evidence shows that if we focus on better mental health for kids, we will have better academic outcomes, too.”

Resource

Public Funding for School-Based Mental Health Programs, by the California School-Based Health Alliance, explains the current sources of public mental health funding in California that can support a full continuum of school-based mental health services. The document also illustrates how schools can best leverage sources of public mental health funding and community partnerships to make the most of existing resources:
https://www.schoolhealthcenters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Public-Funding-for-School-Mental-Health.pdf

[1] A referral may also be initiated whenever additional services or a change of placement is being considered due to mental health.

[2] The use of pre-referral interventions as part of an RtI2 or MTSS process does not diminish a district/LEA’s obligation under the IDEA to obtain parental consent and evaluate a student in a timely manner. For that reason, it is generally not acceptable for a team to wait several months to conduct an evaluation or to seek parental consent for an evaluation if an additional area of need or eligibility is suspected. Therefore, when a student is referred for an ERMHS assessment it is recommended that the IEP team carefully consider the referral to avoid delaying assessment and potential services based solely on access and response to pre-referral interventions.

Opportunity! Students Can Make a Difference
The Advisory Commission on Special Education (ACSE) is looking for students with disabilities to serve as ACSE student commissioners. The commission is seeking students to share, from their experience, their perspective and voice in the recommendations and advice that the ACSE provides to the State Board of Education, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Legislature, and the Governor in areas of new and continuing research, program development, and evaluation of special education in California.	To be eligible, candidates must be . . Students 16 to 22 years of age with a disability Interested in taking on a statewide leadership role Able to travel to Sacramento five times a year to attend two-day meetings If you or someone you know meets this description, then go to the California Transition Alliance website at https://catransitionalliance.org to find, complete, and submit the application form.
Application deadline: June 9, 2023

Change: An Introduction

California’s System of Support: How Change Happens

Scaling Up Statewide

Harnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement: Local Change

Early Childhood Programs: Expanding Options and Challenging Practitioners

Building Capacity

Working Toward the Promise of Inclusion

A Family Inclusion Story

Family Engagement: What Happens

A Family Engagement Office

California Special Education Technical Assistance Network

Changes to Educationally Related Mental Health Services

What We Do

The Special EDge Newsletter: Winter/Spring 2023

Letter from the State Director

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Table of Contents

Letter from the State Director

Change: An Introduction

BACKGROUND

COMMONALITIES

THE CALIFORNIA APPLICATION

RESOURCES

How Change HappensCalifornia’s System of Support

CALIFORNIA'S SYSTEM OF SUPPORT

The System’s Structure

THE APPROACH

SUSTAINING CHANGE

COACHING

THE LONG GAME

Coordinating Resources

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Resources:

Scaling Up Statewide

California Multi-tiered System of Support

CONTEXT

FINDING A COMMON PURPOSE

BUILDING ON EXISTING STRENGTHS AND SUCCESSES

RIGOROUSLY AND CONTINUOUSLY EVALUATING THE SYSTEM

COORDINATING EFFORTS

SCALING UP

PROVIDING INFORMATION AND TRAINING

INCLUDING STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

Local ChangeHarnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement

IMPROVEMENT CYCLES

NETWORKED IMPROVEMENT COMMUNITIES

REGIONAL SHARING

ROOT CAUSES

CREATING EFFICIENCES

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

UNDERSTANDING THE "WHY"

Expanding Options and Challenging PractitionersEarly Childhood Programs

DEFINITIONS

INCREASING OPTIONS AND EQUITY

BENEFITS FOR ALL

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL AND MENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGES

BENEFITS FOR DUAL LANGUAGE LEARNERS

BUILDING CAPACITY

LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

CREATING A UNIFIED SYSTEM

WHAT'S NEXT

RESOURCES

Working Toward the Promise of Inclusion

THE HISTORY

The Changing Landscape

Projects and Resources from California

Additional Projects Supporting Inclusion

INCLUSION IN UNIVERSAL PREKINDERGARTEN

Challenges

Addressing Challenges

Conclusion

Resources

A Family Inclusion Story

What HappensFamily Engagement

PREPARATION

THE PROJECT

Customized Connections That Endure

Results

System Supports

CONTINUING SUCCESS

EXPANDED OUTCOMES

ENRICHED COMMUNITIES

RESOURCES:

A Family Engagement Office

California Special Education Technical Assistance Network

The Idea

The Network

The Launch

The Catalyst

THE RESPONSE

Changes to Educationally Related Mental Health Services

Click HERE to request a printable PDF
of The Special EDge newsletter.

Click HERE to get notified when the next
issue of The Special EDge is available.

How Change Happens
California’s System of Support

Local Change
Harnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement

Expanding Options and Challenging Practitioners
Early Childhood Programs

What Happens
Family Engagement