Virginia’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) for School Discipline – How is it Going?
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28 responses to “Virginia’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) for School Discipline – How is it Going?”
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Great column Captain! There is much to unpack here. I never made the connection of PBIS to Section 504 before. 504 is very much the rudder for dealing with discipline and special education matters.
In 2012 Loudoun began PBIS. Some schools took a deep dive, others did just enough to satisfy the requirement. But now in 2022, PBIS consumes a great deal of valuable instruction time. Furthermore, present day PBIS restricts a school’s ability to address individual discipline matters and erodes the school climate.
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So I guess, cutting through the jargon, it is an IEP, right? Much like the IEP (individual education plan) required for special ed, except an IEP for students with discipline problems? Perhaps one of you experienced educators should enlighten other readers about the paperwork and bureaucratic nightmare which is the IEP and the role IT has played in teacher burnout. Don’t leave out the legal angle, the liability risk it places on both school and teacher….
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See my response to Lefty above, Jay. Mirrors your own.
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So I guess, cutting through the jargon, it is an IEP, right? Much like the IEP (individual education plan) required for special ed, except an IEP for students with discipline problems? Perhaps one of you experienced educators should enlighten other readers about the paperwork and bureaucratic nightmare which is the IEP and the role IT has played in teacher burnout. Don’t leave out the legal angle, the liability risk it places on both school and teacher….Lefty kinda hints at the burden as he notes that once a student is in that regime, it never actually stops…
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There is a reason why you haven’t met many retired Special Education teachers. Most switch to another subject. The paperwork, the meetings, and the challenge are mind bending.
Section 504 of the 1973 education law is where many teacher burdens sprang forth.
I bet you didn’t know that every student in Virginia can claim the status of a SPED IEP? Don’t forget the BIP either. Behavioral Modification Plan. Complete with all services, rights, and privileges.
All a parent has to do is repeatedly demand “504 student only” status.
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I am married to a retired special ed teacher. Her take is what was anyone thinking when they got an education in special ed? If they were not prepared for and up for the challenge they had no business being in special ed in the first place.
For her, figuring out what was going on with each of her students, what to do about it and then executing were what the job was about, what made it interesting and worth doing. She would have been bored out of her mind and gone without challenges.
Meetings are a crucial part of getting buy in and participation of families and kids without which nothing works well. They are a vital tool, not mind bending.
The regs are necessary to keep schools from dropping kids through the cracks as they are all too likely to do without that structure.
She certainly ran into parents who wanted more services for their kids who were not thriving. However, very few actually wanted diagnoses and the process that went with special ed or 504.
With an IEP or behavior mod plan, yes you actually have to write down what the problem is, what you propose to do about it, and then what you actually did and how it turned out. That is something all of us would want for our kid or loved one who was receiving services anywhere.
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Your wife should have a double pension. Everything you outlined is so true. What is written into the IEP and BIP carries weight and must be followed. I found that out of date IEPs resulted in holding a student back. The best results are a successful exit from the IEP. When a student can stand on their own two feet without crutches the IEP method is a victory. But how often does that victory occur by high school? That would be worth knowing.
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Your wife should have a double pension.
You’ll intervene with VRS for her won’t you? 🙂 I’ll write the IRP (individual retirement plan).
Clear cut and total victories are hard to come by, but they do happens.
What we found with people with severe disabilities was that the longer we could forestall the deficit the better the life prospects for the kid.
That was especially true with infants birth – 2 when the state took over. An infant intervention program that kept little ones from being developmentally delayed, or reduced the delay before they hit state programs was huge for their long term prospects.
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Your wife should have a double pension.
You’ll intervene with VRS for her won’t you? 🙂 I’ll write the IRP (individual retirement plan).
We have both been fortunate to have spent our lives doing things we cared about and loved. Her professional life has been far broader than sped. That was a decade long retirement job.
Clear cut and total victories are hard to come by, but they do happen. Dunno how often. You’re right it would be nice to know. She did fairly regularly have kids who passed SOLs, often for the first time. Those were victories too.
What we (folks I worked with) found with people with severe disabilities was that the longer we could forestall the deficit the better the life prospects and the shallower the impact.
That was especially true with infants birth – 2 when the state took over. An infant intervention program that kept little ones from being developmentally delayed, or reduced the delay before they hit state programs was huge for their long term prospects.
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What I was talking about was that changing behaviors is not like slapping on a coat of paint, declaring victory and walking away. It takes ongoing reinforcement. That is usually less frequent and/or less intensive than the initial intervention and fades over time. But the need for it is real and long lasting. Behavioral change will not stick without it. Characterizing that as a “burden” is bizarre and demonstrates ignorance of both behavior change and how to make it permanent.
“the paperwork and bureaucratic nightmare which is the IEP” is equally bizarre. The IEP is the tool sped teachers use to describe what is wrong with a kid, what is to be done and how, to remediate it.
According to my wife, a sped teacher, the IEP is the central and essential piece for successfully helping a kid overcome deficits. She laughed derisively when I read her your description of it as a nightmare. I won’t share what she called you, but if so it would make you eligible for special ed services.
FWIW in the rehab business we called them Individual Written Rehabilitation Plans or IWRPs. They fulfilled the same function as an IEP. They were our roadmap to helping people overcome severe disabilities. They were our tools, services would be a nightmare without them.
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Jim, thanks for penetrating the bureaucratic morass of educational policy. You raise the issue of how well and how consistently these policies are implemented. Anecdotal feedback from my acquaintance “Fletcher Norwood” is that in his school and county, training was inadequate and follow-through non-existent. The policies were largely ignored.
My sense is that the educrats in Richmond and in the central offices like drawing up spiffy plans that look good on paper but are terrible in the implementation and follow-through.
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Still wonder when the Biden Justice Dept Civil Rights Division is going to sue Fairfax and Albemarle Counties for what they claim are 504 violations. It was the threat of such lawsuits by the Obama administration in 2014 that started all of this. All that and I think I’ll file a complaint with the Department of Education OCR.
Of course, one wonders what a Voucher School would do with such issues….. 😉
You write:
“A five-year pilot program for VTSS measured support to academic progress, not its effects on student behavior.”
And then quote:
“teachers believed that student behavior management is central to the remaining agenda: only about a third of the group conclude that “VTSS was helpful for non-academic areas like behavior management this year.” emphasis added
Those are contradictory.
Then:
“Different sides in the debate will highlight the parts of those findings that support their positions. Neither will deny that when the intense focus on PBIS in this project was removed, the effects went away.”
What organizations I worked with found in many years of behavioral programming, similar to PBIS, is that once behavioral change is achieved interventions can decrease in intensity, frequency or both, but they cannot cease or the behaviors return.
The technique was called “fading” and it was effective where declaring victory and walking away failed repeatedly. That is consistent with the reporting that improvements ceased when PBIS was discontinued.
It ain’t rocket science, if you want behavioral change to stick you have to reinforce it. Even educators should be able to figure that out.
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Not contradictory, the pilot measured academic effects. The other remarks were anecdotal.
I pointed out that Virginia’s efforts have not and are objectively unlikely to match the intensity of the preparation and support that accompanied the pilot.
All of that was preface to the point that there does not appear to be any effort to measure the results of PBIS in classrooms. Without that, it is all box checking.
Don’t you , like I, wonder when the DOJ will sue Fairfax and Albemarle counties for the civil rights violations represented by the data I highlighted?
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They may be anecdotal remarks but they contradict your immediately preceding statement, not support it.
The total idiocy that anything but equity in outcomes is prima facie evidence of racism cannot be overstated,
OTOH with DOJ pursuing parents as terrorists when they speak up at school board meetings, anything is possible.
VDOE might want to talk to state Rehabilitative Services they have been practicing behavioral programming for people with severe disabilities for around 50 years. They have learned a few things about it in the process.
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Fair and balanced, as is the entire article I think, or at least that was my intent.
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You made a statement, then posted a quote immediately below it that contradicted it. Calling that “fair and balanced” is a joke. You might consider teaming up with McCarthy and doing a duet of silly walks.
In general I thought you provided a reasonable post, and that in my view is a big step up. But being in denial and defensive about one small segment of it that contradicts itself detracts from your effort.
You and I agree that DoJ regarding differences in outcomes as being evidence of discrimination is asinine, but current policy. We will see if they pursue it. It may be they’ve got their hands full with Trump at the moment, although screaming racism might help wire up the base for November. That’ll encourage us to stay tuned.
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Yet ‘one small segment’ is what you chose to comment about. A little introspection is called for.
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Yes it is, and if you had acknowledged the contradiction and moved on it would have been done. But instead you became defensive and made foolish excuses and rationalizations. Thanks for a reminder of the behavior that has made jesuits insufferable through the ages.
Otherwise a good post. Please keep up that good work. May it become your norm rather than the exception.
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I am not trying to be a smart “ass” but let me tell you a story from 1974. One my student experience options was at a very well respected group of associates who worked with severely impaired students between 16–21. One student was autistic. He would not communicate nor would he provide eye contact. His teacher was a cognitive behavioral specialist, the same as the PBIS philosophy. He decided to support this kid, 6ft and about 180 lbs, twirling behaviors by snapping the poor kid with a rubber band every time he twirled. The twirling is self stimulating behavior. So my job as a student was to count and chart the twirling to see if the snapping was working. I was so insulted, I left the institution, called my professor and let him know that I would not be counting or snapping. Period. But some other student did. And not to my surprise, the twirling initially slowed down then he started banging his head to the point he had to where a helmet. So we decreased one behavior and inadvertently increased another because we weren’t looking at the real problem, self stimulation. Oh, the errors we make. It made for good class discussion, but I am all about human treatment, not cognitive behavior therapy. I could not even use a shocker to train my dog. I was an educator for 45 years. That was the worst experience in my career.
I am not trying to be a smart “ass” but let me tell you a story from 1974. One my student experience options was at a very well respected group of associates who worked with severely impaired students between 16–21. One student was autistic. He would not communicate nor would he provide eye contact. His teacher was a cognitive behavioral specialist, the same as the PBIS philosophy. He decided to support this kid, 6ft and about 180 lbs, twirling behaviors by snapping the poor kid with a rubber band every time he twirled. The twirling is self stimulating behavior. So my job as a student was to count and chart the twirling to see if the snapping was working. I was so insulted, I left the institution, called my professor and let him know that I would not be counting or snapping. Period. But some other student did. And he reported, not to my surprise, the twirling initially slowed down then he started banging his head to the point he had to where a helmet. So we decreased one behavior and inadvertently increased another because we weren’t looking at the real problem, self stimulation. Oh, the errors we make. It made for good class discussion, but I am all about human treatment, not cognitive behavior therapy. I could not even use a shocker to train my dog. I was an educator for 45 years. That was the worst experience in my career.
I am not trying to be a smart “ass” but let me tell you a story from 1974. One my student experience options was with a very well respected group of associates who worked with severely impaired students between 16–21. One student was autistic. He would not communicate nor would he provide eye contact. His teacher was a cognitive behavioral specialist, the same as the PBIS philosophy. He decided to support this kid, 6ft and about 180 lbs, twirling behaviors by snapping the poor kid with a rubber band every time he twirled. The twirling is self stimulating behavior. So my job as a student was to count and chart the twirling to see if the snapping was working. I was so insulted, I left the institution, called my professor and let him know that I would not be counting or snapping. Period. But some other student did. And he reported, not to my surprise, the twirling initially slowed down then he started banging his head to the point he had to where a helmet. So we decreased one behavior and inadvertently increased another because we weren’t looking at the real problem, self stimulation. Oh, the errors we make. It made for good class discussion, but I am all about human treatment, not cognitive behavior therapy. I could not even use a shocker to train my dog. I was an educator for 45 years. That was the worst experience in my career.
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Thanks for your story. There was a time, when such kids were not accepted into public schools at all.
And suffice to say that competitors to public schools, largely don’t want these kids today, they are just fine with the public schools being responsible.
Parents of these kids , some of them can be fairly militant about the schools tending to their kids needs.
The schools and actually the teachers, the human beings assigned to deal with these kids are between a rock and a hard place sometimes.
There is no win. It’s a mess, often without wonderful answers.
Yet, it’s the responsibility of public education.
If one steps back just a little, it’s not hard to see that more “normal” kids that are not “special” also can have their issues which can be expressed in terms of “discipline” issues.
Finally, kids in the early grades show up in stages NOT like problem kids and in the later grades almost always did not succeed in the early grade fundamentals of learning to read, write and math and they have no real future in high school or after and know it and act it out.
Public schools failed to educate them. It’s not just public schools either. Other schools, just boot them early on… and when they do, they have no such stigma as having “failed” with such kids – they’re just gone. Public schools cannot do that.
When we characterize these issues in terms of “left” and “right”, liberals and conservatives, we really are putting our ignorance on display.
IMO of course.
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Try this on Mr. Larry. 26 years ago I had a kid in AP US History. This boy had Tourette syndrome. His tick expression was swear words. I am talking the mothership of swear words. He knew ones I had never heard of before. They didnt’ get his medicine right until March. Nobody learned a single solitary thing that year. Well actually for those 25 or so other students they went to college with AP Swearing under their belts.
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An AP swearing class would have had nothing to teach me – my father was a sailor.
Seriously, though, it is incredibly unfair to every other student in the room for one student to be permitted to continuously disrupt a class. The rights of one individual student should not be allowed to infringe upon the rights of the remainder of the class. I sympathize with the young man, and his parents, but there had to be another way to handle the situation besides requiring you to keep him in that class. Individual instruction would have been incredibly expensive, but at least the +/-20 other students in the class could have learned in a stable environment.
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I can see how PBIS could be a useful approach to dealing with certain students in certain situations. Against that utility, we need to weigh the disutility of loading up teachers with responsibility for implementing PBIS in situations where the protocol might be only marginally helpful. Teachers have finite bandwidth and, among all the many other issues they’re dealing with, they’re frustrated by excessive paperwork. I would be interested to know the degree to which indiscriminate application of PBIS adds to that paperwork burden and contributes to teacher burnout.
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