Response to Intervention (RTI): A Primer for Parents

Greetings Parents...Welcome to 2015.  The first semester is over and we are entering into the second half of the 2014-2015 school year.  The Lafayette staff is here to help you if you have any questions.  We are part of the resources available to help your child succeed in school.  Harriet

Mary Beth Klotz, PhD, NCSP, and Andrea Canter, PhD, NCSP of the National Association of School Psychologists stated that a major concern for parents as well as teachers is how to help children who experience difficulty in school. All parents want to see their child excel, and it can be very frustrating when a child falls behind in either learning to read, achieving as expected in math and other subjects, or getting along socially with peers and teachers. Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multi-step approach to providing services and interventions to struggling learners at increasing levels of intensity. RTI allows for early intervention by providing academic and behavioral supports rather than waiting for a child to fail before offering help. Some new federal laws have directed schools to focus more on helping all children learn by addressing problems earlier, before the child is so far behind that a referral to special education services is warranted. These laws include the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004.  Both laws underscore the importance of providing high quality, scientifically-based instruction and interventions, and hold schools accountable for the progress of all students in terms of meeting state grade level standards. RTI is a process designed to help schools focus on these high quality interventions while carefully monitoring student progress. The information gained from an RTI process is used by school personnel and parents to adapt instruction and to determine the educational needs of the child

 What Are the Essential Components of RTI?

“Response to Intervention” refers to a process that emphasizes how well students respond to changes in instruction. The essential elements of an RTI approach are: providing scientific, research-based instruction and interventions in general education; monitoring and measuring student progress in response to the instruction and interventions; and using these measures of student progress to shape instruction and make educational decisions. A number of leading national organizations and coalition groups, including the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities and the 14 organizations forming the 2004 Learning Disabilities (LD) Roundtable coalition, have outlined the core features of an RTI process as follows:

• High quality, research-based instruction and behavioral support in general education.

• Universal (school-wide or district-wide) screening of academics and behavior in order to determine which students need closer monitoring or additional interventions.

• Multiple tiers of increasingly intense scientific, research-based interventions that are matched to student need.

• Use of a collaborative approach by school staff for development, implementation, and monitoring of the intervention process.

• Continuous monitoring of student progress during the interventions, using objective information to determine if students are meeting goals.

• Follow-up measures providing information that the intervention was implemented as intended and with appropriate consistency.

• Documentation of parent involvement throughout the process.

• Documentation that any special education evaluation timelines specified in IDEA 2004 and in the state regulations are followed unless both the parents and the school team agree to an extension.

Perhaps the most commonly cited benefit of an RTI approach is that it eliminates a “wait to fail” situation because students get help promptly within the general education setting.  Secondly, an RTI approach has the potential to reduce the number of students referred for special education services while increasing the number of students who are successful within regular education. Since an RTI approach helps distinguish between those students whose achievement problems are due to a learning disability and those students whose achievement problems are due to other issues such as lack of prior instruction, referrals for special education evaluations are often reduced. RTI techniques have been favored for reducing the likelihood that students from diverse racial, cultural or linguistic backgrounds are incorrectly identified as having a disability. Finally, parents and school teams alike find that the student progress monitoring techniques utilized in an RTI approach provide more instructionally relevant information than traditional assessments.