0:00:10.7 Vicki Brett: Welcome to the Inclusive Education Project. I'm Vicki Brett.

0:00:14.2 Amanda Selogie: I'm Amanda Selogie. We're two civil rights lawyers on a mission to change the conversation about education, civil rights, and modern activism.

0:00:24.1 Vicki Brett: Each week we're gonna explore new topics which are going to educate and empower others and give them a platform to enact change in education and level the playing field. Welcome back, listeners.

0:00:40.1 Amanda Selogie: Hi, everyone.

0:00:41.4 Vicki Brett: And just like that, we're in March.

0:00:45.7 Amanda Selogie: We got past... I don't know how this year is, the first time in a very long time I've had so many people talk about ski week, and in the past, it was barely talked about. And the amount of teams where I've been trying to coordinate things, and then I get my clients being like, oh, it's ski week. You're not gonna hear back. And I'm like, why?

0:01:02.1 Vicki Brett: Yeah.

0:01:02.7 Amanda Selogie: And now, literally spring break for some other districts, like, spring break starts next week. So we're just in this world of, like, no one's in school.

0:01:11.1 Vicki Brett: Yeah. I mean, I was in an IEP meeting yesterday and they were like, okay, we have to have an IEP meeting in May. And I was like, okay. And one of the parents is just starting a new job and they... It was kind of up in the air. And so I was like, when is your last day? Like, May, end of May? And they were like, oh, we go until June 16th. And I was like, oh, my gosh, that's the longest in a while that I've had a kiddo go through. And non-public schools aside, because a lot of them are year-round to a certain extent, so they have longer times. But I was just like, oh, wow. So they're probably... Yeah, they probably had a ski week, then their spring break is in, like, April, and then you make that run to June. But as Dr. Bolnet said, this is one of the longest times, right, that kiddos are expected to kind of sit through stuff, coming back from winter break and then if there's not a ski week and you have a spring break in mid-March, that's a lot of time. And yes, there's Lincoln's birthday, Presidents' Day here and there, but it's not like, okay, we just got to school, in September, and then we have Thanksgiving, then we have...

0:02:13.8 Vicki Brett: There's a lot of these kind of different types of breaks, and that's where we right now, right? March, typically it started a little earlier with us. I think that's why we feel like the year's going so fast with a lot of our kiddos. We were seeing behaviors right after winter break, but typically March is when we get a kind of flare-up, "behaviors", right, and you've heard us. We are people who understand that behavior is a form of communication and really, the law in California does mimic that, right? I mean, we care that a student has flipped a desk, right? But more importantly, what our focus is when we start to see behaviors that escalate is why the student is flipping over the table, right? And I think a lot of times the team or the administration wants to punish, not discipline, children for these highly severe emotional and sensory dysregulations, right? They don't want to call it that. They just want to call it wildin' out, them wildin' out or whatever, right? Without they're just doing it, and that is not the case. And that brings us to our... What is an FBA? What is a BIP?

0:03:27.6 Amanda Selogie: Yeah. How do we appropriately address the behaviors? And I think you hit the nail on the head, these schools wanting to punish because they feel like, well, you did something wrong, you did something outside of our norm. This is the cookie-cutter mold. A child does something wrong, you get punished. And even in the sense of, like, even the schools who try to claim it's just discipline, it's not punishment, for something that is a manifestation of a student's disability, something that is outside of their control, not only is punishment and discipline ineffective, but it is so discriminatory and harmful for these students. I was just talking to a parent this morning about behaviors that escalated that were a result, because of his disability, and the team was really quick, like, the teacher was really quick to try to label it as bullying, but it was like...

0:04:20.3 Vicki Brett: Like the child was bullying someone else.

0:04:22.7 Amanda Selogie: That the child was bullying another student because this is a child who has tics and sometimes they manifest in inappropriate language, and there is no intent behind the incidents that happened. The child did not intend to say something negative about another peer. It's well-documented and it's disability, but it was quick, and what I told the parent was like, we need to get the team to back up, not just for the student's case of, like, appropriately identifying and addressing it, but just the problem with labeling something as bullying when it's so clearly not has this spiraling effect that then when kids really are bullied, nothing comes of it. So it's just... There's so many things that need to happen when we're dealing with behaviors. And so, we want to kind of go in order of, if your child is seeing an escalation of behaviors, whether they have a behavior goal or plan in place, whether they have an IEP or not, the first step is to evaluate, identify, define. We need to take data. We need to define what these behaviors are and be really clear and take some data. And so, that's where an FBA often comes in.

0:05:37.8 Vicki Brett: Exactly. Right. And when we're thinking about behavior, right, you're thinking, like I mentioned, sensory, right? It's just there's a bad feeling in the kiddo. We use weighted vests, weighted blankets, as adults, to regulate our bodies, right? And we should be teaching our children that because they... Some children do need that sensory input, especially if they're overwhelmed by the lights or the noise in the class. Usually, we also see behaviors stem from avoidance, escape, right? This math sheet is too hard and I don't want to do it, right? And then we often see this, which kind of confuses parents a little bit, but attention, whether negative or otherwise, right? They are trying to seek attention from the adult, and it's like, why? Right? Like, why are they seeking is...

0:06:28.4 Amanda Selogie: Or they're having trouble paying attention to the task at hand, the instruction, whatever the case may be.

0:06:35.9 Vicki Brett: And/or it's like they want something now, right? I want the iPad now, right? I don't want to... I want to go out to recess now, right? It's like something...

0:06:45.1 Amanda Selogie: Their needs have not been met, and the behavior is often that communication of that unmet need, and without really seeking to understand what is that unmet need, we're never gonna resolve the behavior, and that's why we so often get IEPs where we review year after year and the BIP is the same. And we've talked about this on the podcast before. It should never be the same year after year. That is ineffective. It's proving that it's not working.

0:07:13.9 Vicki Brett: And the BIP is Behavioral Intervention Plan. So, that's actually a plan of action taken from the data, right, of the FBA, of the observations of the FBA, and we're turning it into a plan for staff, right? So it translates it into, go-to. This is what... His go-to is, pulling on his shirt, furrowed brow, whatever. I think more often than not, we also get into a situation with some of our clients and it's going to be a mix of, reviewing the FBA and BIP and what that is legally, but also personally for Amanda and I, experiencing a lot of these cases lately. And we'll have... Typically you want the FBA because the child's behavior in some way, shape, or form is affecting, as it says on the IEP, the learning of the child themselves or others, right? And so, then we want to be able to try and figure out any behavioral interventions or services, right, that are needed in order to address or implement the BIP, which we'll get to in a second. But one of the things that I know I have been seeing in my cases, and Amanda, you and I have talked about this, are my aut kiddos, my kiddos with autism who are masking during the day. And there are these very subtle, like I had just said, grabbing a shirt or chewing a shirt, furrowed brow, these subtle little things that is... Like, they pile up over the day, and then I have my parents...

0:08:48.5 Vicki Brett: One of my kiddos, the parent literally has to sit with him for two hours in their car, helping him decompress from the day. I have others where as soon as a kid gets in the car, crying, bursting out into tears, getting home and literally just, for lack of a better term, just so dysregulated, throwing, kicking, spitting, cussing, doing all of these things, and these are not teenagers. These are first, second, third graders, right? And so a lot of these FBAs that we've had to request, we've had to be very transparent and very open as to what is happening at home, and a lot of times parents don't want to share that, right? If the kid is going, okay. But I've had a lot of outside agencies, ABA, encourage the parents to say, like, no, this is masking. This isn't them just being okay at school because all their needs are being met. It's actually quite the opposite. Their needs are not being met. And so then we get districts that go, it's not impacting his access to learning of others, right? And this whole we'll wait and see approach. They'll wait for the child to blow up and have a huge elopement.

0:10:01.0 Amanda Selogie: Well, they'll wait till it escalates, manifests at school, because it will. It always does eventually, and by then the child is so harmed and we've had such school refusal that to get back, so I want to take a step back real fast and for our listeners to kind of talk a little bit more about an FBA. So, a Functional Behavior Assessment. And now, we used to have another mechanism for evaluating students, an FAA, a Functional Analysis Assessment, which was so much more helpful, but there's been changes in the law in the last 10 years and school districts have kind of... They used to be required to do FAAs if the behavior escalated to a certain point and an FBA for all others. And then the law kind of changed where then they said, you don't have to do an FAA. And so, all districts across the board were just like, fine. So there are some schools I occasionally see FAAs done, and you'll see them with more independent assessments. So kind of the main difference between an FBA and an FAA is that an FBA solely looks at the environmental data around the behavior. So looking at what is going on in the child's kind of, bubble before, during, and after the behavior. A Functional Analysis Assessment actually goes a step further by also changing the environment to see how the child's behavior changes and differs.

0:11:29.5 Vicki Brett: And so, the reason we bring that up is it's like we see districts all the time that do the bare minimum in the FBA. And so, yeah, maybe they're taking ABC data and they're kind of getting a little bit of information about the antecedent of the behavior, but they're really not doing a deep dive in an analysis of it and because they don't go the step further of doing the FAA, they're really not getting the full picture, and usually that's why we result in these behavior intervention plans that are the same year after year and the child is kind of stagnant and hasn't made any progress. There's still the mechanism in the law that says that FBAs are required when we need to be looking at an intervention for a student to address behavior, and where I think I get the most pushback on districts refusing to do an FBA is when the behaviors are not as visible. So when we're making these requests for assessments and more data, the first thing, and especially if you have a team where you think they're going to deny the request, the first thing we need to do is define the behavior. Because I think when we use the word behavior, especially if a parent does, the assumption of most school staff is that they're thinking of a very visual, maladaptive type behavior. And if that's not what's happening, even if that is what's happening, it's really important that we define it, right? So as...

0:12:59.1 Vicki Brett: When I think it's, like, a shift in how you speak about it, right? It's what we talked about: sensory, it's escape, avoidance, right? It's attention. And so, when parents are saying, well, he's not getting his work done, we have to shift the way, it seems like he's escaping from trying to do this math worksheet by, getting up and sharpening his pencil, or whatever it is that the kid's doing, or just sitting there and looking, off the to the distance, that is still a behavior. They are escaping from whatever is in front of them. They're just not doing it in, an outlandish way where they are flipping it.

0:13:39.4 Amanda Selogie: Right. In 100 percent of the times where I've had a kiddo where we think there's inattentive or off-task behavior and a successful FBA has been conducted, the data concludes that there is an attention behavioral problem. So that's what's... Why it's so important to dig deeper. So what an FBA should have in it, is it should take ABC data: antecedent, behavior, consequence data. And what that is is a tool used often in ABA, but it can be used in any form of FBA or anytime we're taking data, because it really gives us a clearer picture. It's not just, well, there were 10 instances this week of the child getting up out of their seat. Okay, that doesn't help us because if we find out that of those 10 times, all 10 were because the work we were doing math, gives us a clear picture, it's avoiding math, right?

0:14:28.2 Amanda Selogie: But if two of the times they were distracted by a peer saying, come over here, another time was they had to go to the bathroom, two other times they were going to blow their nose because they had a lingering cold, right, it's going to tell us something very different about what's happening, right? And the way that the reaction by both the student and the teachers is going to tell us something else. So getting this really solid data is so important to be able to do that analysis of where is this behavior coming from and how is it impacting the student, how is it impacting the class and their learning, to be able to decide: do we need a goal? Do we need accommodations? Do we need an aide? Do we need a behavior intervention plan?

0:15:19.4 Vicki Brett: Yeah. That's where the behavioral intervention plan really can shine, right? And we've said this a few times on the podcast, for whatever reason, I think On Opposing Counsel had said it to you, Amanda, it was like... Or said it to me, it was like, districts are reactive. They're not proactive. Like, they don't have to be proactive.

0:15:37.6 Amanda Selogie: Which is bullshit because...

0:15:39.1 Vicki Brett: Well, yeah, no, but a BIP technically is, right? You have to be proactive because now you have this data of, what this behavior is. And what you have to do is teach a replacement behavior, right? You're not just going to be like, don't scream.

0:15:50.0 Amanda Selogie: Or front-loading or...

0:15:51.7 Vicki Brett: Right. You're going to teach the child to take a break, right? That's an appropriate replacement behavior if the child screams every time, something is going to happen or whatever, right?

0:16:08.0 Amanda Selogie: And I often tell families, we want a proactive approach, but when we're first putting together a BIP, realistically, we're going to need kind of a two-tiered approach. We want to work on preventative measures, but we also have to work on reactive measures because at the end of the day, it's a skill development that we're doing. We are teaching these skills because there is a skill deficit, right? And so while we're teaching, these kiddos are not going to get it immediately. So while we're teaching it, we are going to expect that behaviors are still going to occur. And so, what is the appropriate way to react? Is it, Johnny, get down! Sit down right now! What did I tell you? I already told you three times! Or is it, hey, remember, we got to sit down. Do you need... Do you want to do these two problems and then we can take a break? Or do you need a break now, right?

0:16:51.3 Amanda Selogie: So, we have to figure out what is the appropriate strategy for reacting to the behavior as well as if we've truly done a good job of identifying the antecedent of the behavior, for a lot of these kiddos, it is a sensory-seeking behavior that they are either getting too much sensory input or not enough. And so, that's where the preventative strategies can come in. Like, I have kiddos all the time where, they're having so many times they're getting up out of seat, they're fidgeting, they're having these behaviors, they're walking around, and we realize that it is a severe sensory processing deficit where the child needs more input than others. And simple fix of having structured breaks throughout the day before, highly non-preferred or academic demands, that we are putting these schedules in place, that we are doing, meaningful jobs around the classroom or we are doing meaningful movements, whether it's small or big.

0:17:55.4 Vicki Brett: And sometimes, like you had said, it takes a minute to figure it out, because they're going to give you general strategies that typically work: a visual timer, a break card. And maybe your kid doesn't want to do a break card. Maybe that's embarrassing to them as a fifth grader, maybe the visual timer actually causes them stress. I think the biggest thing is that teams don't talk enough about coming back to the table and checking in on the BIP in 30 days, in 60 days. It is not a discipline plan, you're not losing recess because you're not doing this, right? It needs to be positive reinforcement. What's the gimme? Or what's the payoff, right? What's the reward? Whether it's positive, whether it's... And this is where parents can really shine in terms of, this is, when we say this phrase, or in ABA, we say this...

0:18:45.9 Amanda Selogie: You've probably already figured it out at home, so don't reinvent the wheel. The team should be asking, having these conversations. What does it look like?

0:18:54.4 Vicki Brett: They're literally just giving you, like, just general ideas, but you know your kid best. And I think that not checking in on the BIP after 30 days, after 60 days, is a huge miss, right? Because it is something that is beneficial for the team to be like, You know what? He actually hates a visual timer, what? We didn't know that. Okay, so, if he doesn't like the visual timer, what's something else? Can we actually just put a paper on his desk instead of an actual, like, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick timer? Let's think outside the box here.

0:19:28.0 Amanda Selogie: Sometimes with younger kiddos, this might be their first entry into school, this must be the... Might be the first time they're having behaviors in school, so we are making assumptions, we are... It's guesswork, sometimes with IEPs, it is. It can be frustrating for parents to hear that, but we don't always know how it's going to play out. The worst thing for a team to do is to make statements like, well, this typically works with kids with autism. And if you as a parent are sitting there and you're like, 1,000 percent that doesn't work with my kiddo, speak up and say it. Because it's important that this is individualized. Just because it typically works doesn't mean it's always going to work. And so, we have to... And that goes to the specificity, too.

0:20:06.7 Amanda Selogie: Like, being very specific. If we have a BIP that we are including a bunch of these strategies, who is going to implement them? When? I always go back to my WH questions. Who's going to implement the accommodations? When are they going to? How are they going to? Where are they going to? Because the idea is, anyone is picking up this BIP and knows how to implement it. So if it says that we're going to give access to sensory movement breaks, okay, that doesn't tell us anything, right? Is that going to happen just when they're asking for it, or are we going to say structured breaks three times a day, this time of day, and it's going to be vestibular movement, it's going to be a specific task prompted by the aide or the teacher?

0:20:57.9 Vicki Brett: We'll kind of also leave you with this, that more often than not, we win at OAH, right, because a BIP hasn't been appropriately implemented. Because a BIP really has the specific things, and if it is not implemented and we continue to have behaviors, or like you said, it's the same thing but the kid's still having behaviors, there's something wrong here. And if the student needs a visual timer and the teacher didn't give one, that's a denial of FAPE. And so this is an important component for the teachers to speak up. If you do not have the resources to implement the BIP, it's nice that you're going to try. I don't know how, but we're going to try. No, like, what do you need, right? And so this is an area that we could talk at nausea, but we have a couple of great guests lined up that we will be kind of digging into more the intricacies of the FBAs and Amanda had already alluded to ABCs and things like that. But, like, what else, right? Let's move away from these templated, kind of BIPs, right? Let's get into the meat and potatoes of the why, the function, right? And that's really hard for a lot of teachers at times to understand. So maybe we'll do a pod on that, on our experiences with trying to explain these things at IEP meetings, but we hope you enjoyed this episode. It went by quick for us and...

0:22:24.3 Amanda Selogie: Yeah. I hope it was helpful. If you have questions, feel free to send us a DM or a comment on Instagram or Facebook or email us, whatever the case may be, and we'd be happy to answer any specific questions.

0:22:35.4 Vicki Brett: We'll talk to you soon.

0:22:36.5 Amanda Selogie: Bye.

0:22:37.3 Vicki Brett: Bye.