Understanding Functional Behavior and Discipline: The Legally Blind Justice Podcast: Episode 37

Legally Blind Justice Podcast: Understanding Functional Behavior and Discipline

Join host Tim Markley and the special education advocacy team at K Altman Law as they explore the critical role of Functional Behavior Assessments (FBAs) and Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs) in supporting students and promoting positive behavioral change. Featuring special guest Michelle Guffey from New Horizons Educational Group, this rebroadcast of an insightful webinar dives into the FBA process, legal rights, effective interventions, and the latest DOE guidance.

Learn how data-driven strategies can help address challenging behaviors, reduce disciplinary actions, and ensure schools provide the necessary support for all students. Whether you're a parent, educator, or advocate, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help navigate the complexities of special education and student discipline.

📌 Subscribe now and stay informed on legal and educational topics that matter! Need assistance? Visit www.kaltmanlaw.com or call 248-817-8510.

 

Transcript: The follow transcript is autogenerated and may contain transcription errors.

 

 Tim Markley (00:20)

Welcome to the Legally Blind Justice podcast. I'm your host, Tim Markley. In this episode, we're going to talk about functional behavior and its role in discipline. This will be a rebroadcast of a webinar held by our special education team in which they were joined by Michelle Guffey of the New Horizons Education Group. So sit back and enjoy the podcast.

 

Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Loteck. I'm one of the special education advocates here at K Altman Law. And today we're going to be doing a webinar on functional behavioral assessments and behavior intervention plans. We also have a guest, Michelle Goofy. She's from New Horizons Educational Group and she's going to be joining with us and presenting as well. Today we're going to discuss functional behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans and the new DOE guidance on those. All right, Sarah, take it away.

 

Okay, so first as an introduction, today we're going to be presenting, it's going to be Taylor Ruiz, who is our Director of Special Education Advocacy here at K. Altman Law. And I already introduced myself, Loteck, I'm one of the Special Education Advocates. And then Michelle is joining us from New Horizons Educational Group. So we will be presenting together to go over the FBA process and behavior intervention plans.

 

So I'm going to start by talking about the purpose of a functional behavioral assessment. So a definition is that an FBA is a structured process used to identify the cause of a student's behavior. It helps to determine the function of the behavior and the factors that maintain it. So the goal of an FBA is to look beyond just the behavior itself and really figure out what's driving it and why schools conduct FBAs.

So schools conduct FBAs to really understand and support student success rather than resorting to discipline. So FBAs are best practice and allow us to take a proactive and data-driven approach to behavior. And it helps us identify root cause and develop effective interventions. The FBI lets us answer three key questions. What does the behavior look like? When and where does it happen?

And what is the function or the purpose of the behavior? So again, I went over what actually a functional behavioral analysis is, why we conduct it. Again, it's to help better understand a student's behavior, to really figure out the function of the behavior. How we do that? We do that by observing and taking really clear cut data on where the behavior is happening, the function of the behavior.

And then again, when the behavior is happening within that school day. Okay, so the FBA process. So in order to get the process started, we need to identify the behavior. So what is the actual challenging behavior that we want to study and analyze? We need to gather the data through observations, teacher reports, interviews, and ideally you wanna observe that student across settings, including different classes and times of the day.

We need to analyze patterns and triggers. We usually do that through an ABC analysis, which is where we look at the antecedent, what's happening before the behavior, the behavior itself, and the consequence. And then we develop a hypothesis about why the behavior occurs. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about who should conduct an FBA and when it's warranted. So an FBA is conducted by a trained professional, usually a behavior specialist or a school psychologist.

And it's necessary when a student's behavior interferes with their learning or their learning of other students, or if it's a result of a disciplinary action. And I just want to note something really important is that an FBA does not require an IEP. So a child does not have to be classified, does not have to have an IEP in order to have that FBA occur.

And next, Michelle will talk about the key components of an FBA and the FBA process. Excellent. So Sarah did a good job going through an overview of the different steps in conducting a functional behavior assessment. And I just wanted to discuss some key considerations for each of those sections. So the first thing we want to make sure is, are easy behavior talking about observable and measurable? So

If you read on your child's functional behavior assessment, the definition of the behavior, would you know what counts and doesn't count? So as a non-example, a behavior that's not well-defined would sound something like this. Hitting is when a student is angry and tries to hurt someone by swinging at them. So that would not be a great example because I don't know.

the observer would need to assume intent behind the action, you know, when they're angry and trying to hurt somebody. So trying is not really able to be counted. And then what about swinging? So if we're talking about hitting, what if they miss or do attempts count? We're not really sure in that particular situation. Is there anything excluded? So especially students that are planning.

Playing on a playground. A lot of times they're playing tag. They're you know, playing typical social games and maybe we have a situation where we're counting that as aggression or hitting when it really should be excluded or a high five or a fist bump. So we really want to be clear about what things count and don't. So another example might be hitting is defined as any instance of a student making forceful contact with another person using an open or closed hand.

Making contact with any part of the other person's body includes hitting any other person's arms, legs, torso, head, or body part. Accidental contact, such as brushing against somebody while walking and contact made during appropriate play, is not included. So in that example, we know exactly what it looks like, what it doesn't look like, and what's included or not included. Something else we want to take into consideration is

Is the behavior that we're talking about developmentally appropriate to be defined as a problem? So as an example, I was called to consult on a case where there was a kindergarten student and the private provider said that off task was defined as any instance away from a teacher at any point in time. Well,

By that definition, I would venture to say most kindergartners are off task because they're looking away from the teacher. It happens all the time in kindergarten. And so we actually did take the data on that situation and we found that by that definition at any given point in time at the school, % of students in kindergarten were off task. So we really needed to redefine, okay, what is an extreme for a kindergartner? At what point should they be considered off task?

and we redefined it as 60 seconds of not engaged with whatever the activity was. We retook the data and then we said, okay, only 12 % of the students are off task by that definition. So we wanna make sure when we're defining the behavior, especially in a school environment, that's different than a home environment, and that we wanna take into consideration what is developmentally appropriate. The next thing we wanna talk about is when we're collecting data. So we're collecting data through direct observation, interviews, we might do review.

The thing I'm trying to figure out when we're looking at data is under what conditions does the behavior happen? And maybe even more importantly, under what conditions does the behavior not happen? And so we want to decide upfront when we're collecting the data, what data will be important based on the interviews and record reviews? So I've talked to the teachers, I've talked to the parents, I've kind of figured out what I think the problem might be. So whoever's leading the charge in collecting the data should create a common data sheet.

for all relevant staff members to collect the data on. I personally love Google Sheets or Google Forms, and it's really easy to give teachers and staff members a QR code to a Google Form so they can fill it out right then and there when it's happening. We post the QR codes around. So let's say a tantrum starts. We scan that start time, stop time, and then the data is automatically collected and feeds into a response sheet. So just a quick tip.

And then we want to make sure that when we're asking school staff to collect data that it's reasonable. So I had an instance I walked into a classroom with student was having a tantrum and engaging in a lot of aggression pretty frequent and the staff was standing there and. Instead of intervening and clicking every single time that this this hitting is happening and I said hold on a second, just tell me what time it started, what time it ended and and and let me know whether aggression happened because then we intervene and actually respond to this behavior.

And the thing that we're looking at here are we're looking for patterns. So is the behavior happening at a certain time of day? Maybe it's every afternoon at one o'clock. I don't know. So those are the things that we're looking at and it's important to look. Another thing to consider is a day of week. So maybe on Monday, every Monday, it's more likely the behavior is going to happen because they just came back from the weekend. But by Friday, you know, toward the end of the week, the behavior isn't happening so much. I'm looking at time of month.

We definitely had a student that had a spike at a certain time of month. Is it a certain subject? So is it reading or math or all of the subjects? And then is it a certain staff member regardless of the subject? So maybe there's a certain interaction that's happening that is creating an issue. And then we want to look at things like unstructured versus structured time. Okay, so those are all just some considerations when we're thinking of a data collection in ways that we can look at patterns. And specifically,

when we're talking about antecedents and behaviors and consequences, we want to look at what's happening in the environment before the behavior happens. We already defined the behavior and then what's happening in the environment after the behavior happened. So consequence doesn't mean a punishment. Consequence in our case just means anything that's happening in the environment after the behavior happened. So a lot of times I'll talk with the team and they'll say, but there's nothing happened. It's just happening randomly. I don't know what's causing it.

And so sometimes the answer isn't obvious. And when we're taking a functional and doing a conducting a functional behavior assessment, we want to take. I sometimes like the narrative data instead of check boxes for this, because then I can start to see the patterns and everything that's happening in the environment. So I had a student one time had a lot of aggression. She would take her iPad that she was supposed to be using to communicate and frisbee it across the classroom. And we really couldn't figure out what it was. And so we had to.

pay really close attention to everything that was happening in the environment. And what we found out was she didn't like laughing. And if anybody around was laughing, then it would occasion this increase in behavior. But it took a lot of really careful observation to find that pattern. We really want to look for the things that are happening most immediately.

So for example, it's time to do a math worksheet. The student throws the math sheet, starts picking on the peers next to them and cracking jokes. Well, is it the math or is it the attention from the peers? I'm not really sure which came first, the chicken or the egg. So then I have to think, okay, is this only happening in math? Well, if it's only happening in math, then math is the problem and not attention from peers, right? Because if it really was to get attention from peers, this would happen in across environments, regardless

list of what the subject was. So then our next decision is to figure out why the behaviors happening. What is the student getting or avoiding by engaging this behavior? So typically behaviors happening for one of those reasons. So we're going to develop a hypothesis based on those data that we took, and then we're going to test it. It cannot be everything in the kitchen sink. So a lot of times we get behavior plans and there's a function and somebody has checked every box on the. Not usually the case.

If we have multiple suspects, then I really want to look at those ABC data and count how many times did it occur for this and how many times for this, and there's usually a clear pattern. All right. So the last thing in this section we want to talk about is sometimes we conduct a functional behavior assessment and a BIP is not warranted, meaning that we've done an assessment and the team says we don't need a behavior plan.

Here are some situations where that might happen. So maybe we collect data and we decided that the behavior or whatever is happening is not impacting progress in the educational setting. That could be one situation or not. What's out happening outside of the pier? So in the situation with the off task definition, we decided we weren't going to conduct or write a behavior intervention plan because the expectation that was set was unrealistic. So.

We retook the data and the student was not off task more than other peers in the classroom. There was one time we took data that had 81 % of the students off task. If our student was in that classroom, I might start to ask, is this a specific student issue or is this a tier one classroom management issue? So is the student behaving any differently than the rest of the students in that classroom? If the answer is.

Yes, they have problem behavior and no, it's not different than anyone else in the classroom, then we probably need to intervene at the classroom level before we're looking at the student level intervention. Another specific instance where we would not write a behavior intervention plan is what if there was an underlying or untreated medical issue that needed to be addressed that's causing the behavior? I was asked to write a behavior plan to have a student wear her glasses because they hypothesize that she wasn't able to access instructional materials.

but there was no documentation that she had a correct prescription. So I wasn't willing to write a behavior plan until we had verification from a medical provider that the prescription was correct and it would make a difference and that we've identified she truly did have a need to wear those glasses. And then we can talk about the behavior plan. So those would be examples of when we wouldn't. Now, you cannot go to a student study team meeting and sign permission for a behavior plan and a functional behavior assessment and expect a one week turnaround.

That is not a sufficient time to look at patterns in behavior. We really want to make sure the team has a sufficient time to collect data to look for those patterns, because again, if it's something that's only happening at certain times of the week, we need several weeks worth of data to prove that hypothesis. So those are just some considerations about the functional behavior. We'll talk more about the behavior intervention plan considerations, but we're going to let Taylor talk about the legal framework and parent rights.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Michelle. And I just had a couple of things to add before I get into the legal framework. I know so many definitions, so many things when it comes to behavior. Behavior is complex and measuring it correctly is critical for actually understanding, as Michelle mentioned, patterns, addressing progress and making informed decisions. So behaviors can be measured in a variety of different ways.

One of the ways is through direct measurement, right? By recording frequency, by counting how often a behavior occurs. For example, a frequency, a student raises their hand five times in class. Duration recording, measuring how long a behavior lasts. For example, a child engages in a tantrum for a duration of 12 minutes. Latency recording, which is measuring how long it takes for a behavior to start.

after a cue is given. For example, a student begins their assignment 30 seconds after being given redirection or instructions. Indirect measures. These are typically best when direct observation isn't possible. In schools, you will see behavior rating scales and checklists. These tools are completed by teachers or parents, such as the BASC-3 or Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. Also, interviews and surveys.

asking teachers, parents, or the child themselves about the behaviors and their triggers. Also, time-based measures. Some of the time-based measures are a little bit more complex. For example, we have partial interval recording. This is best for tracking behaviors across specific periods. For example, did the behavior occur at any point during a set time frame?

Consider this scenario. You have a student, they called out in class at least once during a 10 minute period. So during that 10 minute period, that behavior occurred one time. Then you have whole interval recording. Did the behavior occur for the entire timeframe that you were recording? For example, the child remains seated at their desk for the entire five minute interval. And then lastly, momentary time sampling.

This is when we check if a behavior occurs at the moment. Or if it's happening at a different time, for example, you can check every 10 minutes to see if a student is on task when you check and then you would record at that point. So I know that those are some complex areas, but when navigating FBAs and navigating behavioral data, I think that those are some really important measures to understand. And now I want to talk about the legal frameworks.

and your rights as parents. Under IDAA and Section 504, there are very, very specific legal requirements schools must follow. An FBA or functional behavior assessment is required in two different situations. The first situation is when a student with a disability has behavior that's affecting their learning or the learning of others around them. The second situation would be when disciplinary action results in a change of placement.

For example, if a student is suspended for more than 10 consecutive days, or there's a pattern of removal that amount to a change in placement. Also, that does constitute in most states an MDR, Manifestation Determination Resolution. So now I wanna briefly talk about parent rights. These protections ensure that families are involved in the process and that schools are following the laws. Informed consent is required

before an FBA can be conducted. This means that the school cannot move forward without your approval as a parent. Parents also have the right to participate, and I mean actively participate in the process. They can provide their input, share observations, and contribute valuable information about their child's behavior. Finally, schools must ensure that qualified professionals, as Sarah mentioned, conduct the FBA.

This should be a board certified behavior analyst, better known as a BCBA, a school psychologist, or another trained specialist who understands behavior and data analysis. This should not be a teacher or someone who does not have behavioral training. Understanding these legal rights really are going to empower parents and advocates to really, really dig in and advocate for their children.

and it ensures that schools remain accountable in providing these appropriate supports. Some of the legal precedents, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Students with disabilities not covered by IDEA may still receive an FBA if their behavior directly impacts their ability to access education. ADA is the American with Disabilities Act. This law ensures that students with disabilities

are not discriminated against in any way if they require an FBA. If their behavior is related to their disability and it's affecting their school population and their participation, they are required and are eligible to receive an FBA. I'm going to jump in here and talk about the BIP or the Behavioral Intervention Plan. So how does a BIP support positive behavioral change? So first, let's go over what a Behavioral Intervention Plan is.

So it's a structured written plan developed and it's based off of the FBA, the FBA findings. So it focuses on teaching positive behaviors to replace the challenging behaviors that were defined during the FBA. It outlines strategies to reduce problem behaviors and teach positive alternatives. So think of it as like a roadmap based on the information gathered from the FBA. And why is it important to use evidence-based interventions when

when creating the BIP, we have to use data-driven strategies because that's proven to been shown effective. And we have to tailor to the individual students. So obviously every student with a behavior plan, their behavior plan is going to be different because it's gonna be based off of them as an individual. And now Michelle's gonna talk about the key components of a behavior intervention plan and its implementation. So the first thing we need to define

If we have a student that's exhibiting a behavior that we've identified through assessment that is problematic and impacting their ability to be participating in their educational environment, we have to decide what else do we want them to do instead. So if our student is hitting, then we want to define a replacement behavior. So again,

When you're looking at your child's behavior intervention plan or you're writing a behavior intervention plan, it really should be again, not a menu of possible options to select from. They. To address exactly how a student should get or avoid the things that they want in a more appropriate manner. So those things were all defined in the functional behavior assessment. We're looking at how can we behave differently to still obtain the desired result of getting what we want or getting away from that.

So for an example, if a student is engaging in a tantrum when they're told no, that they can't have something that they want, we can teach them to use a calming corner instead of having a temper tantrum. So that would be a replacement behavior. So we want to make sure that we're prepared to track progress toward learning these new skills. So if we said that this is what we're supposed to teach the student to do instead, how are we going to track their progress with learning that new skill?

This is a good thing to put on the IEP and the Individual Education Plan in the behavior domain along with any other behavior reduction goals for the behaviors that we want to decrease. So we want to not just talk about decreasing behavior, but what behaviors we want to increase instead. OK, so the next thing we want to talk about is what are preventative strategies that we can implement to reduce problem behavior? So how can we arrange the environment at school?

to make it less likely that the problem behavior will occur. So an example of that would be something like reviewing expectations before a task. So if it's something that we know the student doesn't like math, well, let's review the expectations of how we're going to do this math. And then we can talk about what will happen and what will, if a student follows or doesn't follow those explanations. So sometimes I even like to make a flow chart.

You have choices. You could choose this or you can choose this. If you choose this, then these things are likely to happen. And if you choose this, then these things are likely to happen. It helps them to kind of visually organize how their choices will impact their their day and environment. So in the case of the math student who didn't was having some problems during math time.

A preventative strategy might be to go ahead and put them in a small group with the teacher during small group time or arrange for a support facilitation or inclusion teacher to come in the classroom during small group time to work with the students so that they have more support during that time and are less likely to engage in that problem behavior. So again, we've set up the environment for success. Now we have to teach and reinforce those other behaviors that we talked about that we want the students to do instead. So here's a key.

The time to teach a behavior is not when the problem behavior is happening. So at that point, we're not focused on learning. We're focused on getting away from situations or getting what we want. So we need to teach problem behavior and stable functioning. So example, if we're going to teach using a calming corner, then we have to provide multiple opportunities during the day where we're prompting the student to go to that calming corner. So what is the teacher going to say?

go calm down or ask all for a choice. Would you like to use a calming corner or would you like to do XYZ, whatever the choices might be? And then we have to teach them what they're going to do when they get there. So just going to the calming corner is probably not going to be sufficient to get the behavior to deescalate if we're already, you know, amped up in the middle of a temper tantrum. So the suggestion is the calming corners should contain multiple tasks that are

I say cognitively distracting, so you can't think about these things and continue to engage in problem behavior as well. So I have a student that really likes math and he likes to name all the perfect squares. So OK, we're going to go to the common corner. We're going to name all the perfect squares, whatever it is that they're interested in or might cognitively distract them. In the case of the student that didn't like laughing, she didn't have a lot of communication skills, so we taught her with a augmentative communication device to say no laughing, please, or let's get out of here.

so that she had an appropriate way to ask to leave the situation or say that she didn't like it. And we could then address the situation without her having to frisbee the iPad across the room. It's really important that the environment get better for students when they choose appropriate behavior versus inappropriate behavior. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in the inappropriate behavior section. So how is the environment going to be better for the student engaging in what we want them to do versus not want them to do?

that section which would be defining appropriate consequences and responses. So hopefully we have good preventive strategies. We're learning new problems, new problem behaviors to replace the problem behaviors and we don't have the problem behavior. But inevitably sometimes these problems still happen, right? In the consequences section. So again, just the response to behavior, not punishment, just what's going to happen after. It should read like a step by step flow chart. Who's going to respond and in what order?

So if a student's having a tantrum and they need to be removed from the classroom, well, who is the order of the list to respond? Maybe the guidance counselors first, the assistant principal second. If the school doesn't have a plan for who's gonna respond in what order, then either no one responds or everyone responds and neither case is good typically. We want to make sure the student has returned to stable functioning before teaching or talking. So that goes with the teaching and replacement behaviors.

You know if you're upset and you're kind of amped up if someone's barking commands at you, you're less likely to then calm down and engage in that. And then in the consequence strategies, ideally we want to include a time to practice or the replacement behavior after we have deescalated the situation, right? So we can return to the situation say, hey, I know you were really upset when the student was laughing. We're going to say no laughing, please and have them practice that skill in the situation. That way they can practice doing the things we want them to do instead.

Be very careful about not accidentally reinforcing behavior that we want to decrease. So sometimes we have situations where things, students get things that are bigger and better after engaging in problem behavior than they do if they're not engaging in problem behavior. So an example is we remove a student from the class, they go to the office, everyone in the office is talking to them, asking how the day is, delivering stickers and candy and all of these things. But none of those things happen when the students

not misbehaving. So you've got to think about and watch the environment as we're developing these behavior plans to make sure that the best things happen when the problem happens and the other things are kind of minimized after problem behavior happens. Okay, so let's talk about ongoing monitoring and support. Behavior plans are supposed to work. They are not a checkbox to say we did it and now what's next.

If they don't work, then that means we need to be in relentless pursuit of what does work. It's not another placement isn't going to solve the problem necessarily by itself. So we have to figure out what is going to work. And the way I like to think about that is first we have to train the staff. So whoever's supposed to be implementing this plan has to be trained on the plan. So anyone who's involved with the student and that might

be person responding to problem behavior needs to know what the plan is. What is the playbook? What is that flowchart say is going to happen? I would request that if you are school or if you are a parent, get a sign in sheet for the training, right? That then you have documentation. Hey, we train the staff on this plan. Here's an analogy. If a doctor prescribes you a Z-Pak to cure strep throat, but you take Skittles instead, it won't work.

So if we wrote a behavior plan and we don't implement it and we do something else instead, we can't expect it to work. You're not gonna go back to the doctor and ask for a different prescription. You've got to take the one that you were given. So if you take it and it doesn't work, then you can go back to the doctor and say, hey, that didn't work. So when we're doing an FBA and a BIP, we need to know that it's working. And the only way to know if it's working is to implement the plan that's written.

So making sure that we train the staff and then making sure that we're monitoring fidelity of the implementation will help us to know if it's being implemented. And then if it's not working, we can go back to the drawing board and say, no, this part's not working. This part is working and figure out what we need to do instead. So how are we going to know it's working? We know it's working by looking at data. We have to continue to take data even after.

The behavior plan is written. It's not just part of the functional behavior process. We probably don't need to take ABC data anymore because we've already decided what the function is. The only time I would do that is if we suggest if we're suspicious that the function is shifted or a new behaviors arise and we want to make sure it's still under the same. It's happening. So we need to take those data and just like Taylor talked about, we're going to take data using usually frequency or duration. Be careful about the point sheet.

So we don't sometimes point sheet data just says, hey, they got 80 % of their points for the day. OK, but you called me in and said that he was disrupting three hours of your day. You got 80 % of his points. It doesn't sound so bad. So we want to make direct measure and have a good picture of the understanding of what's happening by looking at the data being collected. OK, so we then have to write clear measurable goals. That's going to go on our.

IEP as well. Typically under the behavior domain we would write a goal for reduction. So here is a bad example of a goal. The student will stop hitting others as much. OK, well that doesn't tell me a whole lot, so a better example would be by May the student will engage in zero instances of hitting per week across all school settings as measured by teacher and staff data collection with 100 % accuracy for three consecutive weeks. Then I know what the criteria are.

for success. And then I have some measurements that we can put on the IEP data. Let's talk a little bit more on the next slide about implementation and accountability.

So the role of the teachers and the school staff and the parents are to implement the plan. So sometimes parents are involved by monitoring the information coming home. Maybe you are monitoring point sheets that are coming home and looking at those data. A behavior plan, we talked about it not being a checkbox, but it's not a checkbox to move a student to, I say anywhere about here, ABH. A lot of times I will be called into a student study team meeting and they're like, okay, let's get this plan done because

He's got to go to this school, that school anywhere but here. It's actually supposed to work. We need to get the team focused on finding out what does work by conducting and writing a good behavior plan. And then we can talk about where does that need to be implemented? Because we need to look at what they need and then ask the question, well, where can that happen? Where is the best place? So I always say for walls the students in, I've got to figure out what's going to work for this

student and that's how the team should operate is really being relentless pursuit of that solution. And we need to make some decisions about how long you plan to work. You can't say you're going to come back to the table in a week. Just like we can't write the plan in a week, we also can't just implement it for a week before we're making decisions about changing it. We should probably agree to come back to the table.

if there's a significant increase or a really significant decrease in the problem behavior. It's likely that this is going to happen more frequently than your annual IEP meeting. It probably should. And we do need to revisit and update the behavior plan as needed. So if a student requires very frequent reinforcement and we've seen no problem, we can decrease that frequency of reinforcement and how many times that we're having to, you know, reinforce that behavior so that it's more likely in

that they can be successful with a natural environmental reinforcement. So here's a bad example. We had a 10th grader that we were called in to look at the bib and we pulled up the date that second grade. It's unlikely that the second grade behavior plan is relevant in 10th grade. A lot has changed between then. The school is different, the environment's different. The behavior assessment and the behavior plan should be relevant to the environment in which it occurs.

which is also why sometimes home behavior plans from outside providers aren't necessarily applicable in the school setting. So we still need to make sure that we've conducted the assessment in the environment where it happens. I'm going to pass that back off to Taylor to talk about the legal rights and advocacy. Thank you so much, Michelle. That was really informative. Now let's dive into parent rights and the FBA and BIP process.

and how you as parents can advocate effectively for your child. Understanding the legal protections under IDEA in Section 504 is really, really critical to ensuring that your student receives the behavioral support that they're entitled to. Parents have the right to request an FBA and a behavior intervention plan or VIP if your child's behavior, like I mentioned before, is impacting their ability to learn.

you don't have to wait for the school to initiate the process. You can make a formal request. Another misconception is that ABA therapy or functional behavior assessments are only for children with autism. That is not true. There are even neurotypical children can benefit from having behavior intervention plans or functional behavior assessments conducted or having ABA therapy. As a parent,

You have the right to request this, like I'd mentioned before, and the schools must follow through with that proper implementation. A behavior intervention plan is not just a document, it is a legally binding plan. Once it's in place and part of that IEP, the school is responsible for ensuring that all staff that interact with your child follow the strategies and interventions outlined in the plan.

Now I want to talk a little bit about progress monitoring. One of the biggest mistakes that schools make is limiting behavioral progress monitoring to quarterly updates or set timelines or during annual reviews. These are living documents, People change, behaviors change on a regular basis. So their plan should change and their interventions should change and be reevaluated as needed.

These interventions should be based on data, not timeframes. Behavior doesn't operate on a schedule, unfortunately. It changes based on circumstance, support, consistency. So, you you can't just wait for something major to happen and then say, well, I followed their behavior intervention plan. That doesn't quite work. The effectiveness should be reassessed on a continual basis.

If an intervention isn't working, adjustments should be made in real time rather than waiting months and months and months to address the issue. As a parent or as an advocate, you have the right to request frequent progress updates, access to behavioral data, and team meetings if you notice that your child's plan isn't working. Advocacy in this process is really key to ensuring your child gets the support that they need to succeed in the school environment.

Now I will pass it along to Sarah so that she can give you some more tips on how to advocate for a stronger behavior intervention plan and functional behavior assessment. Sure. So I'm going to talk about how to advocate for a stronger FBA and BIP. So I have some questions that you can ask at an IEP meeting while you're involved in this process. So the first question is, what data supports the need for an FBA or a BIP?

So has the team conducted a thorough review of disciplinary incidences, classroom observations, or teacher reports? And what specific behaviors are interfering with learning and how are they being documented? Another question to ask is how will progress be tracked and communicated? So like Taylor said, how often will behavior data be reviewed and who will be responsible for collecting it? What communication methods will be used for keeping...

families informed of what's happening? So will you have meetings, progress reports, data graphs, et cetera? And how will the team determine if the BIP is effective or needs modification? More questions to be asked related to reviewing behavioral data and to ensure that data is collected consistently is what data collection tools are being used? Are they using ABC charts? Are they using frequency counts? Are they using duration tracking? That should be something that you should be informed of as parents or advocates.

 

when you're working with a child with a BIP. And are all team members trained in consistent data collection? You want to look for patterns that indicate effective intervention. So are there specific triggers times of days or environments where the behaviors increase or decrease? And do the data trends show improvement or is the behavior escalating? Those are all things that the data should show and that you should be having discussions about with the team. Another area to ask about is addressing concerns about ineffective intervention. So readjusting the plan if progress is not being made. So if behaviors persist, what alternative strategies or supports can be added? Can additional training or professional development be provided to staff implementing the BIP? And then holding the school accountable for proper implementation. So you want to ask how is fidelity of implementation being measured? If the BIP is not being followed as written, what steps will be taken to correct this?

And what role would the IEP team play in ongoing monitoring and adjustments? I'm going to turn it now over to Michelle to talk about the legal rights. We just talked about the legal rights, but specific to changes within the US Department of Education.

Thanks. So in November of 2024, so right at the end of the last year, the US Department of Education saw the need to provide some guidance to the country as a whole about best practices with FBAs and BIPs. So that guidance, it's a lengthy paper, so it is available to the public if you're interested in reading more about that.

They also did do a webinar breaking it down a little bit more, so that is available to the public as well. But they really wanted to provide some guidance around using evidence-based practices and why it's important to conduct a functional behavior assessment. So just picking some interventions from wherever is not typically effective, we wanted to highlight the importance of doing the assessment, conducting the analysis,

and matching the interventions that we're providing so that they actually address the problem behavior that we're seeing. So they looked at, can we provide positive and proactive strategies to prevent the behavior from happening to begin? And those are things that we talked about throughout this webinar earlier and the news that they wanted to get to the different school teams across the country. Let's focus on positive behavior supports.

And then how can we reduce the reliance on the punishment procedures like discipline, exclusionary discipline, specifically with suspensions and restraints? So we want to reduce the use of suspensions and restraints. And I know most states have varying laws around whether those interventions are even able to be used. I know some states don't allow restraint at all or seclusion, removing the student from the environment.

So your state may be different, but regardless, we would rather increase and react proactively and not reactively behaviors already have. We can provide the team some guidance about that, then hopefully that will reduce those occurrences. And then we wanna make sure that behavior supports are accessible to all students. I heard.

Taylor say and Sarah say that it doesn't matter whether or not they have an individual education plan that all students have the right to a functional behavior assessment behavior intervention plan if that need is warranted. And we want to make sure that we are not singling out different categories and that we're not providing disproportionate discipline to different groups in our education process.

Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah Loteck. I'm one of the special education advocates here at K Altman Law. And today we're going to be doing a webinar on functional behavioral assessments and behavior intervention plans. We also have a guest, Michelle Goofy. She's from New Horizons Educational Group, and she's going to be joining with us and presenting as well.

Perfect. Today we're going to discuss functional behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans and the new DOE guidance on those.

All right, Sarah, take it away. Okay, so first as an introduction, today we're gonna be presenting, it's going to be Taylor Ruiz, who is our Director of Special Education Advocacy here at Kaltman Law. And I already introduced myself, Sarah Loteck, I'm one of the Special Education Advocates. And then Michelle is joining us from New Horizons Educational Group. So we will be presenting together to go over the FBA process and behavior intervention plans.

So I'm going to start by talking about the purpose of a functional behavioral assessment. So a definition is that an FBA is a structured process used to identify the cause of a student's behavior. It helps to determine the function of the behavior and the factors that maintain it. So the goal of an FBA is to look beyond just the behavior itself and really figure out what's driving it. And why schools conduct FBAs.

So schools conduct FBAs to really understand and support student success rather than resorting to discipline. So FBAs are best practice and allow us to take a proactive and data-driven approach to behavior. And it helps us identify root cause and develop effective interventions. The FBI lets us answer three key questions. What does a behavior look like? When and where does it happen? And what is the function

or the purpose of the behavior.

Do I need change slots? Yeah.

So again, I went over what actually a functional behavioral analysis is, why we conduct it. Again, it's to help better understand a student's behavior, to really figure out the function of the behavior. How we do that, we do that by observing and taking really clear cut data on where the behavior is happening, the function of the behavior, and then again, when the behavior is happening within that school day.

Okay, so the FBA process. So in order to get the process started, we need to identify the behavior. So what is the actual challenging behavior that we want to study and analyze? We need to gather the data through observations, teacher reports, interviews, and ideally you want to observe that student across settings, including different classes and times of the day.

We need to analyze patterns and triggers. We usually do that through an ABC analysis, which is where we look at the antecedent, what's happening before the behavior, the behavior itself, and the consequence. And then we develop a hypothesis about why the behavior occurs.

And I'm going to talk a little bit about who should conduct conduct an FBA and when it's warranted. So an FBA is conducted by a trained professional, usually a behavior specialist or a school psychologist. And it's necessary when a student's behavior interferes with their learning or their learning of other students, or if it's a result of a disciplinary action. And I just want to note something really important is that an FBA does not require an IEP. So a child does not have to be classified.

does not have to have an IEP in order to have that FBA occur.

And next, Michelle will talk about the key components of an FBA and the FBA process. Excellent, so Sarah did a good job going through an overview of the different steps in conducting a functional behavior assessment, and I just wanted to discuss some key considerations for each of those sections. So the first thing we want to make sure. Is our is the behavior talking about observable and measurable so?

If you read on your child's functional behavior assessment, the definition of the behavior, would you know what counts and doesn't count? So as a non-example, a behavior that's not well-defined would sound something like this. Hitting is when a student is angry and tries to hurt someone by swinging at them. So that would not be a great example because

 

I don't know, the observer would need to assume intent behind the action, you know, when they're angry and trying to hurt somebody. So trying is not really able to be counted. And then what about swinging? So if we're talking about hitting, what if they miss or do attempts count? We're not really sure in that particular situation. Is there anything excluded? especially students that are...

Playing on a playground. A lot of times they're playing tag. They're you know, playing typical social games and maybe we have a situation where we're counting that as aggression or hitting when it really should be excluded or a high five or a fist bump. So we really want to be clear about what things count and don't. So another example might be hitting is defined as any instance of a student making forceful contact with another person using an open or closed hand.

Making contact with any part of the other person's body includes hitting any other person's arms, legs, torso, head, or body part. Accidental contact, such as brushing against somebody while walking and contact made during appropriate play, is not included. So in that example, we know exactly what it looks like, what it doesn't look like, and what's included or not included. Something else we want to take into consideration is

Is the behavior that we're talking about developmentally appropriate to be defined as a problem? So as an example, I was called to consult on a case where there was a kindergarten student and the private provider said that off task was defined as any instance away from a teacher at any point in time. Well,

By that definition, I would venture to say most kindergartners are off task because they're looking away from the teacher. It happens all the time in kindergarten. And so we actually did take the data on that situation and we found that by that definition at any given point in time at the school, % of students in kindergarten were off task. So we really needed to redefine, okay, what is an extreme for a kindergartner? At what point should they be considered off task?

and we redefined it as 60 seconds of not engaged with whatever the activity was. We retook the data and then we said, okay, only 12 % of the students are off task by that definition. So we wanna make sure when we're defining the behavior, especially in a school environment, that's different than a home environment and that we wanna take into consideration what is developmentally appropriate. The next thing we wanna talk about is when we're collecting data. So we're collecting data through direct observation, interviews, we might do review.

The thing I'm trying to figure out when we're looking at data is under what conditions does the behavior happen? And maybe even more importantly, under what conditions does the behavior not happen? And so we want to decide upfront when we're collecting the data, what data will be important based on the interviews and record reviews? So I've talked to the teachers, I've talked to the parents, I've kind of figured out what I think the problem might be. So whoever's leading the charge in collecting the data should create a common data sheet.

for all relevant staff members to collect the data on. I personally love Google Sheets or Google Forms. And it's really easy to give teachers and staff members a QR code to a Google Form so they can fill it out right then and there when it's happening. We post the QR codes around. let's say a tantrum starts. We scan that start time, stop time, and then the data is automatically collected and feeds into a response sheet. So just a quick tip.

And then we want to make sure that when we're asking school staff to collect data that it's reasonable. So I had an instance I walked into a classroom with student was having a tantrum and engaging in a lot of aggression pretty frequent and the staff was standing there and. Instead of intervening and clicking every single time that this this hitting is happening and I said hold on a second, just tell me what time it started, what time it ended and and and let me know whether aggression happened because then we intervene and actually respond to this behavior.

And the thing that we're looking at here are we're looking for patterns. So is the behavior happening at a certain time of day? Maybe it's every afternoon at one o'clock. I don't know. So those are the things that we're looking at and it's important to look. Another thing to consider is a day of week. So maybe on Monday, every Monday, it's more likely the behavior is going to happen because they just came back from the weekend. But by Friday, you know, toward the end of the week, the behavior isn't happening so much. I'm looking at time of month.

We definitely had a student that had a spike at a certain time of month. Is it a certain subject? So is it reading or math or all of the subjects? And then is it a certain staff member regardless of the subject? So maybe there's a certain interaction that's happening that is creating an issue. And then we want to look at things like unstructured versus structured type. Okay, so those are all just some considerations when we're thinking of a data collection in ways that we can look at patterns and specifically.

when we're talking about antecedents and behaviors and consequences, we want to look at what's happening in the environment before the behavior happens. We already defined the behavior and then what's happening in the environment after the behavior. Okay, so we are finished with the webinar. Thank you everyone for participating and for joining us. So if you need any more help related to FBAs, BIPs or

IEPs, you can follow up with us at K Altman Law. Our special education advocacy team is ready to help you navigate the special education world. And you can reach out and schedule a consultation call with our intake specialists today. The most important thing here is that you are entitled as a parent to request a functional behavior assessment if...

the behavior is impacting your child's education. Also, if you have any other questions or concerns, feel free to reach us at 855-K-Altman Law. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks for joining.

I hope you enjoyed this episode focusing on functional behavior assessments presented by our special education team. Join us in our next episode as we continue the journey into student discipline. If you like this podcast or any of our other podcasts, make sure you subscribe. If you need help, reach out to us at 248-817-8510 or check us out at kaltmanlaw.com.