Hesperia USD Shows Leadership to Catch Students Before They Fall

by Dr. Jim Huckeba, Director, Special Services, Hesperia unified School District

For the last eight years, the Hesperia Unified School District has been involved in a process called ExCEL (Excellence: a Commitment to Every Learner) which is a research-based early intervention, prevention, and acceleration approach aimed at addressing the needs of all students, regardless of their label. ExCEL is based on the belief that all students can learn and that all educators are responsible for working collaboratively to meet the learning needs of all students. Our reason for moving in this direction was based on the belief that our educational system, with the differentiation between regular education and special education, was not an efficient or effective way to utilize all of our resources.

The traditional special education service delivery model re-quired that a student be identified as having a disability before he or she could receive specialized services. Since the majority of students (52% in the state of California) were identified as specific learning disabled, and had to have a one and one-half standard deviation discrepancy between ability and achievement in order to receive services, it was necessary for our students to fail, often for multiple years, before they ever became eligible to receive services they needed to be successful in school. That “wait to fail” model was one of the concerns expressed by the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education. This commission acted in an advisory capacity to the reauthori-zation to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

This I.Q. achievement discrepancy approach has been re-viewed extensively by noted researchers such as Dr. Reid Lyon, Dr. James Ysseldyke, and many others. It was found to result in the delay of needed services and, in some cases, actually denied needed services to students who were not being successful in school. Consequently, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 was passed and signed into law, one of the major changes that occurred was designed to address that “wait to fail” I.Q. achievement discrepancy for the learning disabilities category. Instead, Congress authorized the use of the response to intervention approach to determine eligi-bility for the learning disabilities category of special education. When you review the approach that is taken through ExCEL, it becomes clear that ExCEL is a response to interven-tion approach for which we have eight years of data to indicate that we are being successful in improving the academic achieve-ment for all of our students, regardless of their labels.

The basic premise behind ExCEL takes what we believe to be the best aspects of special education and applies those aspects to all students. Those aspects are: assessment to determine present levels of performance; identification of what we need to teach; and systematic and direct instruction to teach them what they need to learn. We believe that all students should be evaluated to determine their current levels of functioning in the basic skills areas of reading and math. This evaluation would not be the type of evaluation that a psychologist would use to determine special education eligibility, but would be the type of evaluation that all of our teachers use on a routine basis in their classrooms. These are the evaluations tied to the basal series or the curriculum-based evaluations that are used to determine the functional levels of students by teachers in all schools.

Our scaffolding blocks of time are called the ExCEL blocks and during these two blocks (usually one hour per day, five days per week), the additional support people at any school are brought into the lowest scaffolded group to bring down the adult-to-student ratio for those students so that they can pro-vide direct instruction to the students most in need of additional support. This scaffolding is done regardless of student labels, so that students receive the academic intervention remediation and/or acceleration that they need based upon their individual performance. Additional support people at a site could be com-prised of a Resource Specialist Program (RSP) teacher and an RSP instructional assistant; a Special Day Class (SDC) teacher and/or instructional assistant; and English Language Learner or Title One support people. The concept here is to work together collaboratively to meet the needs of all students regardless of whether or not they qualify for special education.The rest of the day, excluding these two blocks of ExCEL time, students are heterogeneously grouped back into their home rooms, where they receive standards-based instruction at grade level so that they can be prepared to meet the California content standards. Some of the benefits of utilizing this ap-proach are that students do not have to wait until they fail to receive additional support services that they need, and we do not have to worry about students falling through the cracks. We provide support based upon their assessed instructional need, and not according to whether or not they meet a preconceived eligibility standard for additional support.

We are very proud of the results our students have achieved and the efforts that our teachers have made in working to-gether collaboratively to meet the needs of students regardless of labels. We have done presentations at numerous state and national conferences over the past five years, and have hosted more than 100 school district visitations in the past three years. These visiting school districts have subsequently requested that teams of our teachers work directly with their teachers to assist in developing their own ExCEL plans. We have assisted over 100 school sites in developing their own plans. These school sites are reporting significantly improved results and are seeing increased levels of focus and time on task as well as the staff working collaboratively to plan instruction.

Contact Jim Huckeba at 760-244-4411, ext 209, or at james.huckebo@hesperia.org>.

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Last modified: April 17, 2006

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