Understanding Behavior: Insights from the Frontlines of Special Education === Aleia Mastroianni: [00:00:00] Hey parents. Today we're diving into a topic that so many parents quietly worry about or worry about loud. Behavior: big behaviors, challenging behaviors, confusing behaviors. All of these can make school feel overwhelming for our kids and for us. The truth is, in special education, these moments are not a sign of a bad kid or bad parents. They're just often how a child's disability is showing up, and they deserve to be met with understanding and support. That's why I'm so excited to talk with Tanya Anglemyer from our district's behavioral support team. She and the whole team do incredible work helping teachers, schools, and families respond to behavior with compassion, skill, and focus on helping every child succeed. Grab your coffee and join us for this really important and very real conversation. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of SpecialEd, IEPs, 504s, Oh my: Conversations with DCSEAC. I'm your host, Aleia Mastroianni, and today we're having a really important conversation about behavioral supports in school. We all know that behavior can be one of the most stressful and [00:01:00] confusing pieces about navigating special education, and that's why I am so happy and excited that Ms. Tanya Anglemyer is joining us today. She works on the DCSD behavioral support team and she's their lead CPI trainer. Tanya and her team support students and teachers and families across our district. Hi, Tanya. Welcome. Welcome. Tanya Anglemyer: Hello. Aleia Mastroianni: I am so excited that you're here, and thank you for making time for us. How I like to start, I'm always interested what led people to education and what led you to special education and behavioral supports? Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah, sure. Thanks Aleia for having me. I guess my journey began in sixth grade. I was a peer helper at my school. I loved the kids and saw the fun and the compassion that the teachers had when interacting with them. In my professional role, the past 31 years of teaching, there have been students who needed me to dig deeper into their behaviors in order for them to be successful. I started teaching in Lubbock, Texas. I had seventh, eighth, and ninth graders who I learned from. [00:02:00] I think in all of my experiences I've learned from the students . With those students, they increased my knowledge about different cultures, socioeconomic differences, trauma and how important it is to make connections, because those are gonna influence their behaviors. I had the opportunity to work on a children's book with one of my college professors when I was in school. Aleia Mastroianni: How did I not know this? Like a behavioral book? Tanya Anglemyer: No it's about young man named Zach who is just different from his other peers. And so it's all about every student having gifts. Aleia Mastroianni: Okay. Yeah. My eyes are open for that one. Tanya Anglemyer: But I moved to Granbury. I went from seventh, eighth, and ninth graders to preschool students, which scared me more than those older kids, definitely. Aleia Mastroianni: Those are very different. Tanya Anglemyer: Yes. But the biggest lessons I think I learned from them were patience and really thinking out of the box. I had to be really creative with those little kids. Another big component of that work was partnering with parents. I was that [00:03:00] first person that they really had a connection with in the school system as a preschool parent. And so I really built up my skillset when we're working with parents and collaborating with them. I loved that experience. But I did get the opportunity to actually move to El Salvador and work at the American school there. I helped establish the special ed program, kind of build it up in the middle school and high school setting. And so there again, I learned so much. I definitely learned a lot more about trauma. And how really trauma has no boundaries. It doesn't matter your socioeconomic status, it doesn't matter your cognitive skills. Then when I moved back to the states the district actually had me start a behavior classroom at that school. I had fifth, sixth, and seventh graders in that program. That's where I think my behavior love ignited, was in that classroom. I did end up going back to the preschool classroom because [00:04:00] I really believed in early intervention. I did that for a little bit longer and then actually moved to Colorado. This is where I learned more about behavior in a personal way. I married my wife and then became a parent to a 9-year-old who had significant trauma when he was born. He was struggling at home and at school. It's through that partnership with her that behavior became my life. Not only in my professional, but in my personal life. We're both teaching SSN at the time in Douglas County and raising a very challenging child. Our family grew when I had our youngest son who came at 26 weeks, and so very early. Aleia Mastroianni: Oh goodness. Oh baby. Tanya Anglemyer: When he was born, it really opened my eyes to what precipitating factors could cause with teachers. I was, for eight months teaching, then driving all the way up to Presbyterian St. Luke's to visit him. Also, raising our then 10-year-old. So it really opened my eyes and [00:05:00] let me take in a different perspective of the challenges that us as adults have, and then working with students that have challenges when we have our own, it's hard. Behavior is not easy. Definitely. Aleia Mastroianni: Sad but good that you have this dual perspective: you're like I know professionally and academically here's how we approach behavior. Here's how we approach it with sensitivity and empathy. And then it's so different when you're like this is my personal life as well. I'm experiencing this on that flip side, on that parent side. It makes you a wonderful asset to our district and to our parents because there is an empathy where you're like, hey, I get this. I get it from both sides. Tanya Anglemyer: Oh, definitely. When I moved to Colorado I ended up doing a lot of mentoring with some other SSN programs and teachers. Through that work a coordinator reached out to me and said, hey, you should apply to be on the behavioral support team. I think you would be a great asset for that. So I did. I actually didn't get hired the first time I interviewed. And [00:06:00] I think it was a good thing. It had me go back and really reflect. I really wasn't, all in, maybe for that interview. Aleia Mastroianni: It's hard to leave the classroom. Tanya Anglemyer: It is. It's very hard. It's really hard. Very. And I never thought I would do that. But I felt, something's telling me I should try this again. And so I did and got hired. I've been on the team now for about 11 years. Wow. And I don't regret it at all. I think I've realized that I can make even a bigger impact on kids by helping teachers. Aleia Mastroianni: Exactly. It's a hard transition as a former teacher, it's so hard to leave the classroom. But we need people who can be in leadership and take your knowledge and the great sensitivity about understanding what behavior means and training other teachers. This segues beautifully into my next question. Some parents might not know. In fact I swear some staff members don't know that DCSD has a behavioral support team. And it is a really awesome, powerful tool that we have. But could you, for our listeners, describe what is this [00:07:00] team? What does it do? How do you end up supporting school sites and teachers and students? Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah, definitely. So our team has grown tremendously since I started 11 years ago. Our district has really tried to meet the needs of our students throughout the years. We could always use more. Aleia Mastroianni: Definitely. Tanya Anglemyer: Always could use more, but the team has psychologists, counselors, social workers, teachers, and some of them even have their BCBAs. We all have the passion for working with teachers and helping students. And so we're very eclectic. All of us bring different things to this team. We do meet weekly, or biweekly, and we talk about cases together and we reach out to each other. As a former SSN teacher, I will have people on my team reach out and say, Hey Tanya, I have an SSN student, can I get your input on this? So we'll team up, sometimes in our own team, but we also team up with the autism team. So not only do we have a behavior support team who is who you would [00:08:00] call out if you have any student on an IEP who doesn't have autism or a regular ED student. The autism team is who would be contacted if a student has autism on their IEP. We have nine specialists that cover each of the nine feeders and charter schools that are in that area. We just this year, added on two preschool specific behavior support. Aleia Mastroianni: Yay. I didn't know that. That's wonderful. Tanya Anglemyer: So they just work with the preschool programs. And then, like you had said earlier I am now the CPI specialist for the district, and then we also have a trauma specialist for the district. Aleia Mastroianni: And because we're throwing some acronyms out there, I'm gonna help some parents for half a second. A BCBA is a certification that you can get to be a behavioral therapist. So that would be usually working with our autism spectrum disorder students. The other acronym that, I don't know even in my head what this stands for. What is CPI? I mean, I know what it is, but what does this stand for? Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah. So CPI is Crisis Prevention Institute. That is [00:09:00] the program that the district has adopted to teach teachers and work with students on deescalation. And then if as a last resort, we do teach restraint and disengagement skills to teachers Aleia Mastroianni: To do that safely. And we'll circle back more to CPI. To sum up for parents: the behavioral team is this tight group that's able to deploy, if you will, to different school sites and help support the team there with any behavioral challenges. And I love that there's also a huge amount of working and coordinating together. Your job specifically is about training teachers and administrators. So what kind of training do you provide to our staff members around behavioral support in schools? Tanya Anglemyer: Actually we are there all the time. Each specialist covers a feeder actually meets with those mental health providers from that school. Typically weekly, biweekly. And part of that is teaching and collaborating on that daily or weekly basis with those teams. If there's [00:10:00] certain students who need more support, we'll come in and collaborate and maybe even hold a meeting with the parent involved and maybe help that program come up with a functional behavior assessment or a behavior intervention plan for that student so we can collaborate on those. Bigger kind of teaching opportunities that we provide: we will go in before or after school to programs or to schools. We might review things from from CPI. We might review techniques, we might review strategies. And that way we can also work with those EAs that are in the program. Aleia Mastroianni: That's so important. Tanya Anglemyer: Try to be on the same page. We have PD days Aleia Mastroianni: professional development. Tanya Anglemyer: Yes. Thank you. Throughout the school year. And our team really focuses on that CPI training. Most of our behavior specialists are CPI trainers. And so, we will be running two initial classes. Those are eight hour classes that staff can take to get that initial CPI [00:11:00] certification. And then we have four to six refresher classes happening. So on any given PD day we might have 250, 300 staff members being taught by our team on ways to deescalate, ways to support students. Aleia Mastroianni: That's amazing. I love you mentioning that you are in the schools all the time for two-pronged reason. One, you build relationship and trust with the educators and staff members in that building because I think it could be hard to feel like, oh, someone's gonna come in here and tell me what to do. No, that's not, we're not, we are your teammate. We are another brain. So I love that time goes into it. And also it helps you build a relationship with the students. You're not an unknown entity who comes in. I've walked into a couple of team meetings here and there, and it's just so amazing to see all of these professionals sitting down at a table together. They've got all of these files and they are in depth talking about every child, how they're doing, what can we change. It really is, from the parent side, so heartening. It is an impressive thing to [00:12:00] see, and I wish I could, put it online and let every parent see how hard these groups are working. And the fact that the behavioral team is there. You're like, we know all these kids, we know all these teachers. We don't just randomly come in. We're part of these conversations. Tanya Anglemyer: When you look at all of Douglas County, every center-based program; so our Affective Needs, but also our SSN program, those are programs for students with lower cognitive skills. They all have to take CPI. It's mandatory for those program staff to take it and the mental health providers who cover that Affective Needs program. It is also mandatory for our admin to take CPI. Last year I think we trained about 1800 staff members in the district. And this year it'll probably be a little over 2000 that we've trained. There's a lot of manpower that goes into the trainings and a lot of people that are receiving the same training and hearing the same information. Which is great. So then that way when we are working with teams, they know the terminology. They know the concepts. Aleia Mastroianni: [00:13:00] It's been a complaint I've heard within the special needs- special education parent community, of lack of continuity between schools. I've seen a concerted effort in our district over at least the last five years. Having professional development that they are offering for special education teachers, every month, we're offering that continuity where we're all speaking the same language. Supporting students in the same way. I think is really powerful and hard when we have a district. It's hard, massive, it's so many people to educate. So also a nice segue because let's start getting into the nitty gritty of what are the core principles of educational behavioral support. What's the philosophy behind your work and what guides your team? Tanya Anglemyer: I think the biggest thing we teach and remind staff members that behavior is communication. And there's a function behind that behavior that needs to be met. I always talk about, hunger, and that's a function sometimes of behavior, right? Yeah. If you are hungry and starving, you're gonna show some behaviors. And you may do some behaviors that aren't, that aren't [00:14:00] typical of you, right? Aleia Mastroianni: Yes. Tanya Anglemyer: You might steal food if you're hungry. Aleia Mastroianni: Yeah. Tanya Anglemyer: And stealing's wrong, but you do it because your body is telling you, you have to get this need met. And, there are certain functions that students have that their mind and brain and body is telling them, you have to get this need met no matter what. And so we have to figure out what those needs are, and we have to meet those needs. We can't tell someone, you can't be hungry anymore. We have to feed them. And so we want to feed those students and meet those functions. So that's a big part of what our team teaches. We try to shift mindsets of staff to not ask, what's wrong with that student? But more what happened to that student? We try to shift it from their choosing to act this way to, they have a need that they're trying to get met any way they can. And then our biggest concept through CPI and I talk about that 'cause that's kind of what my focus is, is that we need to know our students so we can effectively meet them where they are [00:15:00] in the escalation cycle. Which is what we teach in CPI is the escalation cycle. What does that look like for the student and what does that staff response need to be in each of those stages? Aleia Mastroianni: I love, the move that we've had into understanding behavior in such a different way. I think about old school schools, and talking about bad kids or bad parents. And I like that is not the conversation, especially within special education or neurodiversity or especially with cognitive disability that children are not inherently bad. Their behavior is saying something. I know that our behavioral team moves with that principle. I love when I've interacted with the behavioral team is, I never feel like they enter and they're like, Hey, how are we gonna change this child? How are we gonna change their behavior, their behaving badly? Instead, they're like, what about this environment isn't meeting this child's needs? And how can we adjust the environment to help them? And having it be solution centric and not, hey, this is bad [00:16:00] behavior and you discipline, has been so powerful to understanding kids and unlocking opportunities for kids with special needs to stay in school and not continue to escalate those behaviors. Tanya Anglemyer: I think that's one of the hardest things for us, as we're teaching. The teachers, the mental health providers, the admin at the school, they're the boots on the ground. They're the ones that are working with the students and it's challenging. It's not easy. And no, we don't ever teach there are bad kids. There's challenging behavior. There's unexpected and not okay behavior. Not saying that the behaviors are okay, but there's a reason behind it. And that's what we need to focus on, is the reason. And it's hard sometimes to figure out the reason. Our kids are coming to school now with so much on their plate. Aleia Mastroianni: What the kids are coming with and what is asked of teachers and staff these days is just overwhelming to me. A personal anecdote about, can they help this behavior? With my own daughter, she is SSN, she does have intellectual disability and does have big behaviors as I've talked about on this podcast before, if you heard, and sometimes they can be silly and big, [00:17:00] but she's angry and she's yelling mean things. But my personal, real aha moment for me was about a year ago she developed this ability to start saying sorry, which she had never said sorry before. And now, she'll be escalated and is saying horrible things and it can last for an hour and a half and we're all trying to calm her down. Then once she's calm again, usually if we can get in a car and drive or something like that, it'll be about 10 minutes and then all of a sudden I'll hear " I need to say, sorry, I am I am sorry". And her voice is different. Everything is different. It really hit home for me, she doesn't want to do this either. Tanya Anglemyer: No Aleia Mastroianni: She can't help it in those moments. She's not able to get outta that cycle either. And I knew this academically, but seeing it in my own daughter and seeing how she's aware she had a meltdown. Even as a mom, even as someone who does this, it built even more compassion and understanding for me to see it right there in my face, oh, she's not in control in this moment. And she's saying nasty things, but you can't, I don't take it personally. Tanya Anglemyer: That's a big thing [00:18:00] that we teach is not take, and it's hard because they will, to get their need met, just like any of us, to get our need met we are gonna do the easiest and fastest behavior we can. And it's much easier to do inappropriate behaviors than it is the appropriate one. There's a lot of skill that goes into getting attention appropriately. Where I could yell or I could say something, that pushes someone's buttons , and I get attention really fast, really quick. And again, is it a choice, maybe what they're saying? Yes. That's a choice, but the choice isn't that I need attention. And so I do these things, consciously, but it's unconscious that my body's saying, I need this. Aleia Mastroianni: A huge part of teaching to support this now is deescalation. There's a focus on, if you're in the behavior world, catch the antecedent. Can we catch the behavior or can we catch the escalation before it goes somewhere so much bigger? So what are some of these deescalation techniques that you are teaching to teachers? Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah, definitely. [00:19:00] So through CPI. We teach what's called the escalation cycle. We discuss how we need to know our students' baseline first. You need to know where they are, what their behaviors look like and sound like when they're in their best space. When they're in their thinking brain is what we call it. That because we're not gonna know sometimes when they start to escalate, 'cause sometimes those cues can be so slight unless we really know our kids. And so we need to know our baseline. We need to connect with students. Students aren't gonna put themselves out there to fail with skills unless they trust you. And part of earning that trust is getting to know the kid. And so we really talk about building that trust with students. Then we start moving up the escalation cycle and we talk about the anxiety stage. It's not a diagnosis of anxiety. Anxiety through CPI is just a slight change in behavior. It could be something like tapping their pencil on the desk. It could be their voice raising slightly. It could be that maybe they're mumbling, maybe they're not talking at [00:20:00] all. So it's really understanding that every student has certain behaviors that they may show in the anxiety stage, and we need to get to know them to be able to then support them. And that's the appropriate kind of staff response is being supportive. And so, being supportive includes being an active listener, listening to what the student is saying, looking at what their body language is saying also. Think about your supportive communication. What are the words you're using? Are you reducing your words? Because when we start moving up the escalation cycle automatically our processing speed actually starts to slow down. Every person, their processing speed starts to slow down. So we need to reduce the words. This isn't a time that we're teaching lessons. It's being supported, it's listening. We need to use a calm voice. We're not using a lot of emotion in this stage. It's interesting, 11% of what is being communicated when we're interacting with someone is our verbals. So only 11% of what we say is really getting [00:21:00] communicated. 38% of what we say is what we call para verbals, our tone, our volume, and our cadence. When we say those things. And a bigger part of what we communicate is our body language. That's 55% of what is being communicated. Wow. And so we teach this that in that anxiety stage, we really have to think about our communication skills when we're interacting with a student. We could be saying all the right things, but if our body language is communicating something very different, students are gonna pick up on that. Aleia Mastroianni: So as a former theatre teacher, this is speaking to me like actual body awareness for your staff members is cool. And possibly something, some teachers have never thought about, never thought, what is my body saying? What does a stressed, frustrated body look like? What does an impatient body look like? I love that. Do you ever make them do theatre games? Tanya Anglemyer: Actually do. Aleia Mastroianni: Oh my goodness. Yes. Tanya Anglemyer: One of the things when we move up in the escalation cycle we get up and we do some role plays. Aleia Mastroianni: Oh, I love it. Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah. One person's a teacher, the other's a student. The others are [00:22:00] observers and they're actually listening for what their words are saying, what their body's communicating, how they're holding themselves. Aleia Mastroianni: I love it. Tanya Anglemyer: Some other interventions at that anxiety, because this is really where we can have the most impact because. Students are still in their thinking brain here. They're starting to go to what we call, that lizard brain, but they're not there yet. So things we can do are, remembering that a student's perspective is their reality. And we need to understand that this isn't a time that we try to change their perspective. That has to be done at baseline when they really are in their thinking brain. We need to actually start acting as their frontal lobe because they're losing that ability. Aleia Mastroianni: Oh, I love that. Tanya Anglemyer: Provide processing time again, processing slows down. So we need to give them wait time, increase their typical wait time, double it. Triple it. You had said this earlier, but we need to rationally detach and not take things personal. Yes. And that's a big part. Another thing that we teach are visual supports. The brain actually processes visuals very different than they do [00:23:00] words. Visuals are already in our long-term memory where words have to be processed, they have to be thought about and put together to understand the meaning. And when you start to go to that fight, flight, freeze. Especially as we're moving up, it's easier to process visuals, so we encourage the use of visuals. Sensory breaks during this time, offering those to students, giving them just a little bit of time to regroup is important. You can push the topic, you can push your own agendas, but typically if you do that, the student's gonna escalate even more. And then it's gonna be much harder. You actually become the catalyst for the behavior increasing. And then we call this the defensive stage. And so the defensive stage is when a student is protecting themselves from a real or perceived threat. We may see the situation as not concerning at all, but that student may see it as concerning. This can include trying to get into a power struggle. It's not one of the functions that we really identify, but sometimes it's to get control. The student wants [00:24:00] control and that's not a bad thing. A lot of our kids want control because of the functions of sensory. Maybe there's sensory overload and they're feeling like, I have no control right now, so I need to get it the best way I can. Aleia Mastroianni: Decreases anxiety. I have a kiddo who's OCD and obsessed with control and it's about decreasing her anxiety about what's going to happen. Tanya Anglemyer: It's protection. When we see a student getting into that power struggle, sometimes we think, they're doing this because they just want to control, but it's not just about control. It's about feeling safe in the moment, and so they are trying to get that control to feel safe. If it's safe because of a social interaction that's taking place. If it's safe because they have a lagging skill, an academic skill that they may not understand or they struggle with, they might do things to get control of the situation because they feel out of control. It's teaching teachers to understand that [00:25:00] perspective. So things that we ask them to do is sometimes just give that student some space. Give them time to regulate themselves. Aleia Mastroianni: And just to pop in, 'cause it may seem impossible if you're thinking of a gen ed classroom, sometimes when we're getting here, other people are going to intervene and help support. That might be, we're going to remove ourselves from this situation or whatnot. And you can write things like this into IEPs about, I need to be able to take a break and walk away and breathe so that I don't keep escalating up into an explosion. Tanya Anglemyer: But you know, even our students who aren't on IEPs sometimes need this. Aleia Mastroianni: Thank you. Yes. A hundred percent. Tanya Anglemyer: And I think for teachers to recognize, hey, they're in the defensive stage. I need to maybe give them and allow them to take some space. We're not gonna make them do what we want. You can't make a student do something. We have to influence them. And so how can we influence them? How can we get them back to baseline? 'cause that's our ultimate goal. 'cause we can't teach until they're back at baseline. And one of the hard things that we have to tell teachers is [00:26:00] sometimes in this stage, we have to allow kids to vent. And that might be we move everyone around them. We do a room clear, an area clear. We do teach teachers that they need to practice this skill, with their whole class. We do fire drills all the time, but we're less likely to need that than we are a room clear for a number of different reasons. Not even just for behavior, but maybe a medical reason. Yeah. And we can help reduce the anxiety of all the other students if we practice this, where are we gonna go? What are we gonna do? Learning doesn't have to stop just because you remove them from the classroom. It can take place in another environment. It might not be what's on your lesson plan for that day, but we're gonna be doing this in the commons area or in the library. Aleia Mastroianni: And to insert for parents who may or may not know about room clears- it's important to note that staff members are not allowed to move students physically. They can't pick them up and move them. It's easier in elementary to pick a child up but you're not allowed to move them. And so if the student won't remove themselves, if they're so escalated and they can't, sometimes we [00:27:00] will do a room clear for several reasons to keep the student safe, to protect the other students, not just from physicality, but from the emotional experience. But I also love it to protect the dignity of the student who's in that moment, not in control of themselves. They don't need to be a spectacle in front of everybody. But what you said that I've never heard before and I love is normalizing a room clear. That is not this shocking, oh my God. You're like, no, we practice this because all of us might have a moment. We all want our dignity protected. And if we're having a moment, it's very easy for all of us to step out and give that person a moment. And I think if you teach kids, they just accept it as normal. Tanya Anglemyer: We also talk about, things we can't do. So we don't restrain students in the defensive stage, right? We're not moving students physically. We can't do that at any stage. It's too dangerous to be physically moving kids. Don't get in that power struggle. Aleia Mastroianni: Yes. It's a losing battle. Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah. We try to get more than one staff member there on the scene as soon as possible. Most schools will have a crisis team. And so they have some [00:28:00] type of procedure for getting other staff members there just in case. Just to help support. If the student continues to dysregulate, then become unsafe to themselves or the others, we call that the risk stage. But there's, at the risk stage, it doesn't mean, oh, we just go into a restraint. There's a lot of decision making that has to be made at this stage. We actually have a decision making matrix and CPI and it has teams think about what is the risk of the student doing this behavior. Is it gonna be catastrophic harm? Is it going to be a minor harm? We have to differentiate because we might be able just to leave that student alone, even when they are throwing things and could be in danger of hurting someone else. Maybe we just move out of the way. So we talk about, first of all, non restrictive interventions that we could do in this stage, and then all the way to restrictive interventions. We teach teachers disengagement skills. So, if they were getting hit [00:29:00] kicked, things thrown at them. What do we do for that behavior? If any way possible, we move. We move, we block, we get out of the way. If we can continue to do that, we're just gonna continue to do that. If it moves into a grab where then the student kind of has control over your body then we teach them how to disengage from that hair pull or that bite. What's the safest way to keep them safe? But we also even talk about what if one student's biting another student? We see that sometimes. We see hair pulls sometimes. But so we teach those disengagement skills. Those aren't restraints. Those are helping them get out of that incident. And then if at the last resort, we do teach restrain skills. This is only used if everything else doesn't work and doesn't help that student come down. We may have to do a restraint and we teach safe restraints. We teach certain things such as inside, outside, how are we gonna mobilize the upper body, the lower body. How do we use a team to do that? We never take kids to the ground. That is [00:30:00] not something we teach. We really only have two restraints. There is a two person restraint and a one person restraint. And those are only used until that student can be safe. It's not for a certain amount of time. It's not until they're calm. Because they're not gonna be calm. It's when is everyone safe in this situation? Part of my role, as the CPI specialist in the district , I review every restraint, 'cause there is paperwork that has to be filled out. I go over each of those and may reach out to teams to talk more about those. Aleia Mastroianni: I'll shift a little bit into the history of the laws around restraint and seclusion since we're talking a little bit about it. And for the benefit of our listeners. For a really long time there wasn't a lot of oversight or common practice on how you would discipline students, restrain students. In the early two thousands is when we saw a big change, when there were several national investigations about cases with specific students, and a lot of them were students with disabilities, which again makes sense if you think about it. Our students are more likely to have [00:31:00] atypical behavior, big behavior and have less ability to reregulate once they've gone all the way up. Unfortunately, these investigations found that the students were being restrained in a way that was unsafe, sometimes unnecessary. And unfortunately, several of these incidences resulted in serious harm. It pushed both the federal government and the states and advocacy groups to demand clearer rules. That's led to a lot of the laws that we have today that are far more clear, explicit, and, as you spoke about, a policy of deescalation, transparency and using a restraint as an absolutely last resort and to carefully monitor it. A slight anecdotal throw in: when this law recently changed, which a couple years ago, our board of education was updating our policies to reflect the law. They sent these to DCSEAC, to our board as stakeholders, to give feedback. I honestly was really impressed. For parents out there it was incredibly explicit about when you could restrain a student down [00:32:00] to, if you are holding a student for 30 seconds, if it's 60 seconds, there's a whole matrix of here's what you do next, here's the amount of time you have until you report this to the parent and your administrator. What I felt when I read the document and the policy is that it protected students and teachers and made it very clear- if we get to this point, here are the next safe steps. I'll link this in our show notes. This is existing policy. It's right there on our district's website, but the policies that I'm talking about that regard restraint and seclusion, are JKA, JKA-E, and JKA-R, and I will link all of those. A fun side story that relates to Tanya: when I was reviewing the new policy , I went to her and asked is it smart to have self-report. I was worried that schools might not want to contact the district and say, oh hey, we did a restraint. I was so pleased and surprised by your response. You were like, oh no, they over, they'll tell me things that weren't restraints at all. They're trying to be so careful that they're letting me know [00:33:00] everything. 'cause they really wanna make sure that they're following this policy. And I thought, oh, that's nice to know. Tanya Anglemyer: I will say that when we reviewed it as a CPI team , we actually had many of these things already in place. We were going above and beyond what the law says. You mentioned that it's very clear, if you have a restraint under a minute versus over a minute, our district has and has for years, said that you're gonna report every restraint. It doesn't matter if it's 30 seconds. Or five seconds. Took five minutes, you report it. Now, the state only requires that we report restraints over a minute. But our district, we wanna hear about every restraint because then allows me to review what's taking place, if people are getting hurt. It lets me look for patterns, with students, with staff. Then I can hopefully intervene. I can team up with the autism specialist or the behavior specialist. I can go out and we can do some teaching. We can problem solve. Our district has actually been doing that for a long time. I get every [00:34:00] restraint that is ever done. I think the bigger thing, in the last couple years in DCSD is that we're being so transparent with parents. The paperwork is very clear. JKA-R is the restraint form itself. And on that we're very clear, what took place, what holds were used, the time. That's always been sent to parents for total transparency. The bigger change is that we have a debriefing after that incident. And that's required for every incident. If they're five seconds, it's required for every staff member. The debriefing is part of that learning process. We do it with students who aren't on IEPs and students who are, and students who have behavior plans and students who don't have behavior plans. The form will ask teams to pull up the student's functional behavior assessment. And what were the triggers that could have caused or affected this situation. They're gonna look at the behavior plan and determine did we follow the steps on the behavior plan? If not, what could we do and then let's [00:35:00] brainstorm. Are there things that aren't on the plan that maybe we could put into place? And then all of that is sent to the parent. So the parent can see this is the thought process that staff went through. Aleia Mastroianni: These are gonna be two acronyms that we just talked about that get thrown around. But briefly, for the purposes of this podcast what is an FBA? What is a BIP? Do you have to have an IEP? What, how are they used as tools in our district? Tanya Anglemyer: So first typically you will see an FBA or a BIP, maybe attached to a student with an IEP. However, they can be used with students who don't have an IEP. A 504 student or even a student that maybe the team is getting to know and maybe they don't qualify for an IEP, but the team might need kind of a plan in place. That functional behavior assessment is the why does a student have these behaviors? We're looking at lagging skills. Just like reading, writing, and math. Kids have lagging skills that can affect their behaviors if they have, inability to regulate their emotions, that's not a choice, that's a lagging skill. If they [00:36:00] have, social communication skills that are lagging, that's not a choice. It's a lagging skill. Mm-hmm. And so, we identify the function. Mm-hmm. What are they getting out of this, right? This behavior. And so that's that functional behavior assessment. And then, the behavior intervention plan is, how are we gonna teach those lagging skills? How are we gonna meet those functions? What are we doing as staff through that escalation cycle specifically for this kid? What is supportive, cause that might be different from one kid to another. So this is an individualized plan for that student that is developed. Aleia Mastroianni: And just 'cause it hit my mom heart, it's okay to have a lagging social skill. Just like it's okay to have a lagging reading skill. It doesn't mean you're bad. I love the idea of calling it a lagging skill because it means it can be taught, we can support that. It plays into this concept, that nothing happens before behavior, nothing. I think it is completely reasonable, and this is now an Aleia opinion, to pause all academics until you have the behavior addressed. Because it does not [00:37:00] matter how smart you are, how brilliantly intelligent you are, if you don't have behavioral management skills or social functioning, nothing happens. You will not get a student to learn anything if they're in their lizard brain. Tanya Anglemyer: Yeah. Aleia Mastroianni: And behavior comes first. Tanya Anglemyer: And that's why we do have Affective Needs programs. That's why we do have autism programs. The team has identified, we've got to work on these behaviors. It's hard to do that in a classroom full of 25 kids. Aleia Mastroianni: Exactly. And Let me ask you , is it possible for parents listening , can they request the behavioral team? What would be the proper approach if you are worried about your kiddo's behavior. Tanya Anglemyer: Always start with your school. They're gonna know those students better. So I would definitely reach out to the mental health provider, your student's, case manager. Meet with them, talk, collaborate with them. If you feel, you're not receiving what you feel your child needs, reach out to the administrator from that school or your special ed coordinator. If the student's on an IEP, they can help support reaching out [00:38:00] then to whoever else needs to be a part of that team. There are many times that we will lead conversations with the team at school and the parents. And we will be that outside source to come in and have those open conversations and talk about the students' plans and help build those plans. Aleia Mastroianni: Fair. Like Tanya said previously, she's probably already in your school. They're probably already at team meetings. Do you guys offer any training for parents? There's so much crossover between parenting and behavioral supports at schools. Tanya Anglemyer: Unfortunately, right now our team doesn't have parent classes. We definitely see the need, but resource wise, we don't have that capacity. I know that there are some other things I think that are available, but our team doesn't. Aleia Mastroianni: So no, our behavioral team, as amazing as they are, are not here to train us parents. But do look out for Parent University, which is offered through DCSD, and I think all of them are archived on the website. I'll link this in here and they've done many episodes, webinars, about supporting [00:39:00] behaviors. Also Developmental Pathways does monthly seminars where they are teaching over a variety of topics. I'll link that in our show notes as well, and you can keep your eyes open for that. Tanya Anglemyer: I would encourage you to reach out to your team and say, Hey, do you have ideas of things that we can do at home? So we're both doing kind of the same thing. Reach out to them. Hopefully if your student does have, some of these higher concerning behaviors, they are on a behavior plan. And so this escalation cycle, hopefully there are some strategies that are written into that plan that you can use at home. Just because they're written for the school setting doesn't mean you can't then kinda tweak them for the home setting. Aleia Mastroianni: There's nothing wrong with having visuals at home, and then it creates a nice continuity for the students. And so reach out to your team. As my personal advice , we don't ever wanna approach kids as "bad kids." It's probably nice to not approach school like "bad school." Situations vary, but your team often will want to work with you. It's exciting to have [00:40:00] parents reach out and collaboratively say what has been successful for you? Let me tell you what was successful for us, all in the service of helping that kiddo in the end. Tanya Anglemyer: Like we talked about precipitating factors that teachers have. Our team will come in and we know that there's precipitating factors when working with those teachers. They are the ones that are boots on the ground. They have been working on these behaviors and maybe they're not seeing the success that they wanted to see. And so we have to come in with an open mind and meet them where they are. I would encourage parents to also have that open mind when working with staff at school. We want staff to do that with parents. We want parents to have that open mind also. Behavior's difficult, and sometimes you might not see the behaviors even at home that we're seeing at school because of the demands of school. Aleia Mastroianni: I'm with you. If all of us, even in life, can approach each other with understanding and that team spirit, in the end, it's gonna help your students, so at least start there. If you feel like you're not getting movement, contact your coordinator. But just even starting with behavior is hard. [00:41:00] This is challenging. It's okay for us to say amongst ourselves, this is really hard. Disability is really hard, and we're all trying to figure this out. That's a lot of what this podcast is about, group is about, is us just acknowledging this is hard, let's figure out how to do this together. So as I bring us to our close here today, parents, thank you so much for listening to incredibly important, valuable conversation about behavior, about how we support behavior, how our school approaches supporting behavior. I wanna thank Tanya so much for spending her time with me and sharing so much great insight. To all of our listeners, thank you for joining for another great conversation with DCSEAC. If you have any questions about today's episode or any future ones, please reach out. We love hearing from you. You can find us at dcseac.org, as well as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We're all over the place. Come find us. But thank you for joining us. The path is hard, but it's easier when you're with friends. We'll see you next time. Yay. [00:42:00]