Ep. 20: Extended School Year (ESY) Data Collection Tips

Listen as we chat about ways to streamline data collection for your Extended School Year program! We discuss the merits of printable packets versus digital data trackers. Plus, snag a FREE printable data packet template from our Facebook group!  ⬇️

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Transcript

Caitlin Beltran: to me, there's no sense in saying, okay, they've maintained their, you know, 10 numbers. We won't teach them one more number. So I've always thought that was silly when districts operated that way.

Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorists Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran, here to bring you evidence based strategies with a student centered focus. Let's get started.  

Audra Jensen: Welcome back to the Misfit Behaviorist podcast where we share fun and easy tips and tricks for behavior management, skill acquisition, special education, parents, whatever. Last week we talked a little bit about summer services, 

or summer structure for parents and maybe educators at home. And this week we want to talk a little bit about data collection and summer services in kind of a school or structured setting.

So we are going to do that today, but don't forget to subscribe on our YouTube channel or find us on Instagram and in our group on Facebook where we are sharing our freebies every week there. So don't forget to do that, and we will see you there. This week we are talking about summer. Caitlin, you are running it this week. What are your ideas? 

Caitlin Beltran: Yes. So first, I guess I'm just gonna describe what a typical day or structure looks like and the ESY program that I work at currently and ones that I've, you know, similar districts run it similar ways. I guess a few variations here. And then Audra you could chime in as if this was your consistent experience or if you had other things that you've done.

 Our program runs for six weeks and so it's definitely not the full summer. We have off fourth of July, we have off every Friday, and then we run from 8:30 30 to 1:30. So it's not a full day and it's not five days a week. We do have mostly district staff. I know some places have almost all district staff, some places have almost all their contracting out for the summer, depends on where you are, I guess.

So we have everyone in who's recommended for ESY has familiar faces, in other words, so we're able to spread that staff out. They do have their weekly services, so they're getting their speech, their occupational therapy, whatever they need. For us, we are lucky enough to have the same provider. So throughout the summer, we are, that person is seeing speech from someone in our district.

It might not necessarily be their consistent speech therapist, but it is someone who is from our district, so knows the way that we do things. Is that kind of how you've run your programs or how and when you've participated? 

Audra Jensen: Yes. ESY varies very much from district to district, state to state, even. 

And I just want to say a little bit just about ESY in general being that special education service for students who require, services throughout the summer in order to make those IEP goals.

And I think that's the one thing I kind of wanted to say about ESY specifically, that, both we as educators need to know, but parents also need to understand kind of what ESY is and how to qualify for them. There's a lot of really great information on Wright's Law, which is w r i g h t s l a w, dot com.

There's, and they go through kind of the original IDEA 2004 law and kind of what that means, what services are legally mandated, how to receive those services. And I guess it's really important for me being coming from kind of that parent perspective and then an educator and kind of seeing the differences is just to understand that a lot of districts and here's my little pet peeve that I'm just going to kind of go on a little tangent about a lot of districts do use kind of the term regression and other certain checkboxes to check in order to determine eligibility.

I think it's really important to understand that that's not part of the law. That the law really is only, or they'll say, you know, this is what we offer and you either take it or leave it and you got to be really careful if you have a very parent or a legal savvy parent that you understand that that's not part of what the law is.

The law really is just a team decision is made about this particular student that the extra services during the summer are required to meet those goals. And it's that's basically all what the law says and then we have you know states and districts to kind of interpret that and they may use regression as one of the the ways to qualify somebody but you can't say well this student your student hasn't shown any regression over spring break and so we're not going to offer ESY services because you can get to a lot of trouble doing that. You have to show regression and recruitment of skills.

That's not part of the law. And I have actually seen legal action taken against districts when they tried to do that. So that's my little pet peeve just making sure that really ESY is determined from that IEP team and parents are part of that IEP team that the summer months and services required to meet those annual goals.

Caitlin Beltran: Yeah. I mean, well said so many things to consider both as educators and as parents. And I think, in one of the schools that I worked at a million years ago, they would always talk about regression. I mean, you'll hear that word a lot, obviously connected to summer months, but they would ask us in the beginning of the school year to take separate data to show if there was regression and my thing was always like, but if this is a child, who's always been to extend a school year, like, like, how do you prove a negative?

You know, like. it's super hard. It's very intangible and you said it very well, like there's no one thing that says, oh, if your child meets this and this benchmark, they definitely have to have ESY and if they don't. 

Audra Jensen: I've seen districts where they'll, like, I know of a family whose son wasn't making any progress on academic goals.

This was not a student with a significant disability. It was just a resource student. Hadn't made goals, progress in many years, and had, they had just kind of recycled those goals for a few years. And finally, the family's like, We need specific tutoring for this. the program you're using there is not working.

We have evidence of that. And they're like, well, you know, he's not losing and then not regaining skills. And they're like, yeah, well, they won the case obviously, because, and then that district had to pay for his private tutoring over the summer with a different program because what they were doing wasn't working and so it's just be really careful that we're not just using a checkbox and we say there's no regression or there's no, you know, they're not on the cusp of certain skills or there's not a certain disability.

Got to be really careful about that one is you have to have a significant disability. You can't say that. So just be really cautious with ESY for that. 

Caitlin Beltran: Yeah, 

Audra Jensen: There's my soapbox. Stepping off. 

Caitlin Beltran: Okay, so perfect. With that being said, I wanted to talk about two ways that I have used for skill data collection, specifically in the summer. So like Audra's mentioning, not just for the reason that we don't want legal action, obviously we want to collect data and make sure our students are progressing because that's what we're here for as educators.

And it can be tough over the summer because I know I mentioned our program, like we don't go in Fridays, we get out earlier. And then we do try to make it really fun for the kidS.. So, we have like outside time. We have animals come visit. We might do a field trip. So between those times, hopefully we're targeting skills across the day in all those generalized context, but we do still have our structured learning times or our discrete trial sessions or whatever that student is benefiting from.

So personally, I found it easier to kind of set aside a specific book, packet, sheet, or whatever you call it for ESY so we can just have that clipboard or that binder and not have to worry about maybe the intensive trials we were doing from the school year because that system might not always fit into our summer schedule.

So I'm going to share my screen so if you are watching on YouTube. You can follow along, and if not, Audra's going to help me make sure I am describing everything perfectly. 

Audra Jensen: It's a white screen and it has a picture of a data collection sheet. Surprise. 

Caitlin Beltran: okay, so this is the first option that I've gravitated towards in the more recent years is doing more of a packet.

So instead of making a condensed sheet for each learner or putting each learner's binder into a sheet, I am going by classroom. And this is just what works for us, but I think there's a million ways you can customize this for your classroom or school. So knowing that in ESY, you're still going to have a class full of students, even if it's not your exact roster from during the school year.

Sometimes if multiple students aren't attending, you're going to squish a few classrooms together or whatever it might look like. So let's just say in this example, I think I have four students listed. I like their names. I always put Pheobe, Monica, Rachel, Chandler. Geller. Yeah. So I would put maybe three or four students at a time in one packet.

And so if I have a classroom of like up to five students, I can usually make them work in one packet. And then beyond that, I'm making maybe two packets like group A and group B. And so then I'm picking maybe their top two or three or four priority goals that I'm targeting that summer. Because also we do have some goals that just don't lend themselves to summer months.

I mean, if you have a goal for zipping coat or unpacking lunch and you're, in a school district that you don't, it's obviously pretty warm out where we are and we don't always have lunch, sometimes just snack or something like that. So I'm picking the most relevant goals. of course, if you can target them all, that's great too.

And then I'm putting them in this packet and then I literally put each learner, they're, whatever it is, two, three, four, five, six, ten goals underneath. And then right under that, I start the next learner. So you can see like Rachel, and then Rachel has two goals, and then Monica, and then Monica has four goals, and then Phoebe, Phoebe might have six goals, but they're all on the same sheet.

 And then on the far right, I just have columns for week one, week two, week three, and we're taking a probe data point, maybe, you know, Mondays or Wednesdays. During the rest of the week, we're still teaching. But again, we don't have the time and the staff to take that intensive trial by trial data that we might be taking during the year.

But to me, this is just as good. It's reflective of the time and the staff that we have. The quality is there because we're still teaching this outside. We're not just taking the one data point and putting it in the back for the rest of the week. We're teaching it all the time. You could also print this, laminate it, and do the dry erase so that every single day you can just have staff be accountable that they're practicing it.

But you have a hard copy where you have at least one data point for at least one every student's goals for that week. And then say you have six weeks of ESY. There you have six data points for each goal, and you're making an easy percentage. 

Audra Jensen: I like this. You've used probe data here, and if those of you who are watching and listening didn't catch a previous episode, we talked about probe and trial by trial data.

So, I think that would be good to go back and watch and kind of see the difference between probe data and trial by trial data. And I think the difference, this is a great example of how using probe data is appropriate in this type of setting. 

Caitlin Beltran: I think so. And we definitely have some learners where we're still doing pretty intensive teaching trials, but again, just for the data.

And so that's important to like, you're not necessarily changing your teaching style. I might for that learner still be doing pretty intensive trial by trial teaching, but I'm just taking a probe data point just for ESY. Like I said, it's more reflective of the resources that we have over the summer.

So then I'm going to link this in the Facebook group, actually, so that if you hop in there, Misfit Behaviorists Podcast, find our group on Facebook. I will link this free so that anyone can download it. And then you'll see the first page is kind of just an example. And the second page is, you can edit it.

So then you can literally highlight and copy and paste for as many learners as you have. And I think for us. another just tip we've done is you may or may not have the staff from that child's program working in the summer, like we mentioned. So the teacher and I usually collaborate, depending on, again, if it's that child's teacher, she's way ahead of the game, she knows their data and their goals, but it might be even the teacher in the room is somebody who doesn't really work with these kids.

So in that sense, I'm helping them get to know the goals and how that learner operates, but also, maybe it's just the teacher taking the probe data each day or each week, and then that way, the staff can really be pairing with the kids, be playing with them, be teaching them naturalistically. Um, but sometimes given that there could be so many new staff over the summer, you don't want all that room for error with five new staff taking data on five new kids that are new to them.

So this kind of streamlines it in that sense. 

Audra Jensen: Yeah, I love that. 

Caitlin Beltran: so this was one example. And then my other example was, of course, the digital data sheet. Still doing the probe data. For me, most of the time for summer, it's just a better fit. But in this example, I am separating it out by goal.

So if you are watching and following along, you can see how I have all the dates here. But I can check yes or no per goal and you could do this every day and now all of a sudden you're getting a data point per week that's also getting graphed for you. So this is really helpful when you just want to maybe fine tune, you're still doing probe data, but now you're collecting it every day, you're getting the weekly average.

And then at least across the summer months, you have like a really nice visual. I save everything. We all know that. If it's a printable data sheet, I'm scanning it into Google Drive and then shredding it, but it's all on my computer. But sometimes, you know, there's nothing like just seeing the graph. So if I'm trying to remember something from last summer, how this, if this learner did regress, or if this learner was able to, do well in all of her programs or not.

I'm pulling up that graph, and I can just see it as an instant visual. 

Audra Jensen: And then you also have at the end of the summer, a really nice visual of progress over the summer, you know, throughout the summer. Did they make progress? Not just maintaining the skill, but did they make progress on it? Did they master something?

I think that's really great. And then you can also, if they're going into a new classroom you can pass this data on to the teacher, and you have even more accurate and updated information than you had for the previous school year. 

Caitlin Beltran: Exactly, and I think that's huge, because like we said, sometimes it's that child's teacher, but a lot of times it's not.

I mean, in my district, we're usually, you know, so many teachers are applying for ESY, and it usually just goes by, you know, first come, first serve, or maybe whoever's been there the longest. I'm sorry, I think 

Audra Jensen: I heard you wrong. You said so many teachers are applying for ESY. 

Caitlin Beltran: Where do you live? 

Audra Jensen: I don't know.

Caitlin Beltran: I 

Audra Jensen: have never 

Caitlin Beltran: heard of that. That's really funny. We, I will tell you, I can't think of, I mean, I've only been there, what, six years, but usually we have more staff than needed because, I don't know, it's, I, see, I find it strange that teachers don't want to work ESY for me, it's like, they want the summer off.

Like, we're like, peace out. I'll see you in September. Maybe, I should have prefaced, I work in a very small district, so the fact that we have this many teachers, the ratio works, Well, that's great. We'd still only have those 20 teachers that wanted to do it. Maybe, so. But for me, it's perfect because it's like I said, shorter hours, but I need that routine.

So I love working in the summer because it's like the best of both worlds. and even like we said, we are focusing on maintenance. But to me, there's no sense in saying, okay, they've maintained their, you know, 10 numbers. We won't teach them one more number. So I've always thought that was silly when districts operated that way.

So, you know, we talk about in my district staff, just amongst us, like, we're just going to keep going. Like, of course, if the goal is one through 10, you know, come July 5th, we're going to talk about 11. Um, but of course you still have that maintenance option of just taking the probe data every week for both. So, you know, some skills lend themselves. You're not going to be able to count to 20 without also counting to 10. So you might not need a separate data point for that. But if you've learned penny, nickel, and dime, and now you're working on quarter, you might need data for all four because you can learn quarter, but then lose nickel.

So there's like a lot of different ways that you can customize those data sheets and packets. And really, it's up to you as the educator, if you're comfortable with, you know, paper and pencil, which. You know, totally. A lot of people are. I am, too, in a lot of settings. I think the packets work really well because then you're just putting everything in one folder, one binder.

You don't have to worry about, you know, you're still going to have each kid's materials, but you don't have to worry about a whole system for each kid for the summer that's going to have to get packed up in August or whenever you end your summer months. Here we go back in September, so we get out really late, but we start really late, so we don't get out until June 20th.

Audra Jensen: Yeah, we're the same here. Oh, okay. Yeah, we hear all these family different places because now we have, you know, listeners and watchers all over and they're, you know, getting out there. A lot of them are getting out this month. And I'm like, I think we still go until the 3rd week of June. 

Caitlin Beltran: Yes, but I guess we'll be laughing in Labor Day.

Yes. It all evens out. Although it doesn't feel like that sometimes. Um, so the printable option, like I said, I'm going to link that in the Facebook group, and if you download it and need any help tweaking it, definitely reach out to us. And the digital version is available in my store. I'll link that as well.

I think it's only a couple of dollars. Um, I'll link it on Facebook and also Instagram, and that one as well. If you need help tweaking it or customizing it, always reach out, and we're happy to help. 

Audra Jensen: I love that. Very nice. Well, I don't know what we're talking about next week, but we will be here talking.

Maybe we'll talk about Toilet training or something. So yeah, we have, we have ideas, don't we? I think you got it. Toilet training it is. Oh boy. That's going to be a big one. You'll have to really think about that one. It'll be a two to four parter. Two to twenty. So yeah, you know, if we do, we are going to talk about toilet training.

If you have ideas or questions, we get that a lot, throw them into the Facebook group or Insta or anywhere. You can contact us, um, and we will consider adding that into what we want to talk about. There's just, I mean, with subjects like toilet training and some other ones. It's, it's it's a beast.

You know, it's a really big one You think about you know, if you're a typically developing parent and you've had typical kids I had one of each one was so easy and it was just like hey, she just started going to the bathroom It was really easy. The other one took years and so in it And we have, we're toilet training, you know, teenagers and adults.

And so it's a very big subject. So if you have something that's important to you right now, that's, you know, apropos to your life right now, whether it's school or home, reach out to us and we'll try to consider putting that into what we discuss because that is a big subject. We'll probably come back to it as well.

Definitely. All right. So we will see you guys next week. Thanks. Bye. 

Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.