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The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered student growth, social development, emotional well-being, future preparedness, and overall behavior. In addition to a slow academic recovery, myriad students are exhibiting behaviors often associated with learning disabilities. The question is whether students’ experiences reflect temporary setbacks or learning needs requiring long-term specialized support.

In the edLeader Panel “Learning Loss vs. Disability: Navigating Special Education Identification in the Post-Pandemic Classroom,” educational experts contended that, regardless of the cause of the challenges, all students can benefit from universal evaluations and programming to effectively and equitably address their needs.

Post-Pandemic Trends

Post-COVID data reveal the pandemic’s extensive impact. There has been an increase in students receiving special education services. Others come to school with non-disability-related challenges, like chronic absenteeism. Parents report observing concerning behavior in their children and delayed academic recovery.

As a result, more students than ever need assessments. Schools are grappling with clearing a backlog of assessments while striving to assess every student accurately. Schools must incorporate more comprehensive assessments that consider academic and mental health needs while avoiding overly identifying students with disabilities when their challenges might be associated with other circumstances, such as language barriers.

Learning Loss and Learning Needs: Hurdles to Cross 

Since the pandemic, schools have faced multiple obstacles, from staff shortages to lowered expectations of students’ academic progress. More and more general and special education students are coming into the classroom with challenges often conflated with disabilities.

Students who might qualify for special education services don’t know they do. In special education programs, students are pulled out of class for services rather than receiving enhanced academic support. There is a focus on acceleration, challenging teachers to help students reach mastery and fill holes while trying to stay on pace to hit end-of-year assessments.

Funding sources have dwindled, or they cover only specific programs, such as tutoring, that may not be available to students with individualized education plans (IEPs). Most damaging is the wall between general and special education programs that affects the services and support students require.

Suggested Solutions

Identifying learner variability is critical to discovering student needs and implementing measures to address them. The panelists contended that a universal design approach to assessment, programming, intervention, and learning would better and more inclusively address varied learning needs. Administering comprehensive psychoeducational assessments is critical.

Moreover, it is essential to recognize additional factors that affect students: the need for students to feel they belong, the role of family support as a predictor of student outcomes, the impact of bullying, and educator biases.

The panelists suggested that school systems become ecosystems beyond related service providers (inclusive of general educators and administrators) to ensure no child is left behind. Approaches toward this goal include:

• Pre- and in-service professional development centered on learner variability to understand how learners engage with instruction and demonstrate competency.
• Academic and social interventions that support students and cultivate a sense of acceptance in an inclusive environment.
• Incentives for students with disabilities, such as explicitly engaging them in advanced placement and International Baccalaureate classes, in which they often are not allowed to participate or do so at rates lower than their general education counterparts.
• The promotion by school systems and leaders of ambitious graduation and post-secondary enrollment rates, encouraging educators to establish pathways for all students toward those desired outcomes.
• Technology-driven solutions to provide more accurate and scalable support for identifying student needs and extend schools’ reach, for example, to students in geographically isolated areas.
• Incorporating accessible, culturally, and linguistically responsive frameworks into assessments, with a clear understanding of the difference between language acquisition and special education. English language learners are often assessed for special education in tandem with English language learning or teaching English as a second language, leading to an overidentification of a learning disability.
• Considering cultural implications when students come to school to align practices with those implications. Educators must be mindful of the judgments and criticisms they make to effectively collaborate with immigrant families to create culturally responsive IEPs.
• Offering additional evidence-based services such as summer and after-school programs, using data to inform targeted interventions, and providing more time-on-tasks.
• Engaging students in their IEP meetings and parents/families in service-related policymaking.

Most significantly, schools and school districts nationwide have begun to tear down the wall separating general and special education. Teams of educators from both realms are working with external experts to triage needs and bring in community assets in service of the child.

Learn more about this edWeb broadcast, Learning Loss vs. Disability: Navigating Special Education Identification in the Post-Pandemic Classroom, sponsored by Presence.

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Supporting Students with Special Needs is a free professional learning community that provides K-12 educators with a place to collaborate on best practices for helping students with learning challenges so they can learn and grow to their full potential.

Presence is a leading provider of remote evaluations and online therapy solutions for children with diverse needs. At the heart of the company is a purpose-built therapy platform, designed by clinicians for clinicians, that allows school teams to serve children both in and out of school. Presence’s national network of more than 2,000 highly skilled and licensed speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and behavioral and mental health professionals helps schools to extend their teams and reach more students. To date, Presence has delivered more than 6 million remote evaluations and therapy sessions to schools and districts in every region of the U.S. Presence is supported by Spectrum Equity, TPG’s The Rise Fund, Bain Capital Double Impact, and Catalyst Investors. For more information, visit presence.com.

Article by Michele Israel, based on this edLeader Panel