Parents’ Corner

It is so fun to know what your I.Q. is and we sometimes ask our friends what their I.Q. is as a joke. What are these statistics for and does it have any importance for how smart we are? I will answer the latter question first. The answer is no. There is no evidence that shows how smart someone is. If I were to make a new test to know how smart someone is, it will be good as the regular test is.

Who Developed I.Q.?

Now for the answer for the first question, it was used so Hitler could get rid of people with disabilities. We only think he was targeting only Jews, but it is not the case. It was used to weed out all the people who had an intellectual disability. There is a great movie called “Intelligent Lives” and it is on Amazon Prime. It talks about how I.Q. got started and shows how people with intellectual disability can become an asset to society.

Partners in PolicyMaking

We often live in our own world and don’t see what is happening. For those who are not getting my newsletter, I am in a class called Partners in Policymaking which every state has. This class is for people with disabilities and parents who have children with disabilities. It meets for two days in a month for nine months and this past weekend we had the class. The topic was education. One of the subjects was on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports or PBIS.

PBIS

What is PBIS? It is a framework for the school to adopt and it is mainly for the staff. It focus on the behavior of all the students. Many students don’t need help in school, but some do. The teachers are trained to help the students before they have a meltdown. The reason why they want to catch it before the student has the melt down is because if they can help the student early enough, the student can be calm down faster. Otherwise, the student cannot function in class.

Example of How PBIS Helps

One student had stress and some days they were in a good mood and some days they were in a bad mood. The school figured out that it started first thing in the morning. What they did was every day the school would called the students at home to see if they were having a good day or a bad day. If they were having a bad day, they would see someone who could calm them before going into class. As the year went on, the student learned how to calm themselves without needing help.

3 Tiers

Like I said that this framework is for everybody in the school to adopt. There are three tiers in PBIS and each tier aliens to the type of support students need. Tier one is for everyone. The school is structured to have positive expectations and behaviors. One thing that got to me is they focus on is respect for everyone. To me, this is really lacking in this country.

Each tier gets smaller as the tiers increase. So, when they get to the third tier, the number of students is much less. If a student is in the third tier, there is a multi-disciplinary team for each student. The student has a behavior support expertise and formal fidelity and outcome data are collected. In the third tier, there are usually 1-5% of the students. This number of students is something that the school can handle.

Think Outside of the Box

The question that comes to my mind is why don’t more schools have PBIS? This framework is for everyone. Yes, this works for students with disabilities but let’s think outside of the box now. There is a lot of bullying at school but there are many unwanted shootings in schools. To my mind, PBIS might be one way of stopping the violence in schools. I don’t mean it will be the final answer, but let’s try something that might help everyone. Students need the support that their parents can’t provide and this might be one way that can save lives.