Problems of Practice

School professionals striving to provide services to individual students often find that student data is inaccessible and disorganized. They are hampered too because service interventions often go undocumented. These problems and others interfere with identifying students for referrals, making critical service decisions, and ensuring accountability.

Identification of students for social support referral
A major issue impeding the process of identifying students is the inaccessibility of student data. This produces an over reliance on one or two academic indicators and typically the anecdotal judgment of the teacher. Teachers often fail to complete this task sufficiently because the process of collecting data from various locations and individuals is cumbersome and time consuming.

Evidence-based decision-making by social support team members
Decisions regarding student needs, interventions, and progress are fully dependent on the availability of comprehensive and dynamic student data. Throughout this process, decision-making is compromised by the lack of sufficient evidence on which to base practice decisions. Furthermore, the absence of intervention documentation and tracking prevents team members from making decisions about the efficacy of their practice.

Public accountability in social support services
School administrators and case managers have tremendous oversight responsibility for student support practices. These leaders manage the student support referral process, schedule and facilitate meetings, and track the implementation of interventions. These responsibilities are quite difficult to accomplish because of the large number of competing work responsibilities.

In all cases, valuable time is spent either locating and collecting information or piecing together incomplete information. Often staff members fill in the blanks with retrospective anecdotal information or hopeful assumptions at best. Under these conditions, important decisions that can impact student trajectories are based on limited understanding.