How do teams decide whether a childs needs fall in the “greater than 90% – 95%” range?
This is a consensus team decision based on a combination of the student’s level of performance and professional judgment. The process of establishing local norms is valuable for this process, but it takes time. In absence of available local norms of students’ academic achievement and rate of learning, comparison to national norms is possible and performance at less than the 10th percentile would likely be equivalent to the 90%-95% range. Additionally, the team can get a “feel” for this level of need in a couple of ways. First, the team considers what percentage of students in the school or district have typically been identified as having a disability, then judges where this student’s performance falls within that group – for example, if the school has been identifying 20% of its students, the team should think about the needs of the lowest-performing half of the students in that group and compare this student’s needs to those. Another way – focused on specific skill areas – is to stud
