The local school systems have been implementing an intervention program for students having problems in class, and it has been effective - so effective that the number of students enrolled in special education in the system is dropping.

In Carroll County Schools, the number has dropped to the point that the system is losing some of its special education funding and five special education paraprofessionals, as well as 14 other paraprofessionals, who assist in the classroom and will not be returning next year.

At Central Elementary School, four paraprofessionals will not be returning. They help provide some of the individual assistance that the intervention program created by the state Department of Education demands.

For instance, if students were having trouble in math, before they might have been given general help, now the teacher will try to pinpoint exactly what is keeping that child from succeeding.

“Say we’re doing geometry,” fourth-grade teacher Patty Edison said. “They do great in geometry, but then we go back to do long division, and they’re not doing well in long division.”

The teacher would have to pinpoint exactly what is that is preventing them from succeeding in long division and provide that student with a personalized program to fix the problem - and everything has got to be documented.

“They’re pulled out into little, small groups “ not all the time, but for you know, help with their math facts or help with their completing assignments or different things like that,” fourth-grade teacher Tina Lewis said. “I don’t think they feel as overwhelmed as they did before, being one of 20 other kids where now they’re one of four.”

To create the interventions, the teachers and the administrators get together and try to pinpoint exactly what the student is having problems with. They develop a plan on how to help the child, for instance working on a particular computer program that addresses whatever problem the student has or modifying assignments for that student.

“You write up a plan, a detailed plan of what the strategies are, and the teachers have to keep documentation of that,” Assistant Principal Beth Patterson said. “So if they say they’re going to weekly checks on math facts, they going to help them study them all week and then they’re going to weekly checks on them, they have to prove that they’ve done that. ... Not only have they got to implement the strategies, they’ve got to keep records of what they’ve done as proof.”

That may not seem very difficult - Edison said that teachers have become adept at dealing with a “three-ring circus” in their classroom. The teachers try to do the individual work when the students are working individually, maybe on a writing assignment or a math page. However, when you consider Tina Lewis’ class, in which eight of her 18 students require intervention, it can become a daunting task.

That’s where the para-pros come in. While the fourth-grade teachers do not have paraprofessionals in their classrooms, they do get some extra help when needed by the ones in the school.

“We’ve taken a lot of our special ed para-pros and used them to help kids who aren’t in special ed,” Patterson said.

The students are benefiting from the program. That is illustrated in lower numbers of students being referred to special education classrooms but also in the students’ grades.

“The (students) that are getting the help love it,” Patterson said. “They’re going from failing to passing.”

The goal of Georgia’s Pyramid of Intervention, which was introduced two years ago, is to keep students in the regular classroom, said Sue Ellen Snow, associate superintendent of Standards-Based Learning at the Department of Education. She said certain groups of students were disproportionately being referred to special education, and the department stepped in to make sure that all avenues were explored to help the student before referring them.

“It’s really more kind of a strategy for how to address struggling students,” she said. “In Georgia, we’re really trying to expand that conversation not just to focus on students with disabilities but to focus on any student that is struggling.”

Kathy Rogers, assistant superintendent at Carroll County Schools, said the pyramid is an illustration of all the things the system does for students in the classroom. Tier one has the standards-based classroom that all students receive. As a student begins to struggle, he or she is moved to tier two, where they receive focused, more refined supports. If that is not enough, the student advances to tier three and receives individual assessments and interventions. If that is still not enough, only after all the steps have been tried and failed, then the student is assessed for special education.

The pyramid is working, but it is also costing the system.

“We earn money on the number of students on FTE (full-time enrollment),” Rogers said. “But the money that we earn for a special ed student’s much higher.” Those students require more individual help. They are in smaller classrooms, and the classrooms must meet different requirements than a standard classroom.

Snow said there is no additional funding to implement the pyramid.

“That can be done in different ways and doesn’t necessarily require additional funding, it requires doing things in a different way,” she said.

However, Patterson notes, it is best to keep the kids in the regular classroom - but then you risk losing some of the funding for the very resources that helped keep those struggling students there.