A student support team (SST) is a group of school professionals that assemble at a meeting or series of meetings to address the specific academic and/or behavior needs of an individual student. These teams may also be referred to as student study teams, student success teams, or pre-referral teams, but all serve the same essential function. These teams are a function of the general education program within an individual school and are designed to bring parents and school professionals together to develop specific interventions within the general education setting. When a child has an academic and/or behavioral difficulty in the general education classroom, interventions are first developed by the child's individual teacher as part of the differentiation of instruction that all teachers are expected to provide within the general education classroom setting. If the teacher needs additional assistance, a referral is made to the SST and a meeting is scheduled. The typical members invited to a SST are the parent, the classroom teacher, an administrator (principal or vice-principal), as well as a number of potential additional members. Additional members that may be present include the school psychologist, school counselor, special education teacher, speech and language pathologist, autism specialist, occupational specialist, physical therapist, school nurse, or other persons who may make relevant contributions.
The general process for a SST begins with the teacher filling out a form to request an SST. The teacher will generally identify the current academic and behavioral functioning of the student, the problem/s of concern, and any interventions that have been tried. An SST is then scheduled on a date when the parent can attend. Most schools have an regularly scheduled SST meeting every week or every other week.
At the initial SST meeting, the team would get together and follow a process that may typically look like the following:
Introductions are made and the facilitator of the meeting will generally begin by asking about the students areas of strength and the things they enjoy doing. This helps orient the meeting in a positive manner, but more importantly it develops a pool of strengths that can be used in the process of building interventions. The problem/s areas and any other weaknesses of concern are then considered. Finally, one of three outcomes may occur. First, the SST may determine that the problem/s have been addressed with existing interventions or may be addressed with informal interventions that don't require significant follow-up. Second, the SST may develop interventions and data collection to address the problem with a follow-up meeting scheduled to review the progress. Third, in rare cases a student may be in need of immediate assessment for potential special education services due to severe academic or behavioral needs that require the implementation of interventions concurrently with assessment (e.g. when a student has a significant social-emotional concern that a delay in assessment would place the student and/or others at-risk). It is important to note that typically, a student would go through the process of an SST intervention with data collection with a six to eight week follow-up meeting to review the intervention results before assessment for special education would begin. The reason for this is that the initial intervention is to determine that the student's difficulties cannot be met within the regular educational environment with reasonable accommodations/support. This later becomes important in determining eligibility for special education services. The rationale behind this is that special education services are reserved for persons with identified disabilities as defined in federal law and state educational code whose needs cannot be met with reasonable modifications and accommodations to the general education environment. The key concept is that special education is designed to ensure that students with disabilities are able to access the general curriculum. If a student can access the curriculum with interventions in the general education environment, they are determined not to need special education services. To the extent that students with disabilities are not able to access the curriculum, the school district offers what is termed a free and appropriate public education (FAPE).
Ultimately, the SST is a team designed to bring together the people who best know the student (e.g. the parent, the teacher, other school personnel, etc.) to engage in a collaborative process that develops interventions that will hopefully address the student's problem within the existing educational environment. The reason for this is that research supports the premise that interventions are most successful when provided in the natural environments in which they exist. This is because it eliminates a step of generalization from another environment to the natural environment.
