This is what is happening with our district in terms of Rti. They have an outside consulting group that they are paying thousands of dollars to (the District Management Council which works nationwide and is in most states) telling them to shift money from special education to RtI. If they had actually set up a DECENT RtI system this wouldn't be so horrible but our district does not have a referral process, they don't have a system of tiered interventions other than what they are getting free like free tutors from the State, Title 1, etc. And basically any services they offer are focused on reading interventions. If your problem is something completely different like math or writing or behavior, or organizational skills, then kids in our district can forget about getting hep. So one of my kids was delayed an eval while they pursued having him use a pencil grip in kindergarten. I kid you not. If I complained about how I had concerns I would either be blown off or the teacher would ask the OT what to do about my son, who would come in, observe him for a few minutes and then give him something like a pencil grip and declare the situation resolved. They completely disregarded outside evaluations that we had. The school didn't actually do anything until I called Compliance with the State and the school knew the State was getting involved and I was on the verge of filing a formal complaint.
I told the special ed director that my daughter also needed to be evaluated once she started in the gifted program at a different school, and that if they stonewalled me the way they did with my son, it wasn't going to be pretty. That's exactly what ended up happening. With her, I was worried about her written expression, in that she was in 4th grade and couldn't do any sort of story or journal entry or assignment of any kind and write any more than 2-3 sentences. I brought my concerns to the school, stated the need for an eval, and was told "we can't evaluate unless we do several interventions first." I then proceeded to send them the info about RtI and how they can't use interventions to delay an eval, esp. if the parent makes a request. They had no plan about WHAT interventions and there was no discussion or meeting. I asked specifically what interventions, and they had no idea because they don't actually have any sort of RtI system for written expression, yet they are denying kids evals. I believe they would have let months or years go by claiming they are doing interventions, yet actually not doing anything. When they DID finally evaluate her they found exactly what I was telling them. That she would not write more than a couple sentences. But they denied services because she did not have failing grades and her math and reading standardized test scores were so good (yeah, puzzle that one out). We were told it would be useless to write an IEP and she would be pulled out with 5 other kids so what would be the point. We ultimately ended up taking her out, it was such a bad situation and we would have obviously been spinning our wheels indefinitely trying to get services that didn't actually exist and that the school didn't know how to do anyway. Basically what is happening is that districts are using a fake RtI system in order to get out of following the Child Find mandate.
