District Protocol for Obtaining District Information

Appendix 8. District Protocol for Obtaining District Information about Adjacent Comparison Schools and Determining

Interest in Participation in the Study

Evaluation of RtI Practices in Elementary School Reading

District Name and Location:

Name/Title of Administrator:

Date:

As we indicated in our earlier letter to you, we’re beginning to recruit sites for a U.S. Department of Education study on the Impact of Response to Intervention Practices in Elementary School Reading. As we shared, we are identifying schools that have and have not implemented RtI practices for addressing the educational needs of students who struggle with learning how to read. We’d like to talk with you about your district and school’s RtI initiatives.

We’d like to ask you a couple of quick questions about __________ district, the status of the implementation of RtI in any schools in the district; and about the standardized reading assessments required by the district. Are you the right person to talk to? (If no, get the name of the person who is knowledgeable.) Do you have about 30 minutes to talk with us about RtI in the district?

Our questions include:

1. Does your district provide guidance or resources to support schools to implement RtI?

   1. If no, move to question 2.

2. If so, ask:

1. What kind of support does the district provide?

2. Was this kind of district support provided to all of the elementary schools in the district at the same time? If not, how did the district stagger its support to the elementary schools to implement RtI?

2. Are there elementary schools in the district that you consider to be as mature in their implementation of RtI reading practices?

   1. If no, move to question 3.

   2. If yes,

      1. How many years has the school implemented RtI?

      2. Does it have the following components in place:

• Universal screening (benchmarking) administered in reading at least two times a year;

• At least three levels (tiers) of instruction, comprising a system of increasingly intensive interventions;

• Monitoring the progress of students who do not meet benchmark;

• Procedures for presenting data on student reading performance, evaluating student's performance using these data, and making decisions based on these data about students' response to interventions, and

• Processes for determining eligibility of children for special education services that include data from the students’ responsiveness to the intervention(s).

3. Is it OK for us to call ______________ school(s) -- to learn more about their practices for assisting struggling readers? If yes, who would be the best person to talk to?

3. Across the district, what standardized reading tests are required to be administered to students in grades 1 through 5? Some of these tests may be required by the state or district. If you like, we can email this question to you in a spread sheet to more simply check off the boxes or you can tell me over the phone.

	Name of Standardized Test	Performance measured by test (e.g., oral reading fluency, letter naming fluency, reading comprehension)	State or District Required	Years that this standardized test has been administered and Year of 1st administration
1st grade
2nd grade
3rd grade
4th grade
5th grade

4. Do you think that your district would be interested in participating [as a comparison district] in this study sponsored by the US Department of Education? Would your district be able to give us student data if we are unable to get the student level data from the state. If yes, could we call you at a later date to discuss this possibility? If yes or conditional, who else should we talk to in the district for the next conversation?

Thank you very much for your time and assistance!

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