UC Santa Barbara

Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities (EBDs) are often pushed out of the least restrictive schooling environment due to schools’ inability to meet their unique learning needs (OSEP, 2020). School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS) is a research-based framework for helping school teams establish social and behavioral supports. Robert Horner and George Sugai have developed several very large-scale grants which helped to establish implementation teams at the state level. Their procedures for helping schools implement these supports have resulted in one of the largest adoptions of a model in the history of US schooling. While there have been several studies analyzing the steps taken to support students at Tier One and Tier Two of the SW-PBIS framework, very little to no research exists for developing supports for Tier Three students. The present case study analyzes a school team’s efforts to implement an intervention package including a Check-In-Check-Out (CICO) behavior intervention combined with a Social Thinking social skills groups for students with EBDs in a unique full-inclusion public school context. The researcher, a practicing education specialist for students with mild to high support needs, used qualitative methods to analyze the implementation process for building Tier Three supports for students with EBDs over a four-year implementation period.