Behavior Support in the IEP: Manifest Determination
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Understanding Manifest Determination
The numbers are grim. Students with disabilities are suspended about twice as often as their nondisabled peers– and for longer parts of time. They are more likely to be expelled and more likely to drop out of school. At my high school, almost all of the fights involve students with IEPs. There are a lot of reasons for this– including the rise in emotional and behavioral challenges in students and the rise in qualifying those students for special education services because of those challenges. None of those are things that we can control as special education teachers. What we can do, however, is understand the legal protections these students are given and use those to try to push for more and better services for our students.
Here are the basics. Before being suspended for 10 days or expelled, a student with disabilities has the right to a manifest determination. At that meeting, the team has to look at the student’s behaviors and figure out how and if those are related to their disability. If they are, the school is supposed to make changes and not just kick the kid out (drugs and weapons are excluded from this). That doesn’t fix the problem. If services don’t actually change, the student isn’t going to miraculously start doing better at school.
Suspensions, Expulsions, and IEPs
What the Law Says
You cannot endlessly suspend or arbitrarily expel a student with an IEP.
Here is the relevant segment of the federal law— which applies to every single special education program in the United States. The highlights are:
- Students with disabilities can only be suspended for a maximum of ten days during an entire school year.
- If schools want to suspend a student for more than ten days (total, not in a row) or to expel a student, they have to hold a manifest determination. During they meeting they have to determine whether the behavior is the result of the student’s disability (specifically: “are caused by, or had a direct and substantial relationship to, the child’s disability”) or if the behaviors reflected a failure to implement the IEP Weapons, drugs, and injuries excepted.
- If it is either, the onus is on the school. They can’t just expel or suspend the student for ever– they can discuss as a team how to better support a student (which might include a new placement) but not just get rid of them.
- Note that their are weapons, injury, and drugs exceptions to this.
- The clock resets the next school year. Until then, the team is supposed to meet for each new suspension.
What Happens in Practice
Manifest determination meetings are often rote. If a high school student got into a fight, unless their disability is really specifically about emotional responses, the team will decide that the behavior is not a manifestation of the disability. Then the school will suspend the student for however long. When the student comes back, if the behavior repeats, there will just be a new meeting with the same findings. The paperwork will be filed and the cycle will continue until the clock resets at the next school year.
Obviously, this is sub-optimal. First, a student with learning challenges often misreads social cues so it is pretty hard to say that the disability is not related to the behaviors. Second, the point of the law is to ensure that students get more support– not to ensure that papers are filed.
If you know a manifest determination is coming up, think about what you want– what do you think the student should be getting? What else do they need? Then ask. If you don’t, then the meetings will stay meaningless check box activities.
What Should Happen
The reason why the manifest determination provision is written into law is because law makers have seen the statistics and know how bad discipline outcomes are for students with disabilities. The provision is supposed to ensure that students get the support they need and to protect them.
Here are some key things that SHOULD happen in these meetings:
- Does the student have a behavior support plan? If not, one needs to be created immediately. If the student does, have they had a functional behavioral assessment done to create a more defined behavior plan (BSP or BIP)? If not, then that needs to be done right away.
- Does the behavior reflect a difficulty reading the situation? If so, what types of social supports are in place? For example, is the student in a social skills group? Was this considered in the student’s comprehensive evaluation?
- Does the behavior reflect a difficulty with processing emotions? If so, what types of socio-emotional supports are in place? For example, was the student assessed in this area? Is counseling or psychological services on the IEP? Does the school partner with therapy providers? If so, what is the referral process from the school?
- Does the behavior reflect a difficulty with self-regulation? If so, has an occupational therapist screened the student? Was this included in the student’s comprehensive evaluation?
There needs to be a comprehensive review of the student’s needs and what went wrong. It is not appropriate to just say that the disability is unrelated. The point of these is to problem solve so that the behavior does not repeat.
Push back. ADD is related to poor impulse control. Lower IQ is often linked to rigidity and difficulty reading situations. Disabilities don’t just mean that students have trouble reading or doing math– they often manifest in multiple areas of students’ lives.
