CARES Act Funding for Schools

by | COVID Pandemic, School Funding

CARES Act Funding for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief

Help your school apply for grant programs for SEL, classroom management and behavioral support. The following information can help teachers and other education officials to fund programming that will help with student needs, created by COVID19 pandemic school closures.  

The CARES Act includes:
Planning for and coordinating during long-term closures, including for how to provide meals to eligible students, how to provide technology for online learning to all students, how to provide guidance for carrying out requirements under IDA and how to ensure other educational services can continue to be provided consistent with all Federal, State and local requirements.

How Leaps Is Aligned:
Leaps provides significant data, tracking and reporting to help educators monitor and manage the specific needs of their students and faculty. Our comprehensive benchmarking and assessment tools give administrators a big-picture look at how things are going, across the district, in a school or in a specific classroom.

Simple reporting tools provide important data and reporting on how each student is doing with regard to distance learning, their sense of well-being and mental health and more. Leaps provides the tools needed to both coordinate and document student services, supports and interventions.

 

The CARES Act includes:
Activities to address the unique needs of low-income children or students, children with disabilities, English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, students experiencing homelessness, and foster care youth, including how outreach and service delivery will meet the needs of each population.

How Leaps Is Aligned:

Leaps allows educators to monitor and intervene on behalf of any student’s academics, behavior, attendance, SEL, and basic needs; including the unique needs of the students with disabilities, low-income families, minorities, those in foster care and more.

Leaps assessments and reporting tools provide critical insights for teachers and school administrators to recognize any lapse in serving these students. Leaps provides data in the aggregate so that an educator can look at measurable results, find success and fill gaps where they occur.

It is even possible to track student success along with data-points related to their participation in free lunch programs, language studies and other key data points required to address the needs of the whole student body, student by student.

 

The CARES Act includes:
Providing mental health services and supports.

How Leaps Is Aligned:

The Leaps program addresses mental health across the full spectrum of concerns from common sense social emotional learning to classroom management strategies and into behavior supports and documentation. Leaps includes helpful collaboration and documentation tools for school counselors and other mental health professionals to log student support notes, assign and manage interventions, and collaborate with support staff and administrators. 

 

The CARES Act includes:
Purchasing educational technology (including hardware, software, and connectivity) for students who are served by the local educational agency that aids in regular and substantive educational interaction between students and their classroom instructors, including low-income students and students with disabilities, which may include assistive technology or adaptive equipment.

How Leaps Is Aligned:

Leaps gives teachers day-to-day access to assess and manage behavior, attendance, social and emotional learning and benchmarking in a single system. We make it easy for teachers and counselors to assign and manage interventions across multiple tiers of support, so they can collaborate with support staff and school administrators.

Leaps makes it possible to manage everything in a single classroom, for the whole school and district-wide with easy to read reports that can be accessed easily for documentation. Our data-driven software solution puts these critical tools in the hands of every teacher as well as district leadership. Fidelity reporting, updates and measurable improvements in attendance, academics, behavior and school culture can be seen across the district.

 

The CARES Act includes:
Providing principals and others school leaders with the resources necessary to address the needs of their individual schools.

How Leaps Is Aligned:

Leaps helps principals and other school leaders manage multiple resources and programs in one place, in order to address the needs of their students. This includes data-driven tracking and reporting tools that provide deep insights into the strengths and deficits of each student as well in the aggregate, for a classroom, a school or for the whole district.

Leaps also provides training for all staff and makes it easy for staff to manage tracking and reports as needed.

 

How does Leaps fit into a busy school day?

by | Audio, Psychosocial Q&A

How does Leaps fit into an already busy school day?

by Jay Burcham, Author of Leaps | SEL Answers - Audio Series

TRANSCRIPT: There isn’t a busier person walking the face of the earth than a teacher. You have 25-30 kids in a class, you are supposed to teach these state and federal mandated learning criteria, you have students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, learning capacity, lots of things going on and teachers are just terribly busy and you have to understand that. The way that Leaps fits in is that you can’t pull behaviors from learning. Learning is self as a behavioral process. Learning is understanding something and applying it and to help kids learn you have to be able to teach them how to learn. So actually changing the learning environment gives the teacher the best chance of teaching the academics, which falls outside of the purview oftentimes.  Teachers are busy, yes no doubt about it, the question I would ask teachers is how much time do you spend investing and telling kids to sit down and be quiet and pay attention, all those reactionary things. If you could turn around and reimburse that proactively and from the proactive investment kids are sitting down more often and paying attention that’s the pay off. How do you do it? Leaps does it by integrating actual, real life scenarios into the teaching of these social and emotional skills. So it isn’t a divestment in the classroom, it’s an investment in the classroom. The in vivo, the role play, the scenarios, the discussions that are had are meant to me impactful as part of the classroom process. You can also have the lessons fully aligned with common core. So as a teacher is looking at that integration, they will see how a leaps lesson will align with a reading standard, a listening standard, communication standard. All those different standards and it is grade specific so as a teacher is putting a lesson together, it gives them a little more flexibility on how a leap lesson can integrate that social and emotional process into the academic lesson which is more apt to engage the kids. But an engagement from the standpoint of something that they are more likely to buy into. One last point on that, when kids begin to fail academically, and I don’t mean just failing grades, but when they begin to wane from an enthusiasm standpoint, and think about this, find a kindergarten teacher, any one of them, ask them if they’ve ever had a kid come in her classroom and say, at 15 years old I’m out of here. They don’t do that. Kids come in,  they’re excited, they’ve got school supplies and a new lunchbox in there, they like to practice homework before school, you know they’re excited about learning. We got a lot of kids and fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth on up that say I don’t care if I pass or fail. Not caring is than to care and continually fail so what you have to be able to do is help reengage kids, and it’s hard to engage kids at a point where failure has been consistent. It’s hard to see the immediacy of gratification from academics alone. Take a kid who is struggling in school and try to get them excited about algebra, it’s not easy, I’m not saying it’s not important but it’s not easy. But if you could help a kid learn social and emotional and cognitive type skills there is an immediacy of impact. It impacts their social standing, it impacts the way they feel about themselves, the way they make friends, their place in the group and kids come back for that and if you can integrate that into the academics you can actually begin teaching them social and emotional skills as the hook to bring in the academics then as the meat once they have become more socially acceptable because the classroom is a social construct.

PBIS and Leaps Overview

by | Behavior Content

Leaps complements PBIS within four key elements of the PBIS framework. It is a comprehensive, online program and resource for educators who are creating learning environments built upon resources that provide both evidence of benefit and content for delivery.

Leaps Complements PBIS Within These Four Vital Elements: 

  1. Data for Decision Making
    Leaps assessing processes, for individual students as well as small groups and classrooms, provides the information educators need to determine the level of behavioral service a student should receive and provides the actual fulfillment of service resource within the assigned level.
  2. Measurable Outcomes
    Leaps assessing processes are automated and collected electronically which provides the opportunity to reassess post-participation. Leaps provides the ability to compare the pre and post participation reports. This data driven reporting process quantifies levels of functioning within key behavioral realms and then compares functioning levels across time to denote actual progress.
  3. Evidence Based Content for Outcomes
    Leaps provides full lesson planning for all areas of assessed need. These lesson plans are the content fulfillment process that has been vetted and is fully evidence based to create positive and pro-social behavioral changes.
  4. Implementation Practices
    Leaps offers a comprehensive and proven implementation package that includes usage based training, administrative training and ongoing topical training for the expansion of behavioral services within general education. Trainings are supplemented by ongoing fidelity reporting based on use of, satisfaction with, and saturation levels of programming. This data reporting process is then combined with automated progress reporting to determine the areas where progress is being achieved and the resources that were used to attain the progress.

RTI Tier 1 initiatives

by | Behavior Content

Leaps is a comprehensive social and emotional interactive curriculum replete with multi-modal assessing instruments. Leaps “Classroom Challenges†is a perfect fit for the process of utilizing “prescriptive assessments to design instructionâ€. This feature allows classroom teachers to identify the area of topical focus based upon the preventative needs presented by the classroom.  

Using the Leaps “Classroom Challenges†tool, classroom educators simply choose the area of focused preventative training or need for their class and then answer simple behavioral observational questions. These focused areas cover a range of categorical needs from citizenship to respect to bullying and 6 other categorical values and character traits. Based upon the observations of the educator, Leaps will identify the most relevant lesson plans for that class as well as the necessary secondary support lessons.

Because the “Classroom Challenges†tool is designed to elicit an observational response from the educator, Leaps can identify the areas of need that are most relevant to the class – even from a preventative format. This greatly increases efficiency and effectiveness of the time allotted for Tier I Prevention. This process also affords teacher input which increases the likelihood of teacher buy-in and participation.

Finally, the “Classroom Challenges†report is printable. When printed the report serves as the benchmark reporting for Tier I because areas of primary and secondary need, from a preventative standpoint, are identified and then those areas of need are supported through lesson plan delivery for both primary and secondary levels. This process removes the guesswork, makes the process relevant to that specific class, affords the opportunity for a systemic, or school-wide focus on a given area while still focusing on the individual needs of that particular class, and helps brings the teachers input into the solution.

Sample: Student Skills Profile Assessment Report

by | About Our Tools, Uncategorized

Leaps assessments generate skill profile reports. These profiles score the student in 10 critical skills on a 5-point Likert scale. The report contains graphs, scatter plots and verbal interpretations for family communication all in this easy to read report. The report also recommends Leaps lessons that will have the greatest positive impact on the student.

 

Sample Skills Profile Report PDFDownload