If you are a childcare center, daycare, or preschool without an internal behavior coach, and a student in your program is showing frequent and intense challenging behaviors (who is not receiving Special Education services), you may need to take the following steps:

1. First talk with the student’s family about the behavior you are observing throughout the day. Talk to parent(s)/guardian(s) about tracking the behaviors to help inform your school based team. Using this information can help your team make decisions on which strategies to use to support their child.
2. Begin a tracking log of behaviors that are happening in the classroom, paying special attention to what the trigger is (antecedent), what the behavior looks like, and what happens right after the interfering behavior (consequence).
3. After gathering two consecutive weeks of data, look at the data and determine some strategies that might be useful in the classroom. Trial the strategies for a few weeks, implementing the strategies consistently, to determine if they are effective.
4. After a few weeks have passed, look at the data and compare it to the data the center initially took for two weeks. Has anything improved or changed? Have the strategies been implemented consistently across the time you took data? Do the strategies need to be changed?
5. If staff continue to write up daily incident reports and are regularly reaching out to parent(s)/guardian(s) via email or phone call, are having the student picked up early, and the school team has notified parent(s)/guardian(s) that suspension and/or expulsion is a possibility, then it is time to make a referral.

The Referral Process:

If a center/preschool is thinking of making a referral for a student, the student must be in their current environment for a minimum of 30 days to allow the student to acclimate to their current setting. The student that is being referred cannot be receiving Infant Early Childhood Mental Health (IECMH) services, nor can they be a Special Education student that currently has an IFSP or IEP in place.

The steps for making a referral are as follows:

• The center/preschool can download the referral form from the Rapid Response web page (bottom left)
• The center/preschool should fill in all fields on the referral form
• The center/preschool should have parent(s)/guardian(s) sign and date the form
• The center/preschool should have the director sign and date the form
• The center/preschool should include 15 days (minimum) of data sheets and/or incident reports to support the referral
• The center/preschool should provide any letters regarding suspension/expulsion or meeting notes with parent(s)/guardian(s)
• The center/preschool should provide a copy of the center’s suspension/expulsion policy
• The center/preschool should send an email to RRT@mciu.org with all of the above documentation and copy the parent(s)/guardian(s) on the email.