The SESC Regional Reach
September 2026
Across our region, educators are doing work worth sharing. The SESC Regional Reach brings those stories, strategies, and resources together in one convenient place.
Published on the 15th of each month, every issue includes:
- Regional Spotlight: Celebrating people, programs, and promising practices
- The Teacher Toolbox: Classroom-ready strategies, resources, and time-savers
- Behavior Bits: Practical support for behavior, school climate, and MTSS-B
- The SERTAC Buzz: Special education guidance, resources, and opportunities
- The Leadership Lens: Tools and insights for school and district leaders
- Counselor Connection: Resources for supporting students, families, attendance, and transitions
Our goal is simple: to make every issue useful, easy to read, and worth opening. Take a look around. You may find a strategy to try, a resource to share, or a familiar face doing something remarkable. Learn more about SESC here.
Educators from Manchester Elementary observe classroom routines and evidence-based practices in action at Paint Lick Elementary.
SESC is proud to help connect educators across district lines, creating opportunities to learn from one another and bring practical ideas back to the students they serve.
By: Lennie Feltner, SESC Special Education Consultant
A simple way to choose supports that remove barriers while keeping the learning target in focus.
When a student is struggling, one of our first instincts is often to give more time. Sometimes extended time is exactly the right support. But if the real barrier is that a student cannot decode the text, does not understand the vocabulary, loses track of the steps in a math problem, or does not know how to begin a writing task, more time may simply give the student more time to struggle.
A better question: What is getting in the student's way?
Once we identify the barrier, we can choose a support that actually addresses it. This way of thinking is useful for all students, not just students with IEPs. General education teachers, special education teachers, interventionists, and co-teaching teams can use the same process across content areas.
Start With the Learning Target
Before adding a support, ask: What do I actually want the student to know or be able to do? Then identify what is preventing the student from showing that learning.
For example, if the learning target is to identify the main idea of a science article, decoding difficulty may keep a student from showing what they understand about the content. Text-to-speech could remove the reading barrier without changing the science learning target.
In math, the same idea applies. If the goal is to solve a multi-step equation, a student who understands the mathematics but loses track of the steps may benefit from a visual checklist or worked example. But if the student does not understand the operations, a checklist alone will not solve the problem. That student needs explicit instruction and practice in the missing skill.
By Dr. Holly Hibbard, SESC Special Education Consultant
I often think about schools through a simple parallel: principals lead, support, and coach adult behavior so that teachers are equipped to lead, support, and coach student behavior.
In a perfect world, that flow works beautifully.
School leaders create clear systems, establish expectations, provide training and feedback, examine data, and support teachers when things get difficult. Teachers, in turn, create clear classroom systems, establish expectations, teach and reteach behavior, provide feedback, examine student needs, and support students when things get difficult.
Notice the similarity?
We would never expect a student to automatically know every behavioral expectation simply because we told them once. We teach it. We model it. We practice it. We provide feedback. We reteach when necessary. Yet sometimes, at the adult level, we introduce an initiative, provide a training, send an email, or hand out a new resource and assume implementation will follow.
Leadership has to be more than introducing the work. Leadership has to create the conditions for adults to do the work well.
Research supports the importance of this role. Liebowitz and Porter (2019) conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 51 studies examining principal behaviors and found relationships between principal leadership and student achievement, teacher well-being, teacher instructional practices, and school organizational health. Their findings are an important reminder that principals influence students largely through the environments and conditions they create for the adults who serve them.
That is why I believe one of the most important questions a school leader can ask is not simply, “What are our teachers doing?” but, “What have we done to equip our teachers to do this well?”
If we want teachers to respond effectively when students struggle behaviorally, have we taught them what escalation looks like? If we expect strong Tier 1 classroom management, have we clearly defined what that looks like? If we want teachers to use restorative practices, PBIS, trauma-informed practices, de-escalation, high-quality instruction, or evidence-based interventions, have we given them the training, coaching, time, feedback, and systems necessary to actually implement those practices?
When those systems are absent, schools can easily slip into what I call crisis mindset.
Crisis mindset sounds like, “We have to do something!” A new problem emerges, so we add a program. Data decline, so we add an initiative. Behavior increases, so we add another intervention. Staff are overwhelmed, so ironically, we sometimes add something else for them to do.
Before long, we have a lot of good things happening, but we may not have a good system.
In a strong system, we don't wait until something is on fire to decide what we believe. We already know what we are about. We have a shared vision. We know what we expect for students and adults. We know what our Tier 1 system looks like, what additional supports exist at Tiers 2 and 3, how decisions are made, how implementation is measured, and how we know whether what we are doing is actually producing the outcomes we want.
One of my favorite tools for beginning this conversation is surprisingly simple: an initiative inventory.
Put everything on the table.
What are we about as a school? What is our vision for discipline? What do we believe about behavior, instruction, intervention, and support? What initiatives, programs, curricula, interventions, assessments, teams, and practices are currently operating within our MTSS? Where does each fit across academic, behavioral, and social-emotional domains? What are we using at Tier 1? Tier 2? Tier 3? Who owns each piece? What problem was it intended to solve? How are we measuring implementation fidelity? And perhaps most importantly, what outcomes tell us whether it is working?
That last question matters.
Schools should not continue doing something simply because “we've always done it,” because we paid for it, because someone likes it, or because it sounded like a great idea three years ago. If we cannot identify the intended outcome, determine whether the practice is being implemented as designed, and examine whether it is producing results, then we have an important leadership conversation to have.
Fidelity is particularly important because outcomes alone do not tell the whole story. If something is not producing the results we expected, we need to know whether the practice itself is ineffective for our need or whether we simply have not implemented it as intended. Research on school improvement has emphasized implementation integrity and fidelity as central considerations when evaluating school-based reform efforts.
This is where leadership moves us away from initiative overload and toward coherence.
Imagine a school where the principal can clearly articulate, “This is what we believe. This is what we do. This is why we do it. This is how we support our teachers in doing it. This is how we measure whether we are actually doing it. And this is how we know whether it is working.”
Now imagine the teacher in that same system being able to say something very similar to a student: “This is what we expect. I have taught you how to do it. I am going to help you be successful. I will give you feedback along the way, and when something isn't working, we are going to figure out what needs to change.”
That is the connection.
Principals don't directly manage every student behavior in a building—and they shouldn't have to. Their greatest leverage may be in building the capacity of the adults who interact with those students every day. A large meta-analysis of school leadership research similarly found that leadership practices related to instructional management and developing teacher capacity were associated with student outcomes.
The goal is not a school without problems. That perfect world doesn't exist. Students will struggle. Teachers will struggle. Systems will need adjustment. Initiatives will sometimes need to be changed—or stopped altogether.
The goal is to build a system strong enough that every struggle does not become a crisis.
So, here's my Leadership Lens challenge: before asking, “What else do we need to add?” start by asking, “What are we already doing, why are we doing it, are we doing it well, and is it working?”
Sometimes the next best initiative isn't another initiative at all.
Sometimes it is getting really good at what we have already decided matters.
References
Liebowitz, D. D., & Porter, L. (2019). The effect of principal behaviors on student, teacher, and school outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 89(5), 785–827. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654319866133
Ma, X., et al. (2023). Measuring integrity and fidelity of program implementation: Validating an instrument designed for school renewal. Evaluation and Program Planning, 100, 102341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2023.102341
As if practical resources, regional success stories, and ideas you can actually use were not enough, we’re adding prizes to the mix.
Each month, readers of the SESC Regional Reach will have the opportunity to enter our prize drawing. Simply read, explore, and complete the short form below to add your name to the virtual hat.
Complete the form below to enter this month’s prize drawing. Winners will be notified by email by October 14th. Good luck!