As Mr. Young explains the stages of the pre-referral process to Ms. Delatorre, he is careful to reemphasize that pre-referral is flexible enough to address concerns about student performance in any academic area, as well as those related to student behavior. He also illustrates with examples from pre-referral meetings held at Macy Middle School how the process works at its various stages.
Although schools might call their pre-referral teams by different names or outline somewhat different procedures for those teams to follow, the pre-referral process itself can typically be divided into six distinct stages:
Stage 1: Initial concern regarding a student’s progress
Stage 2: Information gathering
Stage 3: Information sharing and team discussion
Stage 4: Discussion of possible strategies
Stage 5: Implementation and monitoring of strategies
Stage 6: Evaluation and decision making
The six stages of the pre-referral process will be discussed individually on the subsequent pages of this module.
