Gary

By the end of the first month of the school year we were able to evaluate all of our students on the Gibson Test.  This gave us more substantial information on the strengths and weakness of our students than I have ever seen in my 35 years as an educator.  Every teacher had immediate access to this information.  It was immediately useful to our Special Services people, but also has become a HUGE advantage in the new RTI (Response To Intervention) program.

RTI is not a special Education program.  It is composed of three tiers that are stacked like a pyramid.  Every student is in tier one.  If he begins to demonstrate an education problem, the teacher is responsible for identifying it and doing what she can to remediate it.  She must document her efforts and report them to the RTI team.  If the problem is not solved in a reasonable length of time the team can move the student to tier two.  At that point the team will offer suggestions and further steps will be taken to help the student.  This is where the Gibson test and Brainskills becomes particularly valuable because it gives the teacher real help with only a minimal time commitment on her part.

With Brainskills help, it is entirely possible that most student academic problems can be fixed at this level.  If they aren’t, the student can be moved to tier three which is where Special Education takes over.  Before the student is admitted into the Special Services program (which we call Student Development Services) he must be evaluated by our SDS team and meetings are held with the parents to determine eligibility. We use the Woodcock Johnson III tests which take about a day to administer.  They provide results which are very similar to the Gibson Test and usually confirm in our minds the quality of the Gibson Test information.

I think you can see that the Gibson Test and Brainskills have become an important part of our program at RMCA. Please extend our thanks to all the members of your administration for the very significant help your program has become to our school.  We predict that many of our students will experience these benefits for a lifetime.

Wallace Anderson
School Physchologist