Tier Change Profiles

Abstract

Poverty negatively impacts health, emotional wellbeing, and educational outcomes for children and creates an opportunity gap between children living in poverty and their wealthier peers (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2016). To close the opportunity gap, schools are encouraged to adopt a systemic approach that addresses both academic and non-academic barriers to learning (Adelman 2018). Integrated Student Support (ISS) models have emerged as one of the most effective systemic school-based interventions (Moore et al., 2018). ISS interventions use various strategies to address the continuum of student needs. Tiered intervention frameworks are one strategy geared towards categorizing risk levels and services by their respective levels of intensity. Tiered interventions commonly focus on academic and social-emotional domains. However, their social-emotional focus is often limited to behavior and their categorization of students is deficit-focused (Freeman et al., 2017). City Connects, one ISS intervention implemented in high-poverty urban districts, uses a tiered intervention framework that encompasses the whole child and incorporates strengths as well as risks. City Connects assigns a tier to strength/risk levels evidenced by students at the beginning of each school year. While City Connects has demonstrated robust positive effects on student outcomes, little is known about annual tier level. In the current study, repeated measures latent class analysis (RMLCA) identified patterns of tier change over five years during which students attended City Connects elementary schools in one district. Multinomial regression and chi-square analyses investigated the relationship of social-emotional strengths, needs, and services to the Tier Change Profiles. Overall, more than half of students changed tier between time points. The most commonly exhibited tier change was increasing/decreasing tier by one. RMLCA findings indicated that students facing lower risk at baseline, exhibited low risk over time, while students facing the highest risk exhibited the greatest volatility in risk over time. Students who had more social-emotional strengths than needs were more likely to exhibit Tier Change Profiles of low risk over time but having more social-emotional needs than strengths was not predictive of Tier Change Profile. Among other findings, outcomes suggest that acknowledging and bolstering strengths play a significantly positive role in developmental trajectories.