Significant Identifiable Emotional Disability (SIED)
Definition: A child with a significant identifiable emotional disability shall have emotional or social functioning, which prevents the child from receiving reasonable benefit from general education.
Criteria: The student meets one or more of the following:
- academic functioning (an inability to receive reasonable educational benefit from general education which is not primarily the result of intellectual, sensory or other health factors, but due to the identified emotional condition;
- social/emotional functioning (an inability to build or maintain interpersonal relationships which significantly interferes with the child's social development. Social development involves those adaptive behaviors and social skills which enable a child to meet environmental demands and assume responsibility for his/her own and others' welfare.
All four of the following qualifiers shall be documented for either of the above criteria demonstrated:
- A variety of instructional and/or behavioral interventions were implemented within general education and child remains unable to receive reasonable educational benefit from general education or his/her presence continues to be detrimental to the education of others.
- Indicators of social/emotional dysfunction exist to a marked degree; that is, at a rate and intensity above the child's peers and outside of his/her ethnic and cultural norms and outside the range of normal development expectations.
- Indicators of social/emotional dysfunction are pervasive, and are observable in at least two different settings within the child's environment, one of which shall be school.
- Indicators of social/emotional dysfunction have exited over a period of time are not isolated incidents or transient, situational responses to stressors in the child's environment.
Guidebook for Determining the Eligibility of Students with SIED
The identification of students with emotional disabilities is a complicated journey with relatively few clear-cut paths. And even if students with emotional disabilities are identified, the task of programming appropriately for these students is perhaps one of the steepest mountains yet to climb. The purpose of this guidebook is to help parents, teachers, administrators and mental health professionals successfully navigate this journey.
For more information, please contact:
Barb Bieber
Phone: 303-866-6933