COVID-19 Compensatory Services [CCS]
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Beginning March 17, 2020, pursuant to an order from the Governor, public schools (including educational collaboratives) and most private special education schools in Massachusetts suspended in-person instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of the 2019-20 school year. Following extensions of the Governor’s school closure order, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) issued guidance requiring districts and schools to provide students with access to remote learning opportunities and recommended teaching the content standards most critical for student success at the next grade level. On March 21, 2020, the United States Department of Education (USED) issued guidance clarifying that schools and districts were required to continue to provide free appropriate public education (FAPE) to students with disabilities during the period of suspension of in-person instruction. USED acknowledged that FAPE would necessarily look different during the national emergency because of the need to protect the health and safety of students and their educators.
With the unexpected suspension of in-person education due to the pandemic, schools and districts were not necessarily able to provide all special education instruction and services in the manner they were typically provided or described in students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). Also, despite efforts by schools and districts to create and implement remote learning plans for students with disabilities, some students may not have been able to access special education and related services necessary to make effective progress on IEP goals. Where, due to the global pandemic and resulting closures of schools, there has been an inevitable delay in or disruption to providing services, the U.S. Department of Education has stated that IEP teams must make an individualized determination about whether and to what extent compensatory services may be needed.
What are COVID-19 Compensatory Services (CCS)?
- CCS are services that your special education student may be entitled to if they experienced learning loss or lack of progress towards their IEP goals due to the COVID school closure from March 17 - June 22, 2021. CCS can also include learning loss from this school year due to remote learning.
- These services could be any special education service that would remediate learning loss relative to the students’ IEP goals, whether speech therapy services, rules-based reading, math support, occupational therapy services, etc.
How do I know if my child is eligible for CCS?
- Eligibility and level of service determinations will be made based on the data you gather as the parent and the data collected at the school.
- If you believe that your child did not make progress towards their IEP goals because they could not access remote learning fully or access it at all, you are entitled to a conversation with school staff about what services would remediate that learning loss.
- Parent/guardian input is an essential component in determining students' need for CCS.
Will these services replace all the time my child missed?
- The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education did not design CCS to be a 1:1 replacement for services and time missed.
- For example, suppose a student missed a certain number of related service sessions. In that case, the CCS would not be the number of missed sessions but rather how many sessions are needed to address regression or learning loss.
- The question is not, ‘How many sessions did my student miss?’, but rather, ‘What are the services needed to get my student back to where they would have been relative to their IEP goals if not for the pandemic?’
What if I want in-person CCS?
- Fill out the form in your language.
- Due to the pandemic, BPS can not guarantee when in-person CCS will be offered.
- It is likely that in-person services will be possible during the summer months, assuming the virus numbers do not escalate.
- The afterschool time and the February and April vacation times will be delivered using a remote platform.
- One can opt-out of remote CCS and wait for in-person services. Let your school-based COSE know during your child’s CCS meeting.
- The agreement is binding, and we will resume in-person as soon as we can.