WESTFIELD — At their Dec. 13 meeting, Westfield Academy and Central School Board members received updates from staff members regarding specialized services and intervention for students and the school nursing program.

Dr. Mary Rockey, elementary principal, outlined the Response to Intervention process that is designed to address areas where students struggle and, hopefully, prevent the need for additional services.

“The entire elementary school is an academic intervention school,” Rockey said. “Every child receives academic intervention every day in math and ELA.”

Rockey identified the middle school as a targeted school for academic intervention, in which students with particular difficulties receive intervention in needed areas.

If the academic intervention does not help and the child still struggles, a teacher or parent or staff member can refer the student to the Child Study Team, Rockey said. The CST is a group of people who conduct a meeting, with the teacher present, to identify the issue.

“We come up with strategies to try for six weeks,” Rockey said. “The teacher comes back and reports on the progress.”

When the results are complete, the team and the parents meet to discuss where to go from there, Rockey said. If the strategies were not successful, the child may be referred to the Commitee on Special Education. Rockey also noted that a parent can circumvent the CST process if they wish, and request that their child go directly to the Committee on Special Education.

In the CSE process, a host of assessments are done to answer the question, “What is going on with this particular person?” Rockey said.

If the student has two standard deviations below the mean or one standard deviation in two or more areas below the mean, they are eligible to receive an Individualized Education Plan, she said.

“The Committee on Special Education is authorized to identify students in need of services by determining eligibility and developing an IEP,” she said. “Since we do quarterly evaluations, the CSE office conducts about 400 meetings a year. We are back on track with screenings and everything is moving along the way it should.”

In the second presentation, school nurses Carolann Landon and Katelyn Frye described the department’s struggles in “navigating the pandemic from a nursing perspective.”

“We hit the ground running because of COVID,” Landon said. “We had a lot of help from the administration.”

Landon said a school nursing department is required to do an immunization survey or a BMI survey every year.

“Last year, we did both,” she said. “Also, everyone who plays a sport must have an impact study.”

The nursing department also must identify every student who has allergies, Landon said. Students with allergies have to have a note posted outside the classroom door and frequently must have Epi pens, she added.

The department has also identified 12 students with diabetes. Nine of these have Type I diabetes, and four of them receive daily insulin injections, Landon said.

The district also must attend to a few students with seizure disorders, cardiac issues, a bleeding disorder and one pupil who is on a feeding tube and a catheter.

Frye then spoke of the additional duties that COVID has imposed on the nursing department.

“Since COVID, it’s been an in depth process of looking at each individual student,” she said. “It’s really a whole process; there are a lot of phone calls from parents and teachers.”