The Southern York County School District board voted May 15 to renew use of the Emergent Tree behavior-tracking tool to support progress monitoring for students with behavioral goals in individualized education programs (IEPs). The item had been pulled from the consent agenda for discussion by board members.

Administrators said the district uses Emergent Tree to document and monitor behavior goals for tier 2 and tier 3 students, and that quarterly reports produced by the system support progress monitoring and parent communication. "This is a way for our teachers then to track whatever those challenging behaviors are, and then they're able to then utilize that data when we have progress monitoring," said Doctor Refford, describing how teachers can quantify time-on-task and prompting levels.

Board members asked how the system had been used, who would access data, whether it had been used last year and whether the district "got our bang for our buck." Administrators said special-education teachers, counselors and school psychologists enter data; aggregated reports are available to authorized staff. On security, the vendor provided assurances about encryption and restricted access: staff said access is limited to authorized personnel and that the vendor stated it would respond to legal requests only under subpoena.

The board approved the agreement after administrators explained Emergent Tree would not be used for hiring or employee evaluation and that district IT had reviewed the vendor's privacy and security policies.

Ending: District staff said they would continue to monitor usage, provide training for teachers who use the platform, and report results to families during quarterly progress monitoring meetings.