Guided by outside auditors who studied the district's special ed services and outlined the strengths and weaknesses, district officials plan to refine the way they help students who are at risk of failing at school.

Under the system now in place, "in our district, depending on what school you're at ... you'll have a very different experience," said Charlie Silva, special education coordinator for the Boise School District. "It needs to be streamlined, and that is what we're doing."

The special education audit was part of the district's larger effort to update its strategic plan, something it last did in 2005. A company called Futures HealthCore studied the services that the district provides to special ed students, about 11 percent of the district's 25,000 enrollment.

Auditors visited 30 Boise schools in the 2008-09 academic year and found that many used different forms, terminology, and programs to identify students who needed extra services. Services differed from one place to another, yielding uneven benefits and making it more difficult to assess student progress.

Evaluations are going on around the country, Silva said. Standardization was required as part of the reauthorization of Special Ed legislation in Congress that went into effect in 2006.

"Districts and states are scrambling" to meet the requirements, said Silva, who sent a group of principals and special educators to Oregon last fall to see a district that already had a strong system in place. "This is not Idaho-specific; it's nationwide. There are just some states that are a little farther along than others."

A report issued this spring was generally positive, stating that the district is fulfilling its legal obligations and that staff report high satisfaction with their jobs and their peers. And auditors said parents were generally happy with the quality of the services.

But the auditors said the district needs to do more to standardize how students are identified as needing extra help. That's something the district knew about and has been working to fix for two years, Silva said.

One change coming by the time school starts Aug. 31 is a new special ed reading curriculum. Silva plans to have her staff choose a reading curriculum that can be used by in all of the district's schools.

"We'd like to choose some curricula that are research-based, valid, reliable programs," Silva said. "Under this system, it will be more seamless."

Another change: Parents, teachers and principals will work together to assess which students need extra help. In the past, students at some schools have been given a battery of tests simply on one teacher's recommendation, Silva said. The auditors quoted a parent as saying the special ed system "is driven by the 'good will of individuals' and not a systematic response to the needs of our students."

That might have lead to students being identified for special education when extra help during class time was all they needed, Silva said.

Under the new system, parents, teachers, counselors, and others will use data to assess whether intervention such as tutoring can help the student succeed before the student is identified as having a learning disability.

"This is a more systematic approach. It's driven by clearly specifying interventions, and most importantly it is looking at the data," she said.

The number of children identified with a learning disability will likely drop as the identification process is improved, Silva said.

"It's not a matter of saying your child is no longer going to get speech therapy or occupational therapy; that has not changed," Silva said. "All that has changed is the process to get to that point, the intervention piece. We are focusing on intervening sooner, quicker, and more intensely" before undertaking a comprehensive evaluation that might not be necessary, she said.

The district is not adding or removing any special ed programs in the coming academic year, and will not change the number of special ed staff, Silva said.