Early enough to change the year.
The ratio moves while there is still a year left to act on it. Overdue work escalates on its own, without anyone remembering to chase it. Some of those dates are law and some are a district’s own target, and knowing which is which is what a defended file rests on.
You see the ratio move in November
Disproportionality usually arrives as a report in the summer, about referrals made a year earlier, when the only thing left to do is explain it. Here a subgroup ratio climbing in one building shows up while the referrals are still being made — early enough to go and ask that grade team what is happening, rather than explaining it in July.
This is district practice: it borrows the risk-ratio method from IDEA 34 CFR §300.646 and applies it to MTSS tier assignment, which that section does not govern — §300.646 covers special-education identification, placement and disciplinary removal. Below the group floor the ratio is withheld rather than estimated.
The screen that shows it in November
Tier placement by group, with risk ratios recomputed every time the screen is drawn. Multilingual learners at 23% of the population are carrying a 1.86 risk ratio into Tier 2 and 2.05 into Tier 3. This is the number that usually arrives in a summer report about last year.
TIER ANALYTICS · DISPROPORTIONALITY
| Group | Total | % | T2 | T3 | RR (T2) | RR (T3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ML students | 96 | 23% | 21 | 8 | 1.86 | 2.05 |
| Non-ML students | 322 | 77% | 24 | 8 | 0.74 | 0.62 |
| Students with disabilities | 4 | 1% | 1 | 2 | group n<5 | group n<5 |
reconstruction Rebuilt from the real screen for this page. The labels, thresholds and rules are the product’s own; the group sizes, the percentages and the risk ratios are illustrative.
The default is the compliant one
An action that goes overdue escalates itself. Nobody schedules that and nobody has to remember it — the sweep runs on its own every fifteen minutes while the app is open, from the moment somebody signs in, and once more the instant they do.
Standing it down is a deliberate act. A coordinator exempts one specific action, for a reason, and the exemption stays attached to that action rather than to the district.
That is a decision about which way the default points. The software escalates unless somebody says otherwise, and the somebody has to be named.
Which of these dates the state actually fixes
Most of the deadlines on that list are fixed by statute, and each one carries the rule that fixes it. A handful have no day count in law — no statute names a number, so whatever number sits there is a choice somebody in the district made.
That distinction is the one a district needs when it has to defend a file. Missing a statutory deadline and missing an internal target are different conversations, and a team that cannot tell them apart will treat the second like the first — or, more often, the first like the second.
All of it, on one desk
A director carries 5 programs running at once, 21 clocks watched across them — 16 fixed by statute and the rest set by the district — and 3 levels of government setting those clocks, whose rules do not agree with each other. The point of one record is that you can answer for all of it without asking five people first. Each document type in it carries its own role list and its own retention period.