After years of success with myIGDIs, county expands to social emotional intervention

To ensure young children are socially and emotionally prepared for school, the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Head Start-State Preschool Division is implementing an innovative tiered model of intervention across all 16 of its delegate agencies.

“This new social-emotional model of intervention will help us prepare more than 13,000 at-risk preschool children in Los Angeles for kindergarten,” said Rebecca Lundeen, a school psychologist consultant for LACOE. “Over the past few years, we have seen incredible results with our Response-to-Intervention early literacy project. While we’re taking a different focus this year, I’m confident this social- emotional program will be just as successful.”

Since 2010, LACOE has used myIGDIs, a set of research-based assessment measures for preschool-aged children, as both a screener and progress-monitoring tool to identify 4-year-olds who would benefit from additional early literacy support, particularly in the areas of oral language and phonological awareness.

Through the county’s experimental pilot of a preschool Response-to-Intervention framework, they have been able to monitor the effectiveness of their early literacy intervention program and refine their model for Head Start programs moving forward. In 2016, LACOE plans to use the new edition of myIGDIs to begin monitoring the refined early literacy and early numeracy components of their RtI program.

“It’s so encouraging to all of us at Early Learning Labs to see prominent school systems like LACOE using myIGDIs successfully,” said Steve Johnson, the president of Early Learning Labs. “We look forward to seeing the results from their innovative social emotional intervention program, and we hope to continue partnering with districts to achieve similar results with early literacy.”