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This is a great question. Student Support Teams (SST) and Child Study Teams (CST) are commonly used in schools today. They both were developed from the problem-solving team (PST) framework in which educational professionals conduct in-depth problem analysis for a student’s difficulty and develop individualized interventions. However, very few SST/CSTs actually function as a PST. Most do not solve problems. Most SST/CSTs function more like a pre-referral team than a PST. Here are a few behaviors that indicate your team is a pre-referral team rather than a PST: if you require 30 minutes per student, but 25 of those minutes are spent discussing the problem and 5 are spent brainstorming solutions, if the referring teacher spends the entire time making his or her case that the student should be "tested," or if the primary question that the team answers is whether or not the student should be referred for a special education eligibility evaluation rather than how to help the student. If the SST/CST functions as a pre-referral team, then my experience suggests that you fold the team, wait a short period of time, and reconvene a PST with new forms and additional training. I have a chapter in Best Practices for School Psychology [(5th Edition.), Eds. Thomas, A. & Grimes, J.] that could be used for study groups on the issue. If the SST/CST does function as a PST, then by all means fold the paperwork etc. into the RTI model by convening about students for whom the Tier 2 intervention was not successful. Thus, PSTs should help develop the Tier 3 interventions and decisions about referring students to the PST should be made with Tier 2 progress monitoring data.

There is one more factor to consider. Some SST/CSTs are actually pre-referral teams by design. In other words, it could be that the designated function of the SST/CST is to determine if a student should be evaluated for special education eligibility. This team could also play a role in the RTI framework. Students for whom a Tier 3 intervention was not successful, or for whom the intervention was successful but too intense to be delivered without the support of special education, could be referred by the grade-level team to the SST/CST and that group could decide if and what additional data are needed. In this case, then integrating the SST/CST model and paperwork would be fairly straightforward, except you likely would have to add an "If" option to the types of data needed. However, a PST is still needed within Tier 3 to develop interventions and the progress monitoring plan.