School professionals may provide behavioral support for students using a tiered framework of intervention. Students who display problem behaviors and sustained resistance to interventions within these tiers may require special education services under the category of emotional and behavioral disorders. By the time students receive special education services, they will have experienced changes in intervention intensity, such as increased behavioral reinforcement or modification of functional assessment-informed individualized behavior plans. Yet, simply intensifying interventions quantitatively (more frequent reinforcement or progress monitoring) may not increase sufficiently students' abilities to function successfully in school, because their needs may require behavioral and social-emotional skills instruction. Evidence highlights the importance of skill-based instruction that is sequenced, active, focused, and explicit. Therefore, after discussing current educational practices, we describe an intensive intervention that is responsive to student behavioral excesses and deficits through explicit skill instruction delivered through special education services, and consider research and practice implications.