Tag: IEP

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The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation

Image credit: Justin Lincoln

Trying to piece together the actual special education process from the implementing federal regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a lot like trying to create origami from paper shredder cuttings. However, it’s been done and, when laid out in proper order, the special education process totally makes sense.

When followed as intended, the special education regulations are a marriage of law and science. It is further assumed that procedural compliance with the regulations is likely to result in the provision of the Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) promised to each special education student by the IDEA. The specific language comes from what is known in special education circles as “The Rowley Decision,” which specifically states, “the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP. “

In order to understand why the regulations require the things in special education they do, it helps to first understand the history of the language in the regulations. Prior to Congress enacting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) in 1975, which ultimately became the IDEA during a later reauthorization, there were no laws that specifically promised any kind of education to children with special needs.

Prior to the EAHCA, children with disabilities were routinely denied enrollment into the public schools. In the beginning, it was an accomplishment just to get a public school to open its doors to a child with special needs, and there was nothing that made it mandatory to educate the child according to any particular standards once the doors had been opened.

Then, in 1971, disability advocates took the matter of the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Citizens (PARC) vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the U.S. District Court. The settlement and resulting consent decree produced much of the language that is now found in the implementing regulations of the IDEA, particularly with respect to FAPE and individualized educational program development.

In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a class of individuals who all had intellectual disabilities (IDs), which at the time were described as “mental retardation,” were being denied access to public school on the basis of their diagnosed “mental retardation.” They were either languishing without any education or receiving privately funded education at their parents’ personal expense. PARC filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of itself and the child members of the class, sued for injunctive relief, settled with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and obtained a consent decree overseen by the U.S. District Court, which it later enforced through the Courts to compel Pennsylvania to enroll children with IDs into its public schools and provide them with appropriate programs.

Quoting page 8 of the May 5, 1972 Opinion, Order and Injunction from PARC v. Pennsylvania, “The lengthy Consent Agreement concludes by stating that ‘[every] retarded person between the ages of six and twenty-one shall be provided access to a free public program of education and training appropriate to his capacities as soon as possible but in no event later than September 1, 1972 …’ To implement the agreed upon relief and assure that it would be extended to all members of this class, Dennis E. Haggerty, Esq., a distinguished member of the Pennsylvania Bar who has devoted much of his energy to the welfare of retarded children, and Dr. Herbert Goldstein, an eminent expert in the education of retarded children who is Professor and Director of the Curriculum Research and Development Center in Mental Retardation at the Ferkaus Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Yeshiva University, were appointed Masters at the expense of the Commonwealth … Next, the Consent Agreement charges defendants with the duty within 30 days, to formulate and submit to the Masters a plan to locate, evaluate and give notice to all members of the plaintiff class … Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Agreement states that: ‘The defendants shall formulate and submit to the Masters for their approval a plan to be effectuated by September 1, 1972, to commence or recommence a free public program of education and training for all mentally retarded persons . . . aged between four and twenty-one years as of the date of this Order, and for all mentally retarded persons of such ages hereafter. The plan shall specify the range of programs of education and training, there [sic] kind and number, necessary to provide an appropriate program of education and training to all mentally retarded children, where they shall be conducted, arrangements for their financing, and, if additional teachers are found to be necessary, the plan shall specify recruitment, hiring, and training arrangements.'” [emphasis added; internal citations omitted]

Here, we see the language of FAPE (34 CFR Sec. 300.17), the marriage of law and science in the creation of the program design, the precursor to the federal “child find” requirements (34 CFR Sec. 300.111), and language that effectively describes creating what amounts to an IEP. PARC v. Pennsylvania laid the foundation for what ultimately became the IDEA, which specifically mandates that the peer-reviewed research be applied to the delivery of special education to the degree it’s practicable to do so (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)).

The appointment of the masters in PARC v. Pennsylvania is important to note because it marks from the outset the need to combine the efforts of legal professionals and psychologists to come up with evidence-based approaches to special education instruction that conform with the regulations. While there have been many efforts over the years by those of a particular ilk within the public education system to minimize the science and place undue emphasis on legal maneuvering, they have never been successful at eliminating the science.

Now, we are seeing the courts rely more and more on the dry, neutral facts of science rather than the hysterical budget shielding that typically goes on in special education. As more and more people become more fluent with using math and science in everyday life, the public is increasingly expecting to see science rather than politics in the delivery of public instruction.

It has always been the intent of the applicable law to use the applicable science in the delivery of special education. The arguments for relying on facts and evidence in designing and implementing IEPs are too compelling to be overcome by cronyistic politics altogether. Politically speaking, the science has never carried as much weight in special education as it does now, which is tragic in that it’s taken this long but it’s also inevitable. The truth is the truth and no amount of political spinning changes what a child’s unique learning needs actually are or what research has proven actually works.

So, that being the case, when we look at the logical flow of how an IEP is supposed to go together, it’s important to understand how the law and science become inextricably intertwined as the IEP process goes forward. To start, a child cannot be found eligible for special education without first being assessed. Assessment determines if the child has a qualifying disability and, if so, what to do about it.

Competent special education assessment is a highly scientific process. People with special credentials and licenses are brought in to collect expert data, analyze it, and provide expert opinions to the IEP team as to why a child is struggling in school and what can be done about it. This process can become compromised by internal public education agency politics, however. See our previous blog post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments,” for more information about this step of the process.

In an ideal world, a child’s initial assessment for special education is thorough and competent. It measures all of the student’s unique learning needs and assesses in all areas of suspected disability. The data it produces is then used with input from teachers and parents to create an IEP, presuming the child is eligible for an IEP. This is where things can get really messy.

There are two ways things can go badly at this stage:

  • The assessments were poorly done and now there isn’t good data to inform the development of the IEP, or
  • The assessment data is fine but the IEP offered to the student doesn’t match what the assessment data says the student needs

Parents need to understand what is supposed to happen at this stage of the process or they can be quickly bamboozled by seasoned bureaucrats with their own agendas. The information gathered by the IEP team about the student’s learning strengths and needs is supposed to result in measurable annual goals that describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen in each area of unique learning need.

Where things often break down is in translating all of the baseline data into measurable annual goals that target appropriate learning outcomes in every single area of unique learning need. That’s a tall order. It’s one thing to measure what already is, but it’s another thing to use that data to project where things should be in a year.

IEP teams often struggle to identify all the areas in which goals are needed, much less write the goals they come up with in a measurable manner. In my experience, the average special education professional would fail the 4th grade under the Common Core if their IEP goal-writing skills were used to measure their abilities to apply math and science to solving everyday problems.

A lot of the guidance given to special education professionals during the 1980s and 1990s about IEP goal-writing was a bunch of preemptive legal defense hooey that was utterly devoid of any kind of valid science or math. These approaches provided teachers with formulas and supposed hacks that they usually didn’t understand and usually used incorrectly in the field.

There was no sincere effort that I ever observed back in the day to teach special education professionals the technical nuts and bolts of goal-writing, and I still assert now that the training being done is grossly inadequate. A half-day workshop for continuing education units is usually about it for most special ed staffs, and most of what such a workshop instructs is usually garbage.

These are the workshops that taught teachers to write the measurement for every goal as “… with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials …” even if it makes no sense. For example, it’s highly inappropriate when used here: “By [annual due date], [Student] will cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation.”

First, try to make the math work, which you can’t. Then ask yourself what an 80% accuracy rate of crossing the street safely must look like, however it might be calculated, and whether it could possibly be educationally appropriate. It’s supposed to be a free and appropriate public education and there’s nothing appropriate about being run over in the street like a bug as a result of participating in publicly funded instruction.

My brief advice to school district administrators is to not let your attorneys develop your employee training for any aspect of special education that requires scientific rigor. And, unless you are qualified yourself in the applicable sciences, if you are an administrator, don’t think of developing that training yourself, either. Use actual experts; don’t be a chump.

Doing sound assessments only to toss the science and math out the window when it comes time to write the IEP makes no sense whatsoever. But, there is a political game that sometimes get played with parents in which public education agencies will deliver a decent assessment, but then offer a garbage IEP and act like the garbage IEP is what the data and law say the agency can do for the student. It’s a lie.

In reality, the IEP is based on how much the education agency is willing to spend on the student, but the agency’s administrators can’t admit that, so they try to run a con on the parents in which they use valid assessment data to argue for a garbage IEP. They’re effectively gaslighting the parents because the data doesn’t support the IEP at all, but the parents are usually too confused to understand what is really happening and just let it go, thereby allowing the education agency to get away with shortchanging a kid.

The parents get an assessment report that describes their kid, but then they get offered an IEP that is weak relative to the kid’s actual needs and they figure that’s the most the schools must be able to do for them. In truth, their kid is getting robbed. If the IEP doesn’t match the assessment data, something is really wrong. This can be particularly the case with IEP goals.

The data can make clear what the areas are in which goals are needed, but then only a few goals get put into the IEP by school personnel. This is a problem because the services that are offered to a special education student are supposed to be driven by what is necessary to meet the goals. If you don’t have goals in each area of need, there’s nothing to compel all of the services that are needed. Missing goals mean missing services. Schools that want to prevent spending on services can accomplish this by leaving goals out of IEPs.

Goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Services describe what it takes to meet the goals. This includes service frequency, duration, and location. For example, a student may receive 30 minutes per week of individual speech/language services to address their communication goals.

Accommodations are tools and strategies that make access to the grade-level content possible for a child with special needs. They are not the same things as modifications. Modifications actually change the learning expectations for the student to something less rigorous than the grade-level standards so that the instruction is accessible to the student.

For example, the accommodation of being able to dictate one’s answers rather than write them down doesn’t change the nature of the material being studied or the questions that have to be answered. The only thing that changes is how the response is produced, but a grade-level response is still expected.

In another example by contrast, a student with developmental delays may participate part of the time in general education math where students are calculating the hypotenuses of triangles, but the work is modified to cutting out different sized triangles for the student with developmental delays. In this example, the instruction has been scaffolded towards the grade-level expectations by modifying it to the student’s level of learning.

Before one can understand what a hypotenuse is, one must first understand what a triangle is, so instruction on triangles in general lays a foundation for the eventual instruction of the calculation of hypotenuses. Scaffolding towards the grade level standards and developmental norms is a critical method used in special education as per the peer-reviewed research to adapt the instruction to learners who cannot perform at grade level because of their disabilities. There still has to be a way to measure their learning and push them as close to grade level as possible.

Once goals, services, and accommodations are identified, the IEP team then determines the student’s educational placement. This is usually not a specific classroom or campus; it’s the type of classroom and/or campus required. Placement is decided at the end of the process because it is impossible to know where is the best place to deliver the services and accommodations such that the goals are met if the goals haven’t been written and services and accommodations haven’t yet been determined.

In addition to these critical steps, an IEP can also include an Individualized Transition Plan (ITP), which is basically a plan within a plan that describes what will be done for a teenager or young adult with an IEP to prepare them for life after high school. Students exit special education either by graduating with a regular diploma or aging out, usually at age 21 or 22, The ITP is supposed to be the driving force of their IEPs from at least age 16 forward, though nothing prevents IEP teams from starting younger.

Another component that an IEP may include is some kind of Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP). They can go by a variety of names, but they’re all basically the same thing, and usually loosely based on Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). This is another science that gets grossly watered down in special education, sometimes to the point of becoming ineffective if not harmful.

Good ABA is a wonderful thing, but there are way too many programs operating these days that are “ABA-based,” meaning they aren’t fully adhering to the science and only have borrowed those parts from it that they find most easy to use. They take a fluid science, try to turn it into something formulaic, and ruin the whole damn thing. It’s right up there with crossing the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials.

To be clear, when I talk about ABA in this blog/podcast, I’m talking about the actual science, not some hokey fly-by-night scam trying to take advantage of the autism community. I have plenty of colleagues who operate completely legitimate, scientifically rigorous ABA programs that save and change lives for the better, and they are just as disgusted as I am by the charlatans ruining the good name of a credible science for the sake of making a buck off of autism. These charlatans who have corrupted the legitimate science are the ones with whom the autism community takes such issue when they complain about ABA.

There is no way to have a conversation about the IEP process and the degree to which science plays a role in it without discussing ABA. ABA is the most reliable method of data collection currently used in special education, even when not done that well. This is because the field is dominated with people teaching their students to cross the street safely with 80% accuracy in 4 out of 5 trials as measured by observation. Even shoddily done ABA-type data collection is usually better than that.

It’s my argument that, if the science has to be applied to the degree it’s practicable to do so, and ABA-type data collection is the most reliable, then IEP goals should be based on ABA-type data collection methods. If IEP goals were actually written according to scientific method like they were supposed to have been from the start, we would naturally default to ABA-type methods of data collection because that’s the only thing that will work.

This becomes particularly important for IEPs with BIPs. Real ABA, not the half-baked version that is peddled by some agencies, should be used to develop measurable annual goals and any BIP in an IEP. This will allow for legitimate measurement of actual progress. Here, it’s not exactly about the instructional approaches of ABA so much as how to accurately measure learning. By using ABA-based teaching and measuring approaches, it’s a lot easier to tell if a student is actually learning anything or not, which is the whole point of measurable annual goals and measurable BIP criteria.

When you understand that there is a logical order to the sequence of the special education process that the law describes from what it has taken from science, the parts of an IEP start to make more sense. An IEP is not an arbitrary document. It’s an enforceable contract that describes what a public education agency is supposed to do to tailor the instruction to a student with special needs. It includes what it includes for logical reasons.

Congress organized how IEPs are supposed to go together based on the advice of attorneys and psychologists who worked very hard to come with with a marriage of law and science that will work so long as the public education system pays equal attention to both the science and the law. There needs to be more training for professionals in the special education community as to the scientific origins of IEP design and the scientific rigor actually necessary to deliver special education according to Congress’ intent.

Parents need to understand the importance of the science, as well. They are the most important members of any IEP team and if they don’t understand what the data means, they can’t give informed consent to anything.

Parent education is a related service that can be added to an IEP to help the parents understand their child’s special needs as well as help them better participate in the IEP process (34 CFR Sec. 300.34(a)). If you feel as a parent like you don’t have enough information to be an equal member of the IEP team, it’s your right to request parent training as a related service so that your rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process and informed consent are honored.

 

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Parents Who “School-Hop” Risk Making Things Worse

Image credit: Alan Levine

One of the situations I commonly encounter in working with students with special needs and their families in the public education system is a phenomenon that I’ve come to refer to as “school-hopping.” Sometimes, parents who do not understand why their children are struggling assume that the problem is with the school, and, very often, there is a problem at school. But, quite often, the real issue is that the school is responding poorly to a disability-related need experienced by the student, so it’s not just that there is something wrong at the school, there’s something wrong with how it is responding to a special need that requires unique accommodations.

Put another way, there are two problems to resolve: 1) how to address the student’s unique needs in an educationally appropriate and legally compliant way, and 2) how to address the internal problems at the school that are preventing this from happening. Parents will sometimes jump from a charter school to a district-run independent study program to a home-school group to a … you name it … trying to find the right fit for their child.

The problem with doing that is, unless a parent knows what specifically to ask any school to do for their child, they’re just rolling the dice with every school change and hoping this one will finally be the one that fits. The whole purpose of special education is to impose structure on how education is tailored to each individual student. That way, it shouldn’t matter so much where they are so long as the supports and services described by the student’s individualized program are being delivered in that setting.

The guidance to the school site personnel as to how to do this comes in the form of a legally enforceable document called an Individualized Education Program (IEP). An IEP is created by a team of individuals described by federal law (34 CFR Sec. 300.321) according to specific criteria, also described by federal law (34 CFR Sec. 300.324). What the IEP says it what the responsible public education agency must do for the student for whom it is written.

It doesn’t matter how many times a student with special needs changes schools if the IEP that follows them is garbage. Even when a student changes to an entirely different public education agency, the incoming IEP is what informs the new school team as to how to support the newly incoming student with special needs. If the IEP does not describe appropriate supports and services, then the new school is legally obligated to implement the garbage that the IEP describes, instead.

My point, here, is that changing schools under these kinds of conditions tends to just make things worse. Every school change means at least some part of a kid’s file, if not the whole thing, gets lost in transit between one public education agency and the next. Assessment reports and old IEPs disappear from the record with frequent moves and school changes, so those items aren’t there to inform a records review like they normally would as part of a new assessment conducted by a new education agency.

That makes it very hard for the new school to know where to begin with a new student with special needs. The parents are hoping the new school will somehow magically fix everything but each successive new school gets put further and further at a disadvantage as to where to even begin every time a new change in schools happens and records have to be shuffled around again.

I have yet to figure out why so many people start at the end rather than the beginning when it comes to individualized student planning. Placement – that is, the type of classroom setting(s) in which a special education student receives instruction – is determined by the IEP team as the last matter of properly conducted IEP planning for very important, logical reasons. There are a whole lot of other decisions that have to be made, first, before a placement determination can be made.

IEPs start out with identifying a student’s present levels of performance, which seek to answer the questions, “What can the student already do?” and “What does the student still need to be taught relative to the grade-level standards and/or developmental norms?” On the basis of the answers to those two questions, goals are written that target measurable, annual outcomes.

The goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Until you know that, you don’t know what all you need to actually educate the student.

For this reason, the IEP team next determines what services are necessary to see the goals met. On the basis of the frequency, duration, and location of the services necessary to meet the goals, in combination with the student’s right to experience the least amount of segregation away from the general education population as possible, educational placement is then determined.

Parents who school-hop interfere with how the federally mandated process is supposed to work, usually without realizing the harm they are doing. Until the IEP describes goals in each area of unique student learning need in meaningfully measurable ways, it doesn’t matter where the student goes to school; following a bad IEP in a new, good setting will still go wrong.

That said, I’ve seen plenty of situations where changing schools, even moving to entirely new school districts, has saved a kid’s life. The challenge, though, was to get the IEP as good as we could get it before the student changed schools so the new, receiving school had something worth implementing once the student started attending there.

And, in California, where I do most of my work, whether a special education student moves during the school year or summer break has bearing on what is enforceable in terms of a transfer IEP. This added layer of complexity, which isn’t the same in all the other States, makes the timing of everything that much more imperative when it comes to changing to a different school district or charter school. Parents who school-hop in California can do even more harm than they realize because of the odd State laws about transfer IEPs.

What’s often more heartbreaking are families that are school-hopping because their child has never been offered an IEP and when they’ve asked about it, they’ve been shot down by school personnel who insist that their child would never qualify. In reality, it can be the case that the school personnel are just waiting for the family to pick up and move the student, again, at which point whether or not the student needs an IEP won’t be that particular school’s problem, anymore. There are unfortunately those in public education who will facilitate eliminating a problem rather than solving it, even if it comes at the expense of a child.

Parents who school-hop can call unnecessary attention to themselves as easily exploited by school staffs who would rather see them move along to the next school than stick around and insist that the current school do its job. At some point, school-hopping parents have to figure out that the school-hopping isn’t working and, instead, they need to stand in one spot, dig in their heels, and get a decent IEP from whatever agency is responsible right at that moment. That might mean filing a lawsuit just to get an initial assessment, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.

Without a legally enforceable IEP document that describes something worth enforcing, no placement can be made to work. Federal law mandates that the education rendered to a special education student be in conformity with that student’s IEP (34 CFR Sec. 300.17). If the IEP is garbage, then the school is legally obligated to implement the garbage until such time as the IEP can be made more appropriate.

As a parent, your number one objective when it comes to advocating for your child with special needs is to make sure that the services and supports provided are actually appropriate to your child’s needs. Just having a document that says “IEP” at the top of it doesn’t magically bestow educational benefits onto anybody. The contents of the document matter and, as a parent, you need to know how to look out for language in an IEP that could undermine your child and any exclusions of language that are important to meeting your child’s needs from the IEP. More harm can be done by what is left out of an IEP than what is put into it.

Once you understand why placement is the last decision that should be made by an IEP team, you can understand why changing placement when things aren’t going right doesn’t always make sense. Unless you’ve got an amazing IEP and the people at the school site just aren’t implementing it as written, there’s a really good chance your problem is with the plan more than the placement.

Plans of any kind fail for only one of two reasons: 1) design flaws, or 2) implementation failures. Design flaws can sometimes only be identified when you try to implement the plan and something goes wrong. If you never implement the plan according to its design, you’ll never know if the design was flawed or not because you weren’t following it in the first place. If the design is great, but no one is following it, what’s the point?

This analysis of plan success and failure came to me by way of my training in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), which, by the way, is a science, not a treatment methodology. There are a lot of ABA-based treatment programs out there, but those programs are not what actual ABA is. They are based on ABA, some with more scientific rigor than others. The actual science of ABA can be applied to anything that behaves, including animals, plants, and computers.

From the absolute, parsimonious perspective of ABA as a science, everything is based on objectively identified behaviors, only, which are framed in quantifiable terms and rendered into emotionally neutral pieces of data. Further, not only is data taken on how the individual responds to efforts at changing its behaviors, data is taken on the fidelity with which those implementing the plan are actually adhering to it.

Taking data on the fidelity of the implementation of the program design is one of the most critical pieces of the science that often gets left out of school-based ABA-type programs. It’s my assumption that this is for political and/or preemptive legal defense purposes because no school district that I know of wants data taken on the degree to which their staffs are actually adhering to any part of the IEP.

That’s way too much accountability on the record and way too much risk of it capturing somebody doing it wrong that could then be used to prove a denial of a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in hearing by the parents and achieve an order for compensatory education to make up for the lost instruction. Even though the science is abundantly clear that ABA data collection methods, when followed according to the science, are the most accurate, reliable, and valid data collected in the public education system for special education students (Drasgow, Yell, & Robinson, 2001; Kimball, 2002; Yell & Drasgow, 2000), I have yet to see that degree of scientific rigor applied to any part of a student’s IEP in the public schools, whether it’s through their measurable annual goals or any behavior plans that their IEP might contain.

As parents, your primary goal has to be the quality of the IEP’s design because, if it doesn’t describe what your child actually needs, it doesn’t matter where you try to implement it and no placement will just magically fall in love with your child and imbue them with knowledge through emotional osmosis. Hope is not a strategy. Pursuing a scientifically informed, legally compliant IEP is a strategy that gives you way more likelihood of having a meaningful say in the quality of your child’s education, regardless of where they attend school.

References:

  • Drasgow, E., Yell, M.L., & Robinson, T.R. (2001). Developing legally correct and educationally appropriate IEPs. Remedial and Special Education 22(6), 359-373. doi: 10.1177/074193250102200606
  • Kimball, J. (2002). Behavior-analytic instruction for children with autism: Philosophy matters. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10883576020170020101
  • Yell, M. & Drasgow, E. (2000). Litigating a free appropriate public education: The Lovaas hearings and cases. The Journal of Special Education, 33(4), 205-214. doi: 10.1177/002246690003300403

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The Basics of Special Education Assessments

Most people new to special education are quickly blindsided by the processes and procedures that have to be followed. Many parents new to the process don’t exactly understand that customizing school for their children with special needs is what special education is supposed to do. Often they will say that they don’t know what special education will be able to do for their children, in large part because they don’t understand what special education actually is or how it works.

There is a huge need to demystify the special education process for those who don’t fully understand it. The process starts at the very beginning with a referral for assessment, but before I launch into a discussion of special education assessments, I first want to map out the special education process in general so the role that assessments play in that process becomes clear.

Because special education can only be given to students who meet specific eligibility criteria, a process had to be developed to determine who meets those criteria. The basis for a referral for a special education assessment is “suspected disability.” If the parents, teachers, or other involved professionals have a reason to suspect that a disability might be responsible for why a student is struggling in school academically, communicatively, socially, physically, and/or behaviorally, it’s enough to trigger the assessment process.

Sometimes, special education assessments end up ruling out disabilities and identifying other challenges that are interfering with student learning that require solutions other than special education. It is never a bad thing when a child who is struggling in school gets help, regardless of what types of help may be needed.

Federal law mandates that public education agencies conduct a process called “child find” in which they actively seek out and identify those students who can be suspected of possibly needing special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.111). A great many special education lawsuits have been filed over the years on behalf of students who were never identified through “child find,” but should have been.

I have worked as a paralegal on several cases in which there was enough evidence to suspect a disability was responsible for a student’s struggles but it failed to trigger the “child find” process. When students who are eligible for special education are denied eligibility, including from a failure to conduct “child find” that denies them the chance to be found eligible in the first place, they are usually due compensatory education to make up for the education they should have gotten but didn’t. “Child find” failures are no small things, but they occur systematically everywhere.

Very often, children of color, children from households with low incomes, children in single-parent families, and children who have immigrated here from other countries are the ones most often missed by “child find.” In many instances, they are instead blamed for their challenges and end up funneled into the juvenile justice system, thereby greasing the wheels of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

It often takes a parent referral to see a student properly identified for special education. Struggles over homework, tears shed over grades, disciplinary problems at school, and other obvious signs of trouble will prompt many parents to look into their options for help from their local schools and some will stumble upon some basic information about special education and the referral process. If it makes enough sense to them, they will write a letter requesting that their child be tested for learning problems that might require special education, which triggers the assessment process.

Depending on what State parents are in, the laws vary as to whether their local education agencies are legally obligated to act on their referrals for special education assessment. Some States give parent referrals equal weight to those made by school personnel and other States do not. The federal laws leave it up to the States to decide, by default making it such that education agencies can decline parent referrals for assessment with Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why the referral is being declined (34 CFR Sec. 300.503).

California law, however, gives parent referrals equal weight to those made by education agency personnel (EDC 56029) and mandates that an assessment plan be provided to parents for their consent within 15 calendar days of any referral for assessment being made (EDC 56043(a)). States can add protections to the IDEA, they just can’t reduce them to anything below the minimum standards of the IDEA. Not all States provide the same kind of protection of parent referrals that California provides.

Even when a parent referral is accepted, many school districts will still limit assessment in a way the parents don’t realize is happening in order to prevent students from being found eligible for special education and thereby prevent special education expenditures and a host of additional legal obligations. For far too many families, just getting that initial evaluation can become a legal battle, but then the question becomes whether the assessment they got was any good.

I want to focus on what happens once the assessment process actually gets going, though. Eventually, most families of eligible children who are pushing for appropriate services will get an initial assessment that is used by the IEP team to determine whether the student is eligible for special education or not. If the student is found eligible, re-assessments will then occur at least once every three years, or triennially, to update the data available to the IEP team for ongoing IEP development.

The purpose of special education assessment is to determine 1) if the student is eligible for special education and, if so, 2) what the content of the student’s IEP should be. Needless to say that if the data gathered by the assessment is inaccurate, incomplete, or incompetently interpreted, things can go horribly wrong. And, they do. A lot of special education litigation arises over education agency failures to competently assess in all areas of suspected disability.

For example, if a child is verbal but can’t read people’s facial expressions or tone of voice, there still needs to be a speech-language evaluation that looks at not only articulation, receptive language, and expressive language, but also at pragmatic (social) language. Pragmatic language includes the ability to read nonverbal body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

Children with autism tend to be very literal with words and miss the nuances that tone of voice, facial expression, and body language can contribute to conveying someone else’s communicative intent, so they may misunderstand sarcasm or idioms and cliches. They can similarly struggle to make their own faces match what they are trying to say in a way that makes sense to most other people. Students with other types of handicapping conditions can also have similar challenges for various reasons related to their disabilities.

This isn’t all people with autism, of course, but pragmatic language deficits are commonly occurring features of autism. It stands to reason that any child assessed for autism should also have a comprehensive speech-language evaluation that includes pragmatics. I’ve lost count of the number of students on the autism spectrum I’ve represented over the last 28+ years who have had huge problems with interpersonal communication but had never had their pragmatic language tested until I asked for it. It’s one of those obvious things that shouldn’t have to be specifically requested, but I often end up having to request it, anyway.

And, this example goes to why it’s important that parents understand the critical nature of assessments and getting them done correctly the first time around, if at all possible. What happens if assessments are bad is that whatever IEPs are produced from them will also be bad. This can include an inappropriate denial of special education eligibility altogether at the initial IEP, as well as students being found eligible but then given weak IEPs that don’t actually address their needs.

Simply giving a student a document that says “IEP” on it does not magically bestow educational benefits upon that student. The contents of the document matter and they should be informed by scientifically valid data in all areas of suspected disability and unique learning need. The IEP is supposed to be the blueprint by which the special education student’s education is delivered according to that student’s unique learning profile, which can only be ascertained through valid and sufficiently rigorous assessments that include teacher and parent input.

What tests should be administered to a given student depends on the student. Just as the special education program developed for each student must be individualized, so must the assessments conducted to inform that program. If a student doesn’t present with any evidence of hearing loss, it makes no sense to test in the area of hearing. However, if a student reports that the words swim on the page when the student attempts to read, an assessment of visual processing is entirely in order.

Similarly, if the primary areas of concern are social and classroom participation but the student’s grades are otherwise fine, you can conduct all the IQ and academic achievement tests in the world, but they will fail to give you relevant data about the actual source of the problem. At best, academic achievement testing may tell you the degree to which the social/behavioral challenges are interfering with classroom participation and work completion, but social/emotional and behavioral assessments are necessary to get to the bottom of social and classroom behavioral challenges, including lack of participation.

It is not uncommon for individuals with autism and/or anxiety disorders who are otherwise verbally and intellectually intact to do well in their academics, at least in the lower grades, but have a truly difficult time being a member of a classroom and/or being socially integrated with the rest of the students. School is supposed to teach more than academics; it’s also supposed to give students the opportunity to learn and rehearse social skills that will ultimately allow them to become gainfully employed and fully functional within society in adulthood.

The thing to understand, here, is that a student does not automatically have to be struggling academically to need special education. A student needs to be struggling in any aspect of school as a result of a disability to such a marked degree that individualizing the student’s educational experiences is necessary in order for the student to have opportunities to learn that are equal to the opportunities given to same-grade peers who do not have disabilities.

Our students with anxiety and depression will often miss a lot of school due to psychosomatic illnesses. This prevents them from accessing education altogether, but is not directly reflective of a specific challenge with academics. Very often, these kids can handle the academics okay, but they can’t handle all the other people at school. That’s a different special education problem to solve than accommodating dyslexia or an auditory processing disorder.

I can tell you that, as an educational psychologist and behavior analyst, there are student-specific lines of inquiry that an individualized assessment of each student should pursue. No two assessments should look exactly alike from one student to the next. The federally mandated requirement placed on schools is to assess in all areas of suspected disability and unique student need on an individualized basis (34 CFR Sec. 300.304).

That means social/emotional functioning, pragmatic language, and behavior are probably going to feature more prominently in an assessment of a student suspected of autism or certain types of social/emotional disorders. Measures of cognition and academic achievement, analysis of classroom work samples, parent and teacher interviews, and classroom observations are going to be more useful in troubleshooting a potential learning disability. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and adaptive physical education evaluations are going to be important for a student with an orthopedic impairment that impacts how the student navigates the school campus.

There is no “one-size-fits-all” assessment procedure in special education. There should be no “one-size-fits-all” anything in special education. The whole point of it is individualized instruction, which can only be individualized to the student if the IEP is informed by individualized assessment data.

The importance of individualizing assessment cannot be overemphasized, and I have an example from my past to drive that point home: Many years ago, a couple of years or so after I first became a paralegal, I was working a due process case in which, between the testimony of the school psychologist and the district’s director of special education, it became clear that the only reason the school psychologist had used a particular verbal IQ test on our 7-year-old language delayed client with Down’s Syndrome was because the district kept those tests in bulk in the supply closet, and it would take longer than the 60-day assessment timeline to order a more appropriate test through the district’s purchase order process, as overseen by the special education director.

It is my recollection that the administrative law judge who tried the case had his own blistering line of questioning after those facts made it onto the record. He basically eviscerated the special education director for sneaky, underhanded abuses of the system to save a buck at the expense of assessment accuracy. The judge ended up ordering the school district to fund an outside assessment done by an expert who used the right kinds of tests.

The dad had already paid to have the outside expert assessment done, so we had it as evidence of how to do it right in hearing, plus the outside expert testified credibly as to his methods and findings. The district ended up having to reimburse the dad for the outside assessment and there was a huge training initiative throughout that district’s special education department shortly after that hearing decision was published. Heads rolled and policies changed for the better, but it took exposing what was really going on in a hearing to effect significant changes.

The function that assessments serve in the special education process is to set it all in motion and inform all the other steps that will follow. An IEP must include a statement of a student’s present levels of performance at the time the IEP was written, thereby establishing baselines. An IEP must also include annual, measurable goals that target learning outcomes to be achieved in one year’s time from the date the IEP is written that move the student forward from those baseline positions in each area of unique learning need.

There is no way to realistically identify the target outcomes to be met with one year’s worth of work in each area of unique student need without valid assessment data to inform that analysis. How much is realistic for an individual student to learn in a year’s time comes down to a combination of variables that should have all been measured and described by the assessment data.

Goals target the outcomes intended by a student’s IEP. What services are included in an IEP, including the frequency, duration, and location of those services, are determined on the basis of what will be necessary to meet the IEP goals. Placement is the last decision made by an IEP team and is determined by what is the least restrictive setting or combination of settings that allows the services to be delivered such that the goals are met without unnecessarily segregating the student away from the general education population.

You can’t decide where a special education student can be most appropriately educated until you first determine what you’re going to have to do in that setting or combination of settings. What needs to be done is determined by what you want to make happen. You don’t know what to make happen until you understand where things already stand and what you are still missing. You don’t know what is already intact and available, or what is missing, without first doing an assessment.

So, everything in the IEP process depends on the assessments being done right in the first place, or the entire IEP process falls apart from the outset. If an assessment is done badly, there aren’t adequate baseline data to inform an IEP’s present levels of performance or inform decisions about how aggressive each measurable annual goal should be in terms of its targeted outcomes. Further, if it’s done badly, there’s no guarantee there’s enough data to identify all the areas in which goals are actually needed.

“What can the student already do in a given area of need?” and “What is realistic to expect from this student after one year’s worth of work in this given area of need?” are the two key questions that have to be answered by special education assessment reports. That’s because those two very questions have to be answered when crafting a new IEP.

If you can’t get that far with the data from the assessments, you’re off to a really, really bad start. If you can’t lay a proper foundation, your whole construct will fall down. Competent, reasonably thorough assessment is the very foundation of a sound IEP, so it is important for parents to take this step of the IEP process very seriously and hold everyone else on the team to their respective professional standards.

Federal law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research and the professional standards of any experts involved to the delivery of special education (34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4)). That includes during the special education assessment process. Any standardized tests used must be administered and scored according to the instructions provided by the producers of each test, which must be scientifically valid for the purposes for which they are used (34 CFR Sec. 300.304(c)(1)). The enforceable law does not skirt the applicable science, and there is no legally justifiable reason why any publicly funded education agency and/or any of its contractors should be skirting it.

This can be difficult for many parents who have no background in science or law. However, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur on a societal level that is worth noting.

Millennials are becoming an increasingly represented generational cohort among parents of children with special needs. They use their smartphones ubiquitously to call BS on a host of issues by looking up the truth, and collaborate with each other to address shared concerns. Special education advocacy today is becoming something entirely different than what it was when I started 28 years ago.

When I was a young, beginning advocate, I represented a number of housewives who could bake some mean cupcakes but would nearly faint at the presentation of a bell curve graph and deferred to their husbands on any big decisions. Now, I’ve got young moms and dads taking their own behavior data, charting it, and presenting it to their kids’ IEP teams with a written list of questions, concerns, and requests, all based on their own common sense with no formal prior exposure to the applicable sciences or law.

Where things get interesting is how school district administrations are currently configured. Many of the old-timers that I’ve been dealing with over the last two decades or more have retired and run off with their pension money before there isn’t any pension money to be had, anymore. Millennials are now starting to take the retired old-timers’ vacant job positions and, where that has happened, I’ve found that I don’t have such an uphill battle when making scientifically research-based requests in conformity with the regulations on behalf of my students and their families.

The biggest challenges I’m seeing now are Millennial parents armed with knowledge attempting to advocate for their children to public education agencies still run by the old-timers. The old-timers run things according to cronyistic politics, by and large, which has no scientific support whatsoever. In fact, cronyistic politics have been supported by a great deal of science as being impediments to the implementation of effective educational programming (Coco, G. & Lagravinese, R. “Cronyism and education performance,” Economic Modeling, Feb 2014, 38 443-450; Shaker, P. & Heilman, E. “The new common sense of education: Advocacy research versus academic authority,” Teachers College Record, Jul 2004, 106:7 1444-1470) and the impetus behind the mishandling of education dollars that take money out of the classroom that could otherwise fund effective instruction and undermine a community’s investments in education (Eicher, T., García-Peñalosa, C., & van Ypersele, T. “Education, corruption, and the distribution of income,” Journal of Economic Growth, Sep 2009 14:3 205-231).

When knowledgeable parents go up against cronyistic old-timers, the old-timers resort to their familiar bag of power-mongering tricks. But, trying to intimidate a mom who was educated under the Common Core to use math and science to solve real-life problems is a world apart from trying to intimidate a housewife whose science and math skills are limited to following recipes in a cookbook and balancing a checkbook.

I’m watching old-timers retire in droves nowadays because their weapons of choice against parents aren’t effective anymore and the courts are increasingly relying on the applicable science to inform how the law applies to each special education student on an individual basis. Law is supposed to be evidence-based, as is science. Education science allows special education law to be as black-and-white as possible. Everything else, particularly in a cronyistic system, is subjective opinion and hearsay. The environment no longer reinforces the old-timers’ behaviors like it used to, and their behaviors are starting to become extinct.

So, parents going forth into special education, especially those of you who know how to use your smartphones to look things up and fact-check, fall back on the science and lean on it hard, starting with the assessment process. When you are first given that assessment plan to sign, don’t sign anything until you understand what it means and the language of it is clear.

Very often, assessment plans will say vague things like “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” which can sound a whole lot like a mental health evaluation by a clinician to a lay person. In reality, what it usually means is rating scales filled out by parents, teachers, and sometimes the student that are scored and interpreted by a credentialed school psychologist, not a licensed clinician. Rating scales scored and interpreted by a school psychologist is not the same thing as a mental health evaluation by a licensed clinician.

But, how is a parent unfamiliar with the process supposed to know that? Would any reasonable layperson just assume this language meant a mental health evaluation by a clinician? I’ve seen this happen more than once involving youth with significant mental health issues for which consideration was being requested by the parent of the rest of the IEP team of residential placement via the student’s IEP. The parents would be given an assessment plan that said “social/emotional evaluation by psychologist,” think they were getting an evaluation to explore residential placement, and only find out 60 days later that they had been given the run-around while their child continued to fall apart. Residential placement is the most restrictive placement possible through the special education system, but it is possible for those students whose needs are that dire.

In these cases, the students’ needs were absolutely that dire and the responsible school districts attempted to delay the costs of residential placement by first doing rating scales by their school psychologist as part of a 60-day evaluation process, who then recommended a mental health evaluation, sometimes including a residential placement evaluation but sometimes not, thereby triggering a new 60-day assessment timeline. If a residential placement evaluation was not included with the mental health evaluation, the mental health evaluation could then conclude that the student should be considered for residential placement, triggering yet another new 60-day evaluation timeline.

Or, worse, the mental health evaluation could be silent on the issue of residential placement, leaving it to the parents to know to keep asking for such an evaluation; but, by this point, most parents erroneously conclude that residential placement isn’t an option so they drop it. There are youth in immediate crises who need instant mental health services, and their school districts are stalling the process by adding an unnecessary layer of assessment that gives it another 60 to 120 days before it has to act on the data (i.e., foot the tab for services).

Each of the students from my caseload who have shared this experience, in different school districts mind you, ended up either hospitalized and/or incarcerated at some point before finally getting the help that they needed. In most of those cases, the issue had to be forced with lawsuits that ultimately resulted in confidential settlement agreements. In each instance, the unnecessary delays in receiving immediate help contributed to self-injurious behavior, attempted suicide, and unlawful conduct that could have otherwise been avoided.

In my first case like this, I actually took it to due process myself back in the day when advocates could do that in California, and prevailed. In that case’ decision, the hearing officer made it clear that it defies the entire purpose of the IDEA, which requires that children with qualifying disabilities be identified and served via IEPs in all areas of need as quickly as possible, to subject our most vulnerable children to double or triple the amount of assessment time of a normal special education evaluation before getting the help they need.

I don’t know of any authority that has come out since then that contradicts this interpretation, though it was a long time ago and I’m not an attorney, but I think most people will agree, that it was not likely Congress’ intent to make our most severely impacted students suffer without appropriate supports and services for months longer than it takes other special education students to get what they need. These include, but are not exclusively, students with tendencies towards violence, running away, property destruction, self-injurious behaviors, and other non-social behaviors that require a great deal of expert intervention. These are not the students who should be waiting twice to triple the time to get the services they need to keep themselves and everyone else safe and focused on learning at school.

If it looks like a critical area of need is being excluded from your child’s assessment, don’t sign the assessment plan until the public education agency adds what is missing. If the agency refuses to add it, note on the assessment plan that you are consenting to what is offered, but you still think the assessment is deficient based on what they are excluding, which you should list in your note. That way, the record is clear that you aren’t delaying the other testing by withholding your consent, but you’re also not agreeing it was appropriate to leave out what you requested.

If the matter ever goes to hearing, the fact that you documented your disagreement with the exclusions on the actual assessment plan will become part of the evidence and the agency will have to explain its refusals of your requests to a judge or hearing officer. I’ve seen agencies change their minds after parents have written such feedback on assessment plans because the agencies don’t want to have to explain those documents to judges or hearing officers down the line.

Often, the best way to prevent litigation is to prepare for it. The parents who understand the value of making the record in the right way are the most successful self-advocates out there. But, there are still enough cronyistic old-timers still entrenched in the system who think they can still get away with intimidation tactics, lies, and subterfuge. It’s getting harder and harder for them to get away with these behaviors, and parents who push for the truth from the very beginning, starting with the assessment process, have a greater chance of getting appropriate services for their children than not.

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Podcast: Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues

On April 15, 2009, we originally published “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues.”

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Podcast: Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students

On March 1, 2009, we originally published “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students.”

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Podcast: Behaviors that Interfere with Learning

On January 19, 2009, we originally published “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”.

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The History of Special Ed by Brent Daigle, PhD

Special Education History, Qualification, And Services

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Understanding Who’s Responsible for FAPE with NPS Placements

I had an experience today at an IEP meeting for a student we represent that made me realize that there is some confusion out there amongst parents and educators about who (or what entity) is responsible for which aspects of a student’s IEP when the student has been placed in a non-public school (“NPS”) placement. This posting addresses this area of confusion and will hopefully make sense of the situation.

In our client’s situation, her IEP calls for certain things that are currently being provided by her NPS placement, which is not as restrictive of a setting as other NPS placements in the Greater Los Angeles Area, but is more restrictive than a public school setting. For her, it’s the Least Restrictive Environment (“LRE”) relative to her needs.

To say that this certain NPS conglomerate is politically attached at the hip to Los Angeles Unified School District (“LAUSD”) is a gross understatement. It was this incestuousness that made understanding who was responsible for what so confusing to the parents, the NPS teaching staff, and the District rep present at the IEP meeting – though the District rep finally understood what I was trying to make clear. The problem was that even though she finally got what I was saying, she had no authority to do anything about it.

The District-level deal making – which the NPS’ administrator didn’t seem to have a problem discussing with great candor – had occurred with far higher-ranking District personnel than the poor school psychologist sent to our IEP meeting on behalf of LAUSD. Without going into the gritty details (which is only going to make me mad all over again), I want to focus on the technical considerations. Hopefully by doing so, I can prevent other IEP teams from struggling over these same issues.

The problem was that our student has experienced a medical condition that she will now have for the rest of her life. Now, due to this condition, she can no longer take the medications that were addressing some of the learning issues that arise from the handicapping conditions that make her eligible for special education. This has changed her special education needs and has resulted in a new need for which some tweaking of her IEP was required. She needed additional accommodations and modifications to address homework completion issues and potentially some type of service to assist her with getting her homework done.

The NPS currently offers an after-school homework club, but even though it is an NPS serving students on IEPs at public expense, it was charging the parents a fee for her participation in the after-school homework club. This flies in the face of the definition of a Free Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”).

34 CFR Section 300.17 defines a FAPE as being special education and related services that are provided at public expense and without charge to the parents, among other things, hence the use of the word “Free” in “Free Appropriate Public Education”. The imposition of a charge in order for our client to receive educational benefit amounted to a denial of a FAPE.

However, the NPS administrator was quite verbose during the IEP meeting (which we audio recorded as per parents’ rights) about how her NPS and the District had worked it out so that the after-school homework club would never be placed on students IEPs and was only offered as an “extra-curricular activity” such as music or sports teams rather than as a related service. I’m not going to belabor the point of just how non-compliant that is, but suffice it to say that a whole due process case could be built around that issue alone.

The NPS and the District had reached an agreement to refuse to put something on students’ IEPs even if it was educationally necessary. Presumably this was because the District didn’t want to have to pay for the service and was attempting to pass the expense on to the families of students attending the NPS. And, this NPS gets the bulk of its business from LAUSD. Rather than stand its ground and refuse to participate in unlawful activity, it hopped right into bed with a school district that has been under a Consent Decree from the Federal Courts since the 1980s for failing to implement compliant special education programs as a willing accomplice.

The parents were upset with the NPS, which heavily markets itself as being a heavy-hitter in the area of non-public schools for children with special needs. However, as disgusting as the NPS’ policy is, it’s not the NPS that bears the burden of providing its students with a FAPE. That burden is borne by the students’ individual school districts. In this case, the school district responsible for our client’s receipt of a FAPE was LAUSD.

The problem is that LAUSD and this NPS have gotten into bed with each other to develop a “take-it-or-leave-it” package deal. If a student requires anything beyond what the NPS offers, even if it’s just a supplemental related service, their collective answer is to suggest that the student be placed at a different NPS.

So the NPS administrator suggested that our client, who is finally having a good school year in every regard except certain aspects of homework completion, should be uprooted and taken away from her friends and familiar learning environment so she could get supplemental support with homework, which is outrageous to say the least. It certainly wasn’t an offer of a FAPE (failing on the “Appropriate” of “Free Appropriate Public Education”). The LAUSD rep started to go down this path with her until we said, “Wait a minute!” They were throwing out the baby with the bath water.

The real answer was for LAUSD to push in some kind of additional support in addition to the NPS placement and make it part of the student’s IEP. But, as I said, the rep that LAUSD sent in did not have the authority to do any such thing. We would actually have to file for due process to effect such a change to our client’s IEP; in any other school district, the same change would have been achieved within 15 minutes via a few emails and an administrative amendment that didn’t even require an IEP meeting.

We ended up informally agreeing that the parents wouldn’t be charged for the after-school homework club by the NPS as well as adding accommodations and modifications to the IEP and making some changes in the student’s related services to better support her needs. But, we couldn’t get the District to agree to put anything in the IEP that obligated it to pay for the support that had already proven to work, that being the after-school homework club. The NPS simply informally agreed (though it was captured on the audio recording) to eat the $15 per session fee.

This is less than desirable because, should the NPS shut down its after-school homework club, there is nothing to obligate the District or the NPS to continue supporting this area of need in our client’s IEP. We would have to come back to the table to come up with another idea, the NPS would again suggest that our client change schools in order to receive this one relatively simple service, and we’d probably end up having to file for due process just to get some kind of after-school homework support added to her IEP, which is ridiculous. That’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources to fight something that is so commonly provided pretty much everywhere else without even a hint of acrimony.

The point I want to make here is that parents should not be running to their children’s NPSs asking for things that are the burdens of their school districts to provide. NPS personnel should not be telling parents “Your child can’t have that service because we don’t provide it. You’ll just have to change schools.” What goes into an IEP is an IEP team decision and school districts should be sending representatives to all its IEP meetings who are empowered to actually facilitate a compliant IEP team meeting in which the team members – not some smarmy back-room dealings between the District’s upper administration and non-public entities sucking up and willing to aid an abet in the denial of a FAPE in exchange for a large block of business – determine the content of students’ IEPs as required by law.

Click here for the podcast version of this article.

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Podcast: Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans & IEPs

On January 12, 2009, we originally published “Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans and IEPs”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans and IEPs.”

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Podcast: Partial Parental Consent on IEPs & Assessment Plans

On January 5, 2009, we originally published “Partial Parental Consent on IEPs and Assessment Plans”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to listen to the podcast, “Partial Parental Consent on IEPs and Assessment Plans.”