Fall is a time of transition. Temperatures drop, days get shorter, and school starts up again. Settling into a routine at school after the summer can be challenging, especially for kids who need special education support. It can be difficult to transition back into the classroom after summer, especially if they haven’t had any summer school or similar classroom structure during the summer.
Navigating special education for your child can feel overwhelming, especially when what works to support them changes quickly, or when you haven’t found anything that helps yet. Here are five tips to help you feel more confident advocating for your child as they go through this school year.
Get familiar with your child's IEP
Have you ever received a draft of your child’s IEP and felt like it was written in a different language? Pages of information and you’re not exactly sure what it all even means.
IEP documents can be confusing, not to mention the process of getting one can be overwhelming. In this section, we’ll help you decode your child’s IEP so you can understand what kind of support they are getting at school and if it’s meeting their needs.
Let’s take a look at four major sections of the IEP (there are more than these sections, but we’re going to start with these).
First up: Present Level of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (often referred to as PLAAFP, pronounced “plaf”)
This section covers where your student is performing in any areas evaluated. This could include academics, socio-emotional/behavior, speech, occupational therapy, etc. You will see here a summary of assessments, evaluations, or other scores. You’ll see his or her current level of performance, as well as any areas of concern.
Information about your child’s present level of performance may be repeated in following sections of the IEP, but this is where you should find the most detailed information about their current performance or ability, especially in areas of concern.
Next: Goals and Objectives (this isn’t actually the next section in the document, but it is the next one in the flow of understanding)
This section is where the team tries to bridge the gap between where your student is currently performing any given area and where the team would like them to be. Any area listed in the PLAAFP as an area of need or concern should have a corresponding goal. Each goal should have objectives or benchmarks, along with how the goal will be measured and when. There will also be a person or a few people who will be responsible for working with your student to make progress on each specific goal.
Moving on to: Supplementary Aids and Services
This section contains supports that will be provided to your student to help them progress toward their goals. You’ll see a table in the document which will list all of the supports or accommodations your child will receive. These supports will be related to the areas of needs and the goals. You might see things like a behavior intervention plan (BIP), sensory fidgets or tools, visual schedules, schedule breaks, shortened assignments, assistive technology devices, etc. You’ll also see when and where these things will be available to your student.
For older students (usually starting in middle school), it’s important to help them understand these supports so they can begin to learn self-advocacy and request them whenever they need them.
Finally: Programs and Services
This section details how and where your child’s education takes place. If your child will be receiving academic support from a special education teacher, you will see something like “Resource Room/Program” here. You may also see Speech, Occupational Therapy, or Social Worker in this section.
This is a basic rundown of your child’s IEP. There are other sections and information included in the document, but this should help you better understand the document and how it helps your child.
Make sure accommodations are added to the IEP
As the parent or guardian, you are an important member of the IEP team. This means you can and should suggest accommodations or supports that may help your child. For example, if you use a reward chart or visual schedule at home, these could be modified for the classroom. It’s important that any accommodations that help your child are added to their IEP.
Commonly, when a teacher provides certain supports to all students in their classroom, such as a visual schedule, a quiet corner to take a break, or test retakes, these accommodations don’t make it in the IEP. While a supportive teacher is valuable, their individual classroom strategies do not carry the same weight as the IEP.
Your child’s IEP is individualized and follows them wherever they go. So, if the teacher ends up going on medical leave and a long-term sub replaces them, or your child moves classrooms or districts, the IEP serves as a record of the support your child receives that should continue regardless of the individual teacher’s policies. This is also important as your child progresses from grade to grade, since certain accommodations are common in elementary classrooms, but may not be offered to all students in middle school.
Formalizing supports within the IEP document ensures that the student remains protected by the legal weight of the IDEA, regardless of changes in school staff or environment.
You may not even be aware of some accommodations that are helping your child, because their teacher has just built them into their teaching method. To ensure your child’s IEP contains all helpful accommodations, ask the team to document every informal strategy a current teacher uses that helps your child stay focused, remain regulated, or helps them progress academically and add them to the Supplementary Aids and Services section. Any accommodation listed here must be offered to your child and tracked so the team can understand how all the pieces work together to help your child be successful at school. Which brings us to the next tip.
Read the data
It’s important to remember that kids are settling back into the school routine during the first several weeks of school! Don’t get discouraged because interventions or accommodations that worked before are no longer working. Now is not necessarily the time to change things up in your child’s IEP if the plan was working before. Just let your child get back in the routine of school for a few weeks and you’ll probably see things even out a bit.
How will you know? This is where one of the most important pieces of the special education puzzle comes into play: data.
Pretty much everything written into your child’s IEP should be tracked. Accommodations, interventions, time in class, time in the resource room, time with the OT, etc. All of these things are being tracked, along with progress toward the specific goals listed in the IEP.
So, if your child has a reward chart, time with the social worker, and a goal around behaviors, all those things are being tracked. If you have a concern about your child getting back into the swing of things in the new school year, ask for the data that is being collected around your child’s behaviors, goals, and interventions. This way, you can review it after a few weeks and see the overall progress. (If data is not being collected around goals, accommodations, and program time that’s something you need to speak to the IEP team about).
What you’re looking for in the data is progress, not perfection. If behavior incidents or on-task reminders are on an overall decline over three weeks time, that’s great! Try not to get hung up on a single day that might have been a struggle; remember to look at overall progress.
Side note: data is not the same thing as anecdotes! Data is something like: # of escalations in a day, # of times a certain intervention was used, or # of points earned in a day. Anecdotes sound like: “he seemed a little off today and was harder to redirect than normal.”
Starting to look at the data related to your child’s IEP will help you gain perspective on their overall progress. Getting familiar with the data also helps you understand how decisions about special education are made and can help you advocate for your child’s needs more effectively. So, dig into the data this year!
Take a measured approach
Similar to not getting discouraged when interventions seemingly stop working, you don’t want to drop certain services when your child is making progress or experiencing success. You don’t get rid of your umbrella just because you’re no longer getting wet!
Maintaining supports and accommodations is important even, and especially, when your child is stable. When a student with a Behavioral Intervention Plan (BIP) or specific accommodations is performing well, it is evidence that the supports are functional effectively, not necessarily that they are no longer needed. Removing these supports from the IEP too early can lead to a regression.
If your child is steadily experiencing success in any given area of need it’s important to review the data. If the child is regularly using an accommodation, it’s like they will continue to need it in order to be successful. If they are not regularly using an accommodation that is meant to support a certain goal, but still seeing success in that area, this might suggest that they could benefit from a step down to a less restrictive support or accommodation. In this case, instead of removing the accommodation immediately, the team should try offering the accommodation less to see if the student is able to succeed without it for a period of time.
The goal of special education is to support the student in the least restrictive way possible, but that doesn’t mean that the goal is to eventually remove all support altogether. Using data and a measured step-down approach to modifying accommodations ensures that your student continues to receive the support they need to be successful.
Reach out if you need support
These actions will help you as you support your child’s educational journey, but you may still have questions or need more support. If you are in need of more help as you navigate special education, reach out to The Arc for more information about our Educational Advocacy program.
The Arc works in coalition with Michigan Alliance for Families to provide Educational Advocacy services. When you reach out to us you can expect to follow these steps:
- Step 1: Parents/educators/guardians will contact The Arc at (269) 966-2575.
- Step 2: Contact information will be collected and sent to Michigan Alliance for Families (MAF) and a parent mentor will reach out to assist in answering questions and providing guidance.
- Step 3: If it is determined that an Educational Advocate should be needed, the Parent Mentor will notify The Arc and an Advocate will be assigned.
For more information on The Arc's Educational Advocacy Program, please call (269) 966-2575 or email us at advocacy@thearccalhoun.org.
