Children are our priority. Ensuring their needs are met is our goal.
VDOE identified four counts of noncompliance related to PWCPS’ division-wide independent educational evaluation (IEE) practices, to include failure to follow U.S. Department of Education’s (USDOE) June 2020 required changes to Virginia Administrative Code (VAC).
IEPs are the responsibility of the school to implement from day one of the school year.
If you run into issues with the date of implementation and implementation by teachers, you’ll want to look at some of these regulations.
If you’re advised “that’s how we do it”, ask for documentation citing this to be true, and pull out IDEA or Section 504, and point out “as needed” doesn’t appear in either.
A child doesn’t need an IEP plan or a 504 plan as needed.
Children need everything in their IEPs or 504s period.
For example, one student might need breaks after ever 30 minutes of testing, while another student might not be able to test more than 1.5 hours per day.
Are your child’s struggles and your gut feeling enough for your child to qualify for special education?
No. However, your gut feeling and your child’s struggles shouldn’t be discounted either.
“Reduced Load” is an accommodation that is wordsmithed like a politician’s speech. It doesn’t matter if your gut reaction to it is good or bad. Either way, you’re left wondering what it really means.
A reduced load is exactly what it sounds like: it is a reduction of the load the student must address.
What’s confusing about that?
However, being taught the necessary skills to read and write involves more than teaching children encoding and decoding. It involves learning how to hold a book and a pencil, tracking words on a page or screen, learning what strategies to use when fatigue or frustration overcome them, learning how to best advocate when they are struggling, identifying assistive technology to help them and teaching them how to use the assistive technology, and identifying and providing the specially-designed instruction needed to teach students this other side of reading and writing, and how to practice and perfect it.