Children are our priority. Ensuring their needs are met is our goal.
Learn about the importance of wording in IEPs and 504 Plans, best practices, and what words and phrasing to use and/or avoid.
Teachers will engage with student to ensure student understands and accurately records all assignments in student’s planner.
Now imagine attending an IEP meeting at which this goal is being discussed. You push for more details, but the staff member helming the meeting insists that engage means the following:
“It’s not that they’re waiting for to come to them. They’re going to engage with .”
What could go wrong?
“The IEP will share reading data with parents on a monthly basis.”
After six months of meetings, your internal parent alarm starts going off because the data provided by the school doesn’t match what you’re seeing at home.
You submit a FERPA request for all reading data related to your child.
The FERPA response provides you negative reading data that the school didn’t previous share with you.
You want to complain to the school and/or submit a complaint to the state, but . . .Â
The school followed the IEP. It did share reading data on a monthly basis. There wasn’t anything in the IEP that stated all data had to be provided.
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.
If something is accessible, it is often an alternative method of access.
For example, a student might need a ramp and an elevator as alternatives to the stairs used by his peers.
Another student might need Braille or large text as an alternative to the text provided to her peers.
However, pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the unique needs of students must be addressed.
In other words: Clarity and ensuring the unique needs of the child are met is more important than word count.
“Access to Flash Pass”
“Access” is up there with “as needed” and “all” and “before”.
What is “access”, other than a word that is over-used and under-defined in IEPs and 504 Plans?
In IEP and 504 Plan worlds, assessments are interpreted as differently as a person might interpret a piece of poetry. Whereas one person might interpret Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to be about being an individual choosing a different path, marching to a different drummer, and so on, there are others who point to this understanding as nonsense, as the incorrect interpretation.
Who knew assessments could be the same way?