In a perfect world, every year you and the school officials will hold an Individual Education Plan (IEP) meeting for your child. It’s a time to come together, set goals, track progress, and work on getting your child everything they need to be as successful as they can be both in school, and preparing them for once they leave school.
However, not everyone is always on the same page. And sometimes school officials will fight you instead of working with you so they can use the money they get for your child to be used somewhere else (like the football team).
Every time we had an IEP meeting scheduled for my son I would get sick to my stomach just thinking about it. It was always a battle for us. Every time we turned around the school would try to take things out of his IEP saying “he doesn’t need this anymore.”
Things like summer school, his para, speech – “nope, not needed anymore” said the school. We lost the para, but saved the speech and summer school, just barely. Other students in our school system didn’t fare as well. We were told normal IEP meetings last about 30 to 45 minutes, ours would go on for two hours or more as we fought tooth and nail for everything our son needed.
Finally the last straw was when they informed us that they intended to remove our son from the program entirely. What do we do? We knew our son was on the spectrum, but they wouldn’t even do the testing! It was stressful to say the least.
Our autism support group had a presentation from an IEP advocate about two weeks before our IEP meeting. The whole time she was talking to the group I was thinking – this is what we need!
A few days after the meeting, we called the advocate to explain our situation and see if she could help. We showed her our son’s past IEP and had explained our troubles. We also sent her all of our documentation of progress, diagnosis, and anything else we had. Being well organized we had years of information in folders to send her.
Our son’s original diagnosis of developmentally delayed was done through school testing. But since the school wouldn’t order new testing, she recommended that we get our own testing done with a psychologist outside of the school system, specifically one that specializes in autism. She also recommended several other services that we didn’t even know our son could qualify for. We were told this normally takes several months to get an appointment, but when we mentioned our advocate’s name, they found us a slot for the same week. It was at this point we realized how important it was to know someone with some influence in this area.
We added her to the IEP attendance list (note: this is really important. If you surprise them with someone, they can cancel the meeting and reschedule, so always let them know who is planning on attending) and she attended our son’s meeting with us. We noticed that while she stayed silent most of the time, the school stopped fighting us. Suddenly they were agreeing to the things that our son needed that they had previously blocked. The few times they would say “we can’t” she would point out that by law they had to give him all the services that he needed. We didn’t know all the laws regarding what he was due, but she did. When she could quote the law to them and it simplified the process for us.
In the end, our son stayed in the program and kept all his current services. Plus he gained several new services and we got several goals added that we had been fighting for years to add. Every meeting at the school went much better after that one.
Now, there was an expense involved with hiring an IEP advocate, but it was worth every penny to us. You are allowed to bring anyone to your IEP meeting to assist you. This can be a grandparent, spouse, or paid advocate like we used. If the school is fighting you and trying to remove services that your child needs, you might want to consider hiring your own advocate. We only needed her the one time, other parents I know hire her each time they go, to make life easier for them.
We do recommend that you research your local advocates before hiring one and make sure you hire one from your area, as they know all the rules for your area and most likely have worked with your child’s school system before.
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