a successful iep meeting

Walking into your first IEP meeting can be daunting, scary and very intimidating. Lets be honest, you are out of your element and you don’t have time to educate yourself on the ins and outs of SPED! Its just not feasible. But I’m here to tell you that there is so much you CAN do! Lets start by understanding that we should have the assumption that the professionals in that meeting will be creating and providing all of the appropriate accommodations for my child. Well tap the breaks because you shouldn’t assume that. At all. Too many times in my 30 years I’ve seen proposals for accommodations that are ineffective, inappropriate or simply not enough. And instead of a productive, meaningful meeting there is blame placed on the child. THE CHILD!!. So as a parent, what do you do? Before any meeting gather any and all data, evidence and documentation and basically anything that points to a deficiency in your child. You have that stuff, right? RIGHT?!? Now we have to link that information to how it affects his or her standard of education. Because isn’t why we’re here? For example: “Alex has been having outbursts and leaving the classroom based on emails and phone calls I’ve been getting at home. He’s been disorganized, losing his work, his backpack. The standard of education is that a student must be able to function appropriately and stay in class, stay focused and maintain his or her materials. At this point accommodations must be proposed to address these deficiencies. One example that you will propose would be ‘Teachers will refocus Alex, allow him time to leave the room so he can gather himself before an outburst. He should also visit with the school OT to strengthen his executive functioning skills”. The accommodations must be what I call SMART accommodations: S-specific, M- measurable A- achievable R- realistic and T- Timebound. If the school does not provide these very appropriate and meaningful accommodations, they are in violation.