The Special Education Hammer Problem
If you got a hammer, everything looks like a nail so they say. Even worse if the only thing you’ve ever heard about or seen is a hammer and how do you even know there are other tools?
Or how, when or where to use them?
My wife and my first encounter with special education was through the initial assessment request that we were directed to do after our son was diagnosed with autism.
From there, we went to our first IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting at the beginning of his assessment and then another IEP meeting at the end of his assessment to start special education in Preschool.
IEP All the time, Everywhere
Everything was IEP meetings.
No training, no orientation. No explanation of how the special education system worked, how we were supposed to interact with it. What its goal was.
Just sign the form for the IEP assessment. Get the assessment. Sign off on the IEP agreement document (cuz why not?). Oh, and here’s a copy of your Procedural Safeguards – whatever those are – sign here.
We were in a daze and no one was in a hurry to “educate” us on what the heck we were agreeing to.
But we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what we were creating or agreeing to. We didn’t have any sense of the purpose of any of this except for feeding a system that we had no concept of, but we found ourselves in the middle of.
I think I called with an “Individualized Education Plan” because that’s what I thought it was – a big planning document.
IEP meetings and IEP agreement were the only two tools I knew.
They were my hammers.
NOTE TO SELF AND OTHERS- Teachers and administrators need an on-boarding process for brand new parents in the assessment process, one when entering a new school system or school with an existing IEP.
But the IEP meeting and the IEP agreement are just a small part of the whole special education system.
What is key is the actual education program delivered in the real classroom for your child.
What was missing from our experience entirely was any discussion of where we were going or could go and why we were doing it.
Of course anytime we had any questions, problems, concerns or anything else… we dusted off our two tools:
- We called an IEP meeting and
- We attempted to modify the IEP agreement.
IEP agreement isn’t even a hammer, it is more of a sledgehammer handed to a blind person.
It is a powerful but ugly, brute-force tool with limited flexibility and no sense of strategy and no nuance.
Hacking the Special Education Operating System
Welcome to the beginning of a series of articles that are going to the the basis of a book to be called:
Better IEP meetings and Special Education Communications
*** Suggestions Welcome! ***
A while back, I wrote an extended article on IEP Meetings was a while back as well as a number of articles about special education communications – there’s a lot more to do.
The IEP Trojan Horse
The title begins with Better IEP meetings, but it is kind of a Trojan horse. If you’ve joined us for one of our Wednesday coffees we mostly focus on is working the many informal communication tools that you can use to achieve your child’s education objectives and deal with problems.
And then use the IEP meeting and the IEP agreement to do what they do well:
Establish a formal high-level mutual understanding of your educational strategy for your child and then clearly focus on the resources that your specific IEP meeting team needs to meet that objective
The Goal
If things are work well, you’ll have fewer, more focused IEP meetings and more informal communications. Ensurethat you and your IEP team are on the same page and that you’re doing everything you can to ensure that your IEP team really wants to do the very best they can to educate your child
Just as you can’t use just a contract that will get your bathroom remodeled well
Similarly
You can’t IEP someone into doing a good job
Getting the best out of your IEP team is really what you want… and an effective communication strategy is a big part of how you are going to help make that happen.
