Before your child heads back to school, it is important to do a complete IEP review. This plan will be in place from Day 1 of the new school year. Knowing where your child should be receiving instruction, their instructional or service minutes, IEP goals, and accommodations is vital to staying on top of compliance.
Why Reviewing Your Child’s IEP Matters
There are dozens of reasons why you should be an expert in your child’s IEP, but let’s focus on the top three.
- An IEP is a legal contract between the school and your child. Within the IEP, the school outlines the things they will do for your child:
- Goals they will work to achieve
- Instruction they will provide to meet those goals
- Support services, like PT, Speech, or OT, they will provide to meet your child’s goals
- Setting(s) where your child will receive instruction or support services
- Amount (of time) your student will receive over a period of time
- How long the IEP is “valid”
2. Data drives all aspects of your child’s IEP. Your child’s data is captured in the Present Levels section of the IEP. Present Levels may go by different names on your specific IEP, but it is always a detailed report of:
- Most recent results from the last eligibility or IEP-related assessments
- Most recent screening data
- Information about social skills, motor skills, academic skills, self-care skills, emotional regulation, behavioral regulation, etc.
You need to know what’s in the data before you can assess whether the goals, services, instruction, placements, accommodations, or minutes are appropriate for your child. If you’re not aware of what’s needed based on the data, you can’t effectively advocate for changes.
3. While the IEP is a contract that should be fully provided with fidelity, it’s important to monitor what’s happening at school. And you can’t make sure that everything is happening unless you know what’s in the IEP.
The school absolutely should be checking to make sure that all the services and minutes and instruction is happening. They should be monitoring the IEP goals to track progress. But that doesn’t always happen as it should.
Which is why parents need to know what’s in their child’s IEP, front to back and top to bottom.
How To Do a Complete IEP Review
There are so many ways to review your child’s IEP, and you’ll probably get different tips from every education advocate in business. Let’s walk through a few different methods.
Hard Copy Review
First, print out a physical copy of your child’s current IEP. If you’d like to save paper, you can do a double sided document. But to avoid bleed-through and confusion, single sided is ideal.
Next, get some highlighters and sticky notes. Truly any colors will work, but coordinating your highlighter colors to your sticky notes could help you track info over time. Whether you’ve color coordinated or not, it’s important to determine a color coding system. Use different, specific colors for:
- High scores, strong progress, areas of strength, or other good news
- Low scores that are not of urgent concern, but should be monitored
- Low scores that are of urgent concern, areas of significant weakness
- Names of assessments
- Diagnoses
- Goals, objectives, and/or accommodations
- Parts that you disagree with or other errors
Admittedly, that’s a lot of highlighters. So, feel free to combine some things if preferred. It is recommended to keep the top three points separate. Often, using green/yellow/red or pink to highlight the positives/not urgent/urgent data is ideal.
Start on page 1 and read through everything carefully. Use the highlighters whenever you find important information. Not every page with have highlights and that’s okay. On the other hand, some pages will be chock full of color!
As you are highlighting, jot down your thoughts, concerns, or questions on the sticky notes. Add them to the page near the section you highlighted.
By the end, you’ll have a fully annotated hard copy of your child’s current IEP. You can store this in a three ring binder or your preferred filing system for future reference.
Digital Review and Annotation
There are many ways to review your child’s IEP using digital resources.
One excellent method is Kami. This platform lets users upload documents, including PDFs and photos, for annotation. Kami offers a free trial period with access to all features, a totally free account with limited features, or paid accounts with at several price points with a variety of features.
You can convert documents to meet the platform specifications, run a text recognition scan, and then use the built-in tools to highlight or add notes.
When you’re done, you can seamlessly add the file to Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive. Kami will link to both OneDrive and Google Drive. You can also print or download a PDF, with the highlights and annotations or notes you added.
Kami makes it easy to review, highlight, add notes, and then store your document digitally. However, you shouldn’t upload or review sensitive IEP materials on public or shared devices. And you should always be aware of who can access your Kami account and your OneDrive or Google Drive. Closely protect your passwords.
If you are looking for a more hands-off method, Highlighter is an AI platform that can help. After creating a free trial account (7 day free trial), you can upload your child’s IEP or other support documents. The AI tool will scan and analyze the documents. Then, pull-out and summarize data as well as generating questions, talking points, and proposals to bring to the IEP team.
Highlighter also builds a timeline of documents, data, and events that parents can reference going forward. This feature can help parents to track IEP changes over time and advocate more effectively.
Highlighter is also password protected, but you should still carefully monitor when and where you use this tool.
Interested in Highlighter? Get 20% off when you use code MFES20
Running Notes
Maybe you don’t want to mark up your child’s IEP in any way, either digitally or IRL. And that’s totally fine!
A great option would be to record your thoughts, concerns, and questions as you go through the IEP. You can use a notebook to handwrite your notes or use your preferred word processor to record your thoughts.
If you go this route, it’s important to be clear and specific in your records. One way to do this is to include page numbers, section titles, or other identifying information to your notes. This can make it easier to connect the dots and find information later.
What Happens After I Review My Child’s IEP?
What you do after your complete IEP review depends on a variety of factors:
- Have questions? Write them down and then email the questions to your child’s case manager, classroom teacher, school principal, and/or other special education administrators.
- Concerned that your child’s goals don’t match the data? Request a meeting ASAP by sending an email to the case manager, school administrators, and/or special education administrators.
- Want to add, remove, or change something else? Put that request in writing and send it over to the school-based members of the IEP team.
- Worried that your child’s goals haven’t changed over time? Not seeing the progress you expected? Request an IEP meeting to discuss your observations and to have a discussion about what’s next.
- Need to set up a better communication system? Definitely get in touch with the case manager and classroom teacher(s)! You’ll want to work closely with all teachers who work with your child to create a routine that makes sense for everyone and gets you the insights you need.
Sometimes there isn’t an urgent need to set up an IEP meeting, makes changes, or contact a teacher. And that’s okay. Doing the deep data dive is honestly sometimes enough for right now.
But that shouldn’t be the end of things either. Now that you know all the nuts and bolts of your child’s IEP, you are better positioned to keep track of things going forward. It’ll be relatively easier to monitor:
- Progress on goals
- Service minutes
- Use of accommodations
- Testing results
- Behavior
- Information from school
Each time that you have an IEP meeting or there are new documents, repeat your review process. Then add that information to your filing system, putting items together by type and/or chronological order.