The IEP team: what parents can say in the room (audio overview)

A free audio overview for families, derived from Special Learning's course "Multidisciplinary Collaboration Series, Module 1: IEP Team Multidisciplinary Collaboration" (presented by Karen Chung). It is a synthetic voice, not a person, summarizing one session of the course; it is not the session itself.

Download the MP3 · Read the article version

Episode notes

• The article version of this overview: special-learning.com/blog/iep-team-what-parents-can-say/
• Free tools and guides, no account needed: special-learning.com/free-resources
• The ABCs of Autism guide, free and written for families: store.special-learning.com/free-abcs-of-autism.html
• The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library, written for professionals: special-learning.com/for-behavior-analysts

Transcript

This is a free audio overview from Special Learning. It's a synthetic voice, not a person, and it's summarizing one session of a training course. It isn't the session itself.

The session is the first module of a series on multidisciplinary collaboration, and its subject is the IEP team. It was hosted by Karen Chung, the founder of Special Learning, with a panel of school-based practitioners. The IEP is the individualized education program used in United States public schools, so the details here are American; a note for everyone else comes at the end.

Here is the moment the whole session turns on, and it's one most parents will recognize.

A family walks into their first IEP meeting and counts the people already sitting down. A teacher. A second teacher. Someone from the district. A speech therapist. Perhaps a psychologist, a behavior analyst. The folders are open. The room has clearly met before. It is very easy, in that moment, to feel like a guest at a meeting about your own child.

The panel's first point is about the paperwork, and it's a fact rather than an opinion. On the list of mandatory members of an IEP team, the parent is a mandated member. Not an observer who has been invited to listen. A member, with the same standing as the teachers and the specialists.

The panel walked through who else is required. A meeting coordinator. The special education teacher. The general education teacher, when the child spends time in a general education class. And, particularly for an initial meeting, a professional whose specific job is to explain and interpret the test results.

That last seat is worth knowing about before you go in, because it is the one most often left unused. The evaluation report is the document that decides which services get discussed. If it is read out in numbers you cannot use, there is a person at the table whose role is to translate it, and asking them to is not an imposition. It is the reason they are there.

Everyone else at the table, a speech and language pathologist, an occupational therapist, a behavior analyst, a psychologist, is there because the evaluation identified a need. So if you are wondering why a particular specialist is or isn't present, that question has an answer, and it lives in the evaluation.

The second point is about the student. One panelist said that many people do not know students have the right to be involved in their own IEP process. Involvement becomes mandatory once the team reaches transition planning, the part that looks ahead to life after school. But the panel's point was that the mandatory stage is a floor, not a starting line. A student can take part well before it, in small ways, like choosing goals, or even choosing what to read. The panelist added that research finds the power to make a choice, even among identical things, has a real effect on behavior. The shift the team is trying to make is from a plan written about a young person to a plan that includes goals they would recognize as their own.

And then the sentence that changes the meeting. Asked what parents most need, one panelist said that parents are their child's greatest advocate, and the most consistent thread through the child's whole educational life. Teachers change every year. Therapists change with placements. Parents are at every meeting.

Then she named the thing professionals forget: how difficult it is for a parent to say, that might not work for us.

That is the sentence. It's not a challenge, and it's not a complaint. It's a piece of information the team cannot get from anywhere else. A goal that is sound on paper can be impossible in a particular week, with the schedule, the commute, the siblings, the job. Nobody at that table can see that. If it goes unsaid, the plan gets written around a family that does not exist, and everyone spends a year wondering why it isn't being followed at home. Saying it early is not obstruction. It's the correction that makes the rest of the plan usable.

The panel also had something to say to the professionals in the room, and it's worth hearing as a parent, because it tells you what a good team member already assumes about you. Families, they said, are often in survival mode, doing what is best for their child and very probably already at the limit of what the day allows. And even though parents are not in the building for the six or seven hours of the school day, they are the driving force behind everything the team wants to see.

So, four things to take in with you. Ask for the evaluation before the meeting, not at it. Ask why each specialist is present or absent. Say the "that might not work for us" sentence out loud if it applies, while the goals are still being written. And ask when your child can start attending, whatever their age.

If you are listening outside the United States, the IEP and this team membership come from American federal law. Your country almost certainly has its own version, under a different name, with different paperwork and different rights. What transfers is not the law. It's the room. A meeting where professionals arrive already briefed and a family arrives to be informed works the same way everywhere, and so does the correction. Look up what your own system calls the parent's role, because the specific rights differ and they matter.

None of this is legal advice, and it doesn't describe the rules of any particular school district. For your own child's rights, ask your district or your country's education authority.

If you want something to use today rather than something to buy, Special Learning's free tools and guides are at special-learning.com/free-resources, no account needed.

The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library; the link is in the episode notes.

This has been a free audio overview from Special Learning.