OARacle Newsletter

Your child’s individualized education program (IEP) comes with a team of school-based experts, including a special education teacher, school representative (often termed the local educational agency or LEA representative), and in many cases, related service providers, such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists. Importantly, your child’s IEP team also includes you, the child’s parent/guardian. While school-based professionals serve as the experts on their specific areas of practice (for example, the speech-language pathologist serves as the expert on communication), you are the expert on your child.

As the expert on your child, you might be among the first to realize that an IEP isn’t meeting your child’s needs. For example, maybe an IEP was initially developed with an academic goal for your child to read consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, but you’ve noticed that they are reading CVC words at home. Maybe an IEP was initially developed with one primary disability classification, but your child received a new medical diagnosis that would justify changing this disability classification.

Whatever the case, when you notice an IEP is no longer meeting your child’s needs, you have the power and responsibility to request changes. While the process for revising IEPs is outlined in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Sec. 300.324, I recommend considering different options based on the number of changes you seek to make. Consider the scenarios below. 

Scenario 1: You notice the IEP isn’t meeting your child’s needs in one or two areas, necessitating relatively small changes.

IEPs can be amended without convening a meeting with the full IEP team and redrafting the entire IEP document. If you reach out to the IEP team member whose section you’d like to update, you can develop a written document to amend or modify the current IEP, provided you and the IEP team member agree on the update.

For instance, if you and your child’s special education teacher agree that your child requires an additional accommodation added to the “Classroom Accommodation & Assessment Participation” section of their IEP, the special education teacher can draft the amendment, and you can sign to indicate your agreement. After the amendment is finalized, the special education teacher should provide you with an updated version of the IEP, which takes effect immediately.

As an IEP team member myself, I always appreciate when a parent suggests an IEP amendment in scenarios such as these. Amendments require less time to write and less time to meet/discuss, allowing the amended IEP to be finalized usually within the same day.

Scenario 2: You notice the IEP isn’t meeting your child’s needs in many areas, necessitating more comprehensive changes.

While IEPs can be amended rather quickly, if you’re requesting changes that are more comprehensive and involve multiple domains of the IEP, amendments can become rather tedious. Recall in the previous section where I suggested you reach out to the IEP team member whose section you’d like to update–if you find yourself reaching out to more than one or two IEP team members to update multiple sections, it may be best to redraft the entire IEP document.

In this case, you should reach out to your child’s IEP case manager and/or LEA representative to request an IEP team meeting. I recommend reaching out via email or an alternative means of written communication so that you can remember exactly when you made the request—in many states, schools are required to convene the IEP team meeting within 30 days of your request.

There is always a chance that your child is not presenting the same way at both school and home, resulting in disagreement between you and members of the school-based team. I see this most often with respect to behavior—your child is an angel at school, but when they return home, they refuse to engage in academic tasks, like reading and writing, or have tantrums. While this can be concerning, understand that your child is likely fatigued after a long day at school. If your child tends to mask during the school day, this fatigue may be intensified.

Remember, IEPs are developed for implementation at school. If your desired changes to the IEP are based solely on observations from the home environment without corroborating data from your child’s school, an update to the IEP might not be warranted. That brings us to a third scenario.

Scenario 3: You’re uncertain about whether the IEP is meeting your child’s needs.

Maybe you have a suspicion that the IEP is inaccurate or needs to be updated, but you’re uncertain about whether school-based data confirms your suspicion. In this case, I recommend reaching out to the appropriate IEP team member(s) for a progress update to ask if their experience in the classroom matches yours.

While this progress update can be informal, you can also request records related to your child’s IEP services. Your child’s IEP likely indicates how often their performance is being measured with respect to each IEP goal, so your child’s IEP team members should be able to provide recent progress data, either verbally or via their written records. For example, I measure student performance during each speech-language therapy session, so if a parent asked me about their child’s accuracy levels during our most recent session, I could provide that data. You can use data like this to help you determine whether an IEP is meeting your child’s needs.

Because the IEP term is annual, it’s okay for the IEP goals to be unobtainable for your child at the beginning of their IEP term. However, all goals should be reasonably achievable within the year. While no one is making any guarantees, the IEP team should be using all available data to make an educated guess of what “reasonable” and “achievable” means for your child.

Additionally, many of my recommendations are made under the assumption that you have a collaborative relationship with your school team. If you start running into problems and your school team appears to be violating the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act at any point, I recommend seeking help, whether from a school administrator/supervisor, special education advocate, or special education lawyer.

As a parent/guardian of a child with an IEP, you always have the power to request changes when you suspect an IEP is no longer meeting your child’s needs at school. The process can look different based on the specific changes you’re requesting, but a collaborative relationship with your school team and an understanding of your parental rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act can ensure changes are made as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Madison Brumbaugh is a speech-language pathologist with a passion for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and serving clients with complex communication needs, including clients who may be nonspeaking. She has previously worked in the public school, private practice, and home healthcare settings and has experience navigating the IEP process from the perspectives of a professional and parent (though she does not have children, she previously served as an educational surrogate parent for a public school student).