Fighting district on unqualified Wilson instructor for dyslexia

[Betsy]

Help! Our public district is trying to assign a child with dyslexia, who attends our private school, to a teacher who has only taken Wilson's 16 hour introduction course, but is not certified. Despite other students in our private school working with an OG practitioner, the district is now saying that they, "can't offer our students more than they are offering theirs." Is this legal to offer services that aren't being delivered with fidelity for a student with a language based learning disability? Of note, the district does currently have at least one of their students working with the same OG practitioner (I know the parent). What options do we have for appealing/fighting the district to deliver services with fidelity? 

[JSD24]

Part of the IEP process is progress monitoring.  This person might be great with getting this student to make progress and that's really what counts in the world of IEPs.  Have the school gather data on progress 8X per year and see how well this is working (you want this spelled out in the IEP).  If the student is closing the gap (more than one year's worth of progress every year since the expectation for typical students is to stay at grade level with a year of progress every year) the school has data that this is a good match for this student.  If the results don't show this, you have data showing that something different is needed.

I'm not a lawyer so I can't say if what the school is doing is legal.  (And appropriate seems to be the yardstick used in IDEA.)  I also want to mention there is a huge shortage of people who are certified in any of the many flavors of O-G that are out there.  I was talking to a parent in my area in one of the smaller school districts (2000 students).  They have zero teachers who are certified in an O-G based reading program.

Once you have data showing a lack of progress - 4 data points is what I'm thinking is the minimum to see how progress is trending - you'll have evidence that the IEP needs to be tweaked to something that will help the student catch up/close the gap.  I know you don't want to let this IEP go into place for a full semester so you have data that their offer of FAPE isn't working but I'm not sure of a way around this.  Not sure if someone else has a better idea and wants to post it.

[Betsy]

Thank you for your response. It is a good reminder that frequent progress monitoring written into the IEP  would be a way to demonstrate if the child isn't progressing. It's hard to have an individualized OG instructor in our midst, but the district unwilling to support that given the significance of this childs need.  I know that they are hard to find and expensive, so I don't take for granted the gift that our other students have been given.