JSD24

Are you in PA (GIEPs are a PA thing - I'm in PA - my child had a 504 & GIEP)? When my child had a 504, I never signed it. Parents are not required members of the 504 team. A signature isn't needed. It is best pract to review the 504 annually so it can be tweaked as the student grows and school demands change. It might be school policy to get parents to sign off on a 504 and to discontinue it if the parent doesn't OK it by signing. You can request a 504 meeting at any time. Sounds like a meeting is needed to put support back in place.

IEPs should be individualized to the disabled student. If the disabled student is being distracting with using a fidget, they can be taught to use it in a way that's not distracting. If they don't learn to do this, I can see access to this fidget being limited. My daughter's school had a universal ban on water bottles (this was pre-pandemic, now they are allowed because there are no water fountains in the school). Because she had a need and it was in her IEP, she was allowed to have one with her. It didn't matter that other kids put vodka into their water bottle in the past. I would request that the specific fidget your child gets comfort/stimulation from be mentioned in the IEP & then you can ask that the IEP gets followed. Telling a student that they can't have a fidget due to their disability because a gen ed student abused the use of the same sort of thing doesn't follow IDEA. Diabetic students need access to sweets even if another child made a mess with candy in the classroom. You need to meet the need of the disabled student - not their classmates. I would see how the alt fidget goes. If it works, great. If not, they need to find something that meets the student's needs like the banned fidget does.

I've run into this. In order to do teletherapy or telemed, the provider has to be certified in the state the patient is in. I've seen it with ADHD meds and a student going out of state to college. Also happened during the pandemic with kids staying in another state with grandparents while the parents, who are essential workers, went to work. The therapist wasn't certified to work in the other state so they couldn't provide services. In theory, the teachers are certified in your state and shouldn't be teaching kids in other states either. I have a feeling that some parents get around this by not mentioning that they aren't home. I know when it comes to home/hospital education, the LEA is the district the hospital is in. The only exception I know is McKinney-Vento which covers homeless students who might be staying outside of the district where the familiar district provides bussing to the old school so they have some continuity and this doesn't apply to traveling. I know some virtual school cater to actors and athletes who might be out of state for work/competitions. Not sure how they get around the teacher not being certified in the state they are in.

If an IHP is attached to an IEP, you might need the whole IEP team to make changes to it. I hate IHPs. There is no agency to oversee that they are followed. Is there a way to put some of the accommodations in the IHP into the IEP? You could write a parent letter of concern that you didn't get a copy of the IHP to review. You can also mention that your concern is the IHP not being followed since it doesn't seem to be as accessible as the IEP. Sending a PWN with a draft IEP sounds like predetermination...

There was a stretch of time that schools in my area weren't sending parents finalized IEPs. I think attorneys got involved & that changed. I know my district sends most things via email. Did they email it as an attachment? Did it go to Spam? Was it too big for your email box?

There should be an IEP meeting with all required members where placement gets discussed. The PWN to change the placement should be issued soon after the IEP meeting. I think an email is in order. Dear sp ed teacher- We met on October 20 and discussed changing XX's placement to 2 days of ABA & 3 days of Pre-K. I have yet to see the IEP & PWN reflecting these changes. Please send me a copy of the IEP ASAP. Thanks.

District of residence is based on where a student sleeps. If they are sleeping at a RTF or hospital, the district the RTF or hospital is in is the LEA. When they sleep at home, the district you pay taxes to is the LEA. (I've not seen this written but I used to meet regularly w/ my Pupil Services Director. We have a RTF in my district & she explained how things work.) Not a red flag bad vibe in my eyes because I've seen it before. (Most districts have policies where a student can live/sleep in a district their parents don't live in and they can go to the other district's schools. It's also how foreign exchange students get to go to US schools. If you sleep in the district, you can go to school there.) Not sure if this applies but a students needs to be available for evals. 'In the hospital' is not available.

The school might need to assign a teacher from another grade to work with this student. If the wording says 'sub', they can hire a temporary teacher or a guest teacher - so long as they aren't a sub - so they technically are following the IEP. (The IEP was definitely not written with a baby boom in mind.)

Mini lessons with the teacher are OK. If they are with a sub, you are not following the IEP and this opens the school up to a due process suit. Subs cannot instruct this student or they are not following the IEP. With the IEP, the school & family agreed to this. It is a binding contract that the school should be following. If you want to find balance, you need to redo that part of the IEP. When my sons were in 3rd grade, their teacher was on maternity leave. They started the year with a sub. Their teacher was due to come back for the last few weeks of school but the parents advocated that she not come back to her classroom so the sub they had from Sept - May could finish the year with her class. If this was the situation, this child would miss a full year of instruction. My twins also had an English teacher in 7th who went on sabbatical for 1/2 the year where they had a sub. Long Term subs aren't like a daily sub, maybe the IEP should have covered this happening. It's a situation where you are between a rock & a hard place. Do your job & teach this student so they can learn which violates the IEP or follow the IEP & don't provide instruction for a months long maternity leave and that verges on educational neglect. Teachers are not paid enough to make this decision themself. It really requires admin to figure this out. Do you know the backstory on why this is in the IEP? Did a sub contradict what the teacher said which resulted in a shutdown of the student? Knowing this might help the IEP team come up with something appropriate to the situation.

504s are quicker to put in place. Using the nurse's bathroom & having assistance with cleaning up bowel movements makes sense at his age (and until around 12 or 13 when he can clean himself up - might be later w/ ASD and it being a developmental delay). This is an accommodation. Bathroom is not something an aide (unless they are a PCA) can help with - laws might be different where you are. Most schools don't do both. Any 504 type accommodations can go into an IEP. See if he qualifies for the IEP. This tends to take 100 days. It he qualifies, put the accommodations with the bathroom into the IEP. For a long time, I was following an incontinence group and kids really can't do an adequate job with cleaning up bowel movements w/o showering. If there is poop on the skin & a pee accident, this is how diaper rash develops. You might need documentation from his doctor to get the school do provide the help he needs. (Schools are data driven. You can ask if they have assessed how well he cleans himself so you can review their data on how he's able to do this himself. If you don't think their data is accurate, you can ask for an IEE at school expense but this might not work with a 504. Asking for their data is where to start.)

If I saw this on an IEP, I would think the school's obligation would be to provide instructional material to the family and they would homeschool during any teacher absences. (I'm shocked it got into an IEP given that teachers can get pregnant or have an accident that could leave them out of the picture for a long while.) It does make sense in a co-teacher situation where the odds of both teachers being out would be slim. My thought is to follow the IEP. That's the school's obligation or they will get into hot water with the state. Notify the parent to not send their child to school until your coworker is back from leave. (Let the sp ed director talk to the school's solicitor about the implications of following this clause in the IEP. It's really at this level IMO.)

So you're saying his teachers need training in how kids with autism mask & it's exhausting for them to keep it up the whole day at school. I'm hoping he's got a medical ASD diagnosis in case the school says he doesn't qualify under ASD on his IEP.

PA has a system of APS - approved private schools. Districts seem to like these because PDE helps with extra funding. They might not be looking at discharge paperwork that's separate from the IEP. IMO, you need a meeting (and I think you'll want to ask if you can record it) so you can get more details from the school on this. If he's not in a building, the district shouldn't be ignoring him. Education in the home might be something to ask for so he has access to an education. If you are in SE PA, this might help: https://adayinourshoes.com/iep-private-school-placement-list-chester-county/ BTW, when a student is hospitalized, home/hospital should kick in. The thing is that he's residing at the hospital so their school district needs to provide the education and this might not be the one you live in. It is a messy situation & I'm glad the state has this on their radar. My district is emailing IEP related documentation to parents. Be sure to be checking Spam in case your IEP invite ends up there. I've also seen where a parent didn't get an invite & the IEP meeting was held w/o them. (In this case, the school was unable to show that it was sent. Parents are divorced & neither got it.) I was thinking about suggesting a charter public school but it might cause further delays in figuring out what his IEP needs to look like.

The big con is a lack of time for the school to provide access to the state curriculum where your child might fall behind with learning the state standards. Since is seems like this isn't a goal and your child will most likely graduate with a certificate & not a diploma, it's not a con to consider too strongly . Another con would be if this didn't mesh with state truancy laws. Is he in a self-contained life-skills classroom? If he is, they have to have the right ratios in the room - even if he's only there part-time. It could rub the school the wrong way. Would homeschooling make more sense? What benefit is he getting from his attendance in school? The pro of any child's education is for them to learn the skills they will need after they graduate HS. Every student needs different skills depending on their life's path. If ABA is the thing your child needs, that's what they should get.

I'm also wondering why they are redoing an autism eval. Isn't it a life-long disability? Has there been improvement where the level changed? Teacher training can be an IEP service. An autism inservice for this teacher would benefit your child & others like him.

The new school has to follow the old IEP. The old school messed up if they didn't have an IEP meeting to change the placement following release from the RTF. "They felt my child was ready for a less restrictive environment" but failed to document this so the new school district knew this. Schools (teachers and subs) should not be expected to be omniscient and magically figure out how the other school felt. Without documentation, this appears to have been the expectation. There is a saying in education: If it's not in writing, it didn't happen. To facilitate moving forward, you might want to email the KS school and tell them the 'New school is having difficulty following the plan to move to a less restrictive placement following discharge from the RTF. Can you please show me where this was documented in the IEP? Was there a letter or email that stated this? If there is no documentation showing that this was the plan, can you please create it? New school is attempting to follow the old IEP and cannot find a similar RTF with an empty bed to place XX in. Meanwhile, XX doesn't have a school placement to go to. Help!' Not sure if a no-meet revision to the old IEP is appropriate since it doesn't seem to say that a self contained classroom within the public school following discharge from the RTF is where he needs to be.

I think you need to contact Marcie Lipsitt - https://marcielipsitt.com/. She should have ideas on how to get this child an IEP w/o needing to fail first. They need to be behind - not failing. Limited participation and ADLs makes them sound behind. They need access. You might end up with a 504.

Let's start at the beginning. What does the old IEP say is the placement? What are the supports & services? This is what the new school needs to do. Ask to meet with the sp ed supervisor and go over what's in the IEP that's holding your child up from attending. Write a parental concerns letter outlining that your child graduated from an RTF and was looking forward to the move and consistency of being back in the neighborhood school. Meanwhile, she regressed because she has no structure with being out of school. Ask them what needs to happen so she can start attending. PA has facilitated IEP meetings, I think you might want to ask for that.

Create a paper trail. Email the teacher & cc the SLP. Hi- I'm waiting for the Permission to Evaluate form from the school since I requested an evaluation for speech verbally. We have a hard to understanding XX & feel she should qualify for speech therapy services once the evaluation is complete. I'm looking to help move this forward. Thanks,

Does the person doing the current reeval have experience w/ the ADOS? If they don't, the results won't be accurate & you don't want it done by them. I'd ask which teachers will be doing the GARS. The homeroom teacher might be one of 3.

I'm not going to answer your question. What I'm going to do is to say that school evaluations need to be complete & accurate. Asking one adult in a child's life doesn't sound complete to me. The person who did this eval, IMO, failed to follow best practices with evaluating the sensory integration issue this student deals with. (Kids will mask at school so they can fit in & not get teased. Then they come home and have symptoms of Afterschool Restraint Collapse.) There is wording in IDEA that says multiple measures. Not following IDEA if this is all they did. I'm not sure that a teacher in front of 20+ students has the bandwidth to nuance the sensory difficulties one student might have going on. My feeling is to ask the student and have the parent fill out the parent version of this rating scale so there are multiple measures. A parent letter of concern might also be something to do if the OT doing this eval doesn't request info from the parent & student.

I'm not familiar with FMD so I had to look it up. Functional Mental Disability looks to be a term that only KY uses which is why I wasn't familiar with it. If he's average except for math & writing, he doesn't have a intellectual disability but it seems like that's how his placement treats him. My feeling is that if he's got processing issues, you add special instruction to help him learn to process better. I'm curious how well he did when he had a 1:1 helping him in K-5. Was the 1:1 strictly a scribe or did they do things for him where he appeared to be more capable? In reading between the lines, I see you questioning the accuracy (or maybe the interpretation) of the eval that was done before MS that moved him into his current self-contained classroom. I also see concern about the competency of the teacher/appropriateness of the class given how your son reacted to going to school with them when the year started. You have a lot in your post. I'm not too sure about the rules in KY. I'm in PA & the alt assessment can only be given to the lowest 1% of students in a district. My district has 12,000 students so only 120 can take the alt assessment. Not sure if your school has limits like this - might be worth poking around to see how your school compares to other in your area with the numbers taking the alt assessment. This should be on a website with the tests scores. Here, the alt assessment a simpler test of the same state standards that all students get tested on in grades 3-8 and once in HS (as mandated under ESSA). IMO, these tests are meaningless with some disabled students. If your child had READING issues, I can see them not doing well on these tests as it's a lot of reading comprehension that's needed. You said his only low areas were math and writing. If he's grade level with reading, it doesn't make sense to put him in a self-contained remedial class - it follows he should be with same-age classmates so he's in the Least Restrictive Environment. I've seen students have behaviors when the instruction isn't at a good level for them. Gifted kids will be bored and act out while those that can't keep up will get frustrated and act out. My feeling is he's bored because he's average except for a math & writing disability which is what his eval showed. Rather than remediate, the school wrote him off by putting him into this class. He's not getting appropriate instruction. So, what can you do? You want to match the child the eval describes to the services they need. He needs access to grade level for all but math & writing since these are the only areas of need. He needs remedial instruction in math & writing to see about him catching up. He might need a dysgraphia assessment given his writing issues. He might need assistive technology in math & writing (talk to text) until he's closer to where classmates are or it might be for the long term. When you looked at what he was being taught, it seemed to be well below what he's capable of doing. He's pulled from the grade level classes he was attending so they can give him work below his classmates...and it seems like things would be similar if he went to a different school. I remember being in a meeting with my director of pupil services. What she said was that the school needed to meet the needs of the students and if the classes they had didn't do this, they needed to create a class that did. If I had to guess, the other kids in your son's classes might be similar to your child. I think you need a lawyer to get your child an IEP that is appropriate for him. My suggestion is to reach out to the Disability Rights group in your state or your local Arc. Tell them what's going on and get them to help you to work with (fight ?) the school for an education that's appropriate for your son. Bring in other families and make it a class action suit - there is strength in numbers.

Proactive consequence - not a punitive one. I think the teacher did class discussions so it became a teachable moment. Whenever there is misbehavior in a classroom, IMO, there is problematic impact to the class. I think the philosophy the teacher had was to minimize these by turning them into teachable moments. It boils down to self-regulation. If students aren't approaching mastery of self-regulation, lessons will be interrupted. (I'm not sure you can expect kids in K-2 to be 100% with self-reg but you can maximize their skills by teaching by example.)

Which teacher being assigned to what student is an HR decision - the principal might be involved but it is on the employer to assign staff and he's the 'manager' for this employee. If you feel that your child is not getting FAPE because of this teacher's lack of training, you do have a case for having a different teacher providing what on his IEP. I know in my district, there are some teachers who have been trained in autism. They are the ones who tend to have a caseload of mostly students with autism. Autism is a disability that is difficult to understand without extensive training specific to the disability. In your shoes, I would ask for your son to be transferred to another teacher. Now go back to the 1st thing I wrote and the part you wrote about when this teacher was hired. There is a teacher shortage and this is especially true with sp ed teachers. There might not be another teacher with autism training. The good autism teachers might already have a full caseload. The answer might be no. The other thing to ask for is teacher training in autism. I've seen where that can help. Not your role to suggest this, but I've seen where a new teacher gets assigned a mentor and that can help although she's not a new teacher - she did work in other districts. (I'm wondering if her skillset prevented her from getting tenure in other districts.) I'll also mention this because it's researched to work: Ross Greene and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. It might be a way to get her up to speed on how to help your son. https://forums.adayinourshoes.com/forums/topic/221-ross-greene-–-collaborative-proactive-solutions/#comment-834

If you are looking to fight this, I feel contacting the disability rights group for your state would be the place to start. Anything below 70 is failing so my feeling is that 70 is a good threshold for retakes. (My district gives grades A, B, C & F. 70-80 is a C, below is an F because we don't have D. If your district has D and a D is passing, this might be their logic.) Realistically, the I in IEP is for Individualized. The school having one set cut off for this seems like predetermination & the inability to individualize. The ability to demonstrate mastery and have points added to a test should he get between 60 & 70 might be a way around their rules. It's not fair that the other students aren't disabled. Seems like an advantage to them in taking tests. Can the school do something like they do in horse racing where better horses have to carry a heavier jockey & saddle?