JSD24

He is owed compensatory educational services given the school's delay in finding him an appropriate placement. I'm not sure what type of school has no aides. My district has close to 200 aides with ~12,000 students. No aides makes no sense. (In my state, you would be involved with the truancy officer. What's funny is they would help you advocate for an appropriate placement.)

Your child is not receiving FAPE which is required. IMO, homebound or cyber school might be appropriate for his placement. Schools in the US are not allowed to ignore the issues that have resulted in his truancy and lack of instruction. I feel a lawyer should be involved given how inept the school seems to be at determining your child's needs and meeting them. I'm not sure if an IEP goal to get a GED is a possibility. His autism and trauma are not being appropriately addressed by the school. Also, the pain he feels is real. The mind/body connection can cause pain to exist when there are emotional issues.

Your volunteer friend may have violated FERPA by telling you that your son eloped from the classroom. I would tread lightly with moving forward. I think you need to write to the teacher & cc the principal as well as the sp ed director/supervisor. Mention your concern for his safety. Reiterate that you feel a 504 plan might be a good interim way to put a plan in place while the school looks at determining if your child qualifies for an IEP. A student needs to have a disability to qualify for either an IEP or a 504 and from what you've written, he may qualify. He is not being adequately supported at school if he's eloping. He needs more than the school currently is providing him.

The "60 days to do an eval" varies by state. I'm in PA and it is 60 calendar days. Most states do no count summer break - not part of the calendar for the purpose of 60 calendar days in PA. Yes, it is confusing and a huge learning curve to climb but we are here to help. Putting things in writing - on paper or via email - creates a paper trail so you can count the days from your request as well as having documentation of the school's response...in case there is a question in the future. Do write your request ASAP so you get the clock ticking. The last page of this has a template for your written request: https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/getting-a-special-education-evaluation.pdf This format should work in any state.

My daughter is 2E and stayed for an extra year after she met her graduation requirements. She spent the year on a college campus and took a class per semester. There was a sp ed teacher overseeing this - I think there were 6 in her group doing this. The class & other on-campus services was 3 days per week. The other days, she did a job shadowing program. Her main area of need was social skills. She was measured to be in the ~2nd percentile in 10th grade the one time they evaluated her social skills. It's an IEP team decision about staying until age 21. The program she was in was designed for students with autism but there are lots of other programs out there. You need to have a need for the extra IEP services. Again, it based on if the IEP team feels it's needed.

IQ tests are known to be less accurate if given before the age of 8. What age was your child with these 2 tests? 16 points is one standard deviation. I can see a little variance (5 points) but not this much. Why didn't they do the same test as they did last time?

This is a duplicate posting. Not sure why the same thing was posted twice. Actually this same post is in this forum 3 times.

Everyone in school is spread thin so I think they wanted to to try to get you to be creating less work for the therapists. IDEA does require progress monitoring. In my state, these are done when report cards come out. If you feel you need info more often, you can ask for an IEP meeting & request more frequent progress reports s an accommodation. You'll need to justify why you need this more often than other parents. You can also request parent training so you can better assist your child at home with the speech & OT she gets at school.

In Chester County, there are a lot of public charter schools. PASD must bus your children to any charter school that is within 10 miles of PASD as the bus drives. I'm not sure which fit this profile and I'm also not sure which might have an opening in K. A friend of mine recently switched her child from CCDC to an online charter school. She's 2nd grade. That's also an option and these being public schools, they would need to follow her IEP which a private school doesn't have to do. Private schools can also expel a child for any number of reasons. IMO, this isn't going to be a good choice for your daughters. Have you reported the incident where you were not informed by the school of your child attempt to self harm to Children, Youth & Families? Chain of command does include any oversight agencies. IMO, you need to do this so there is documentation as to why you withdrew your children from this school. This is child neglect (and endangerment) because the en loco parentis failed to inform the parent of the nature and seriousness of what happened at school. (How did things get that far? Where was the adult supervision?) You want to make sure that the powers that be follow up to make sure corrective action is taken by the school so this doesn't happen to another family. The medication combination also has me upset. Uppers & downers together in a 6 year old. Yikes! Was an FBA done when behaviors escalated? That's the correct action to take. The process puts data together to add a PBSP to the IEP. This sounds like what should have happened when behahios got worse at school. They cannot change the IEP w/o data on which to base what new support is needed. What did the suspension paperwork say? There's a movement not to suspend younger students. Philly schools have rules about this - I wish others did too (better yet would be a statewide rule). I kept my twins in the same classroom so they could look out for each other. I'm not sure what I would have done if one seemed OK with going to the neighborhood school and the other wasn't served well by the same school. (I kept them together because their older sister had lots of issues and we didn't get enough help from the school with her 504 & GIEP. They missed that she had autism until she was in 8th grade. I have medical issues & tried to keep things simple & keeping them in the same classroom made things a bit easier for me. My medical issues started when my twins were 4 & my oldest was 12.) It's late as I'm writing this. I will think some more about this. I think you have other posts I haven't read.

With a speech only IEP, only an SLP and LEA is needed for an IEP meeting. If this is the case where one of your children only qualifies for speech then a sp ed teacher isn't needed. The SLP is the case manager & will write the IEP.

IDEA allows the school to change placement w/o the IEP team deciding for 10 days. After 10 days, it's looked upon as a change of placement where the IEP team needs to decide if this is appropriate.

I look at special ed (IEPs & 504s) as a contract that the school makes with a student & their family to provide more than what they provide in general education. Anything your child needs beyond what his classmates get should be spelled out in the IEP or 504. It's up to you to figure out what your child needs & bring it to the team so it can be added to the 'contract'. Having data to support the need is key to the school adding it to the IEP.

Travel training assessment will look at your child crossing the street, riding the bus, etc. With freezing, I'd ask for an FBA. IMO, it's a sign of overwhelm & shutting down. Recess & hallways can also be looked at through an FBA.

I'm with you. Impulsivity comes with an ADHD diagnosis. It comes from the frontal lobe not being as well developed due to the disability. It's not willful, it's developmental (I'm also not sure the SDI to stop this will be all that effective). I see blurting out as coming for the disability where it needs to be accommodated for by the school - not punished by the principal. I wish that adults in schools had better training on disabilities - especially common ones like ADHD - and what to expect from a student with that disability. I'd go into the meeting with documentation that this comes from the disability and ask what can be put into the IEP to accommodate your child and his disability...as required under IDEA, Section 504 and the ADA.

There are strategies that teachers can teach to help students do better with paying attention and remembering what they will be tested on. For example, as you read something, you need to ask yourself: Do I have a grasp on what the author is saying? If the answer is no, you need to reread, ask for help, look up the topic in a different book/website that might explain it in a way that clicks or whatever works for you. They way you are breaking things out might not be the way that makes things click for her. (BTW, there are skills kids should be taught early on in school - like before 3rd grade. It's something to do at any age when it comes to reading for comprehension and reviewing for a test.) If she doesn't know and practice these strategies, they can be SDI in her IEP.

What schools use are normed assessments. These are tests that a large cross section of children have answered and based on your child's score, they can determine where they are on the bell curve for the skill being tested. Standardized tests are not normed. They are supposed to be a measure of how well a student has met the state standards for a subject. If they do this, why did my son pass the algebra standardized test for my state and fail algebra? I believe things played out this way because the test didn't work. With your son, I'd want his reading and listening comprehension tested. I'd expect he does OK with listening but not with reading comprehension.

Just an FYI. If the IEP say aide from 9 to 3. The school has to follow the IEP. If he were to go & there was no aide, the school is out of compliance with the IEP. And then you can file a state complaint that the IEP wasn't followed. Same goes when the IEP says nurse and the nurse is out. You can request make-up days for the days that he missed due to no aide.

I go to my SD's school board meetings so I'm up on what they do with records retention. They might really purge the records you're looking for. FERPA is a federal law. There has to be someone at the federal level to figure out if cloud storage violates FERPA or not. I know my district takes this stuff very seriously and they have all sorts of things that protect confidentiality. It seems like they have a form for this: https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/file-a-complaint

Good luck with this due process. BTW, social pragmatics has a huge impact at school. He'll not be able to do group projects with his skills where they currently are.

I think visual-spatial is huge in schools. I took mechanical drawing, organic chemistry & geometry. These all use a lot of visual-spatial. Always good to ask for a copy of the research they are referring to in this statement. Visual-spatial is also used in PE. It also helps you stay out of another person's personal space.

If your child need 2X time on all exams, tests, quizzes and/or assessments, ask the school to put this wording into the 504 in place of what is currently in the 504. To get accommodations on the SAT (and PSAT & AP Exams - all the same company so you do it for one & you have it for all) you need to do 2 things. 1- Show that they have this accommodation by documenting what's on the 504 (or IEP) to the College Board. In other words, you send them a copy of the 504. 2- There needs to be a statement from the school saying your child uses the accommodation at school. This is because students can have tons of accommodations listed but they only get the ones they use on the SAT. I'm wondering if the school changed the 504 to 1.5X time. Schools can do that but should document the change to the student & parent. In your situation, the 1st thing I'd do is ask the school for a current copy of the 504...in case they didn't put 2X time on it.

Asking for camp is hard to argue. The school will tend to say they can do the same type of instruction at ESY. I would go to this meeting and request an IEP meeting if you feel you have the data to argue that this camp can meet a need that the school's ESY program can't.

Data. Data drives IEP services. Who told you that he needs constant prompting to stay on-task when in his gen ed classes? Did they put this data into writing? What about his sp ed classes? Is he off task there? They might say he needs sp ed all the time because he can't stay on task in gen ed. Is he learning what he needs to stay on grade level in sp ed? This might be why he needs to have an aide: He can meet the state education standards if they give him appropriate services - namely someone to keep him on-task.

My district is 100% electronic now. When they did things on paper, it was often sent in the backpack but it was sealed in an envelope. Given the classmate almost read it, you could file a FERPA complaint.

My school does it like yours. You meet and then they write the update into the new IEP and give it to you. If there are any issues and you need to make changes, you need another meeting. Small corrections can be done via a no-meet revision.