E129: IEP Denials
What if you've gone through this whole evaluation process, trying to get your child an IEP...and thinking you are going in the right direction...
What if you’ve gone through this whole evaluation process, trying to get your child an IEP…and thinking you are going in the right direction…
And then you come to the eligibility meeting and your child is denied an IEP.
So…what next??
In this episode we discuss:
1) Examining your reasons for an IEP to make sure you’re on the right path
2) What you learned from the process (eligibility checklists, school culture, etc)
3) What supports WITHOUT an IEP could look like (using flex scheduling as an example)
4) What your next steps could be (IEE and/or how to go about asking for another evaluation)
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E129: IEP Denials
Samson Q2U Microphone: [00:00:00] So what if you go through this whole process of trying to get your child an I E P and you finally get your child evaluated and you think you’re going in the right direction, and then you come to the eligibility meeting and your child is denied an I E P. You can feel really crushing to go through this whole entire process and then feel like you’re leaving empty handed in just an hour meeting without an I E P or even with like a 5 0 4 offered as some kind of
consolation prize. So where do you go from here? We’re talking about exactly that on the podcast today. What happens if your child gets denied, an I E P, and what you can look back and consider from that experience moving forward and also what your next steps can be as well. So stick with me. We’re talking about I E P denials today.
Samson Q2U Microphone-1: You are listening to the Parent IEP Lab, the podcast that helps you get an effective I e P for your child so that you can get them supported and learning in school.
I’m Bethy zk [00:01:00] occupational therapist who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEPs for their kids without having to fight the school. My mission is to help you learn the pillars of knowledge that I saw these effective parents using their advocacy, and also to provide insider knowledge from the school side so that you have context to turn that into informed intelligent questions that actually get you somewhere with the school IEP team.
So let’s dive into the topic for today and think about we can change and tweak to get the right formula for success, for your child to learn, and grow at school. Welcome to the lab.
So the episodes that I have planned for this summer, starting with this one, well, maybe even starting with last week’s when we covered masking at school, have so much variation between situations and I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the Facebook group and the private messages.
About getting denied for an I E P, but also really specific or unique questions that it’s like, oh, this is a charter school, or, oh, this is a private [00:02:00] charter school, and can they do this or that? And although I’ve mostly done group coaching to keep costs weigh low for parents, you just may need to have a dedicated 60 minutes with me so I can look over your paperwork.
Get the story from you and focus on you and your child’s situation for a full hour. That’s why I’m introducing the one-on-one advocacy power hours, and as a special introductory bonus, I’m offering 20% off of that advocacy power hour for the summer. These are focused 60 minute sessions with me where we have a clear outcome that’s defined even before we get into that 60 minutes, so that we can give you the next.
Steps for your specific situation by the end of that 60 minutes, and it comes with a P D F recap of our session and recommended next steps along with the recording of our power hours, you can watch it or watch parts of it as you need to go back to it, or you can share with other members of their support teams so that you can have them actually listen to what we talked about in that power hour.
[00:03:00] So check out more information and take advantage of 20% off for the summer by going to www.theieplab.com/power hour. And that link is below your podcast in your podcast player as well. So let’s get into the episode.
Like I just said, I’ve been getting this question a lot about I U P denials and as someone who’s worked in the system from the inside, I’ve been in a lot of these meetings where this happened. So if you think about it, I was averaging about 80 meetings per year when I worked full-time in the schools, but I only had about 65 kids on my caseload, which is still a lot.
Right? But there’s a gap there, right? And so that’s because some kids did not qualify for an I E P in general,
or they just didn’t end up having OT as part of their services at the end of that meeting. And of course some of these meetings, just like any other meeting, some of them were totally parent friendly and they made sure that the parent understood what was happening, the implications [00:04:00] of the choices that they had in that meeting, because it is supposed to be a team decision
on if they qualify for an IEP or not. And some of them were absolutely train wrecks. I found myself many times jumping in to facilitate the meeting instead of the case manager doing it, and it was incredibly frustrating. Now, what happens from the school side and why that happens? Just to give you an insider tip, is that the staff is really afraid that parents are gonna be mad.
Understandably, right? You probably are really frustrated and really mad. You’ve put a lot of time into this. You care about your kid. You want them to be supported. You have all this knowledge. You’re listening to podcasts, you’re looking up information online, and you’re still getting denied. You feel like you’re heading a brick wall,
but sometimes it’s helpful to understand that a staff member that’s new or new to that building, or they’ve never been in this situation before, where a kid doesn’t exactly meet the criteria and so they don’t know how to approach this situation. They are not [00:05:00] coached in what to say, what to do in these situations.
So they’re really nervous about having this conversation and many of them just don’t have the skills to bring this up with just a frankness and information and to know exactly how to facilitate a good discussion around the data and the information that would contribute to a really good team decision that you would understand why they aren’t getting an IEP at this time by the end of that meeting.
So if you’ve not had a stellar experience,
I’m sorry, and we’re gonna focus on what to do moving forward. So this sticky, icky experience doesn’t haunt you. And you have some ideas on what your parent rights are around this, what you may be able to do, even going back and requesting something like an I EEE or how to get your child supported in school, whether that’s an i e P or it’s not.
So let’s dive into the first thing that we’ll look at, and this is exploring what you actually want out of an I E P. So sometimes it’s really [00:06:00] easy to get caught up in the wanting this thing. This thing is going to be the solution, and this is going to be the thing that protects my child and gives me the most legal rights, which it does.
Out of the options, it absolutely gives you the most legal rights, but sometimes we get caught up in, well, somebody told me that they need an IEP or somebody told me that they should qualify
like somebody, like an outpatient therapist who knows your child well and knows you well, and they think that they know about the I eep, but maybe they don’t know the unique situation. It’s like it gets so complicated. Right? Or maybe a doctor has told you, oh yes, they need an I E P advocate for an I eep.
They should be like a shoe in for an I E P, right? And so you have this priest conceived notion that this is the thing that’s going to get them supported. And so that’s your drive. And so now you’re fighting against the system because you don’t understand why you’re hitting this brick wall and why they’re not qualifying, right.
It should have been this easy thing because people have presented it to you like they need [00:07:00] this, and you might feel even like you’re failing if you don’t get them that, and I definitely don’t want you to feel like that because there’s a lot of things that we can do and there’s a lot of things that.
Even with an I E P, sometimes they don’t get the support they need. So I want you to really, really dive into what the I eep means for you and why exactly you want one. And you may have like totally justified reasons for getting an I E P, and that’s amazing, but I want you to be able to articulate that in like a sentence of, my child needs an I E P because of this, this, and this, right?
And so it’s here that I really like to tell this story about Fox scheduling. Because it, it really made me question like why IEPs are a thing if we have strategies like co-teaching and flex scheduling. So let me tell you the story about flex scheduling. So I was in an elementary school and they had run flex scheduling for like two years at this point.
So it was still kind of a new system that they [00:08:00] were doing in this one elementary school. And then they ended up spreading it throughout the district in other elementary schools because it was working so well. And this is what flex scheduling is. Flex scheduling is where the team, so let’s say, and it’s for every grade.
So let’s say they’ll take third grade and they will take the scores because of course they go by progress monitoring that everybody in the school gets, right? So in this case, they were using this test called Star that they would do every other week with everybody in the whole entire grade.
And yes, it was computer based and they would say, okay, they did it both for math and reading, so let’s just like focus on reading for a minute. So they would do the reading test like every other week, so twice a month. And they would see, you know, what kind of skills do they have? What kind of comprehension do they have?
They would have like all of this data on everybody. And so what they would do is they would take this entire meeting with the whole third grade staff. So we’re talking about third grade general education teachers. We’re talking about principals, vice principals, um, [00:09:00] academic coaches who are there to kind of support the teachers through things and the intervention team.
That is not necessarily the IEP team. So these are a set of people who are like reading specialists, um, you know, things like that, that support kids. And also like the special education teacher and like other people that would sit in on this from like i e P teams, like special education teams. So if you think about, there’s a lot of people in this room and what they would do is they would.
Project all of this data up on the screen and they would say, okay, so this group of students is looking like they need this basic phonemic awareness skills still. So like they’re, that’s the skill that they’re working on. And then they would pull out this other group and they would say, okay, these guys, it looks like they have this skill of phonemic awareness.
They can decode, they have those skills, but they are really struggling with comprehension. So what they would do is they would take this. And they would divide all of the kids into the skills that they [00:10:00] most needed, and for the next, like six weeks or so, they would pull them out in, in small groups depending on the skills that they most needed to work on.
so what would happen is that during that time, cuz it was a specific time where they had reading intervention into the third grade schedule. Right? It was like from 10 15 to 1115 or whatever it was. And so that’s when small groups would go. The cool thing was that when you were in the hallway, During the switch when you knew that intervention was coming, all of a sudden all of the third grade classrooms would explode and all of the kids would go every which way, and they knew what room they were going to for their small groups, for their intervention.
It was like, Nobody knew who was an I on an IEP or not, because it was across the entire grade. So it was like, not that anybody was getting targeted or anybody was being pulled out, like, no, this is just what we did. And so all of the kids would go to their respective groups. And so sometimes [00:11:00] that special education teacher would have kids that did not have an I E P that still needed that specific skill that they were teaching in their small group.
And then sometimes their kid that they were technically serving for minutes for. You know, reading intervention would be over here with a reading intervention teacher who wasn’t necessarily a special education teacher. But guess what? They were all equally skilled in providing instruction that was targeted to exactly the skills that they needed.
Right. And I mean, of course you’re gonna have like things that are missed or whatever, but it really worked. Pretty darn well. And actually this kind of segues into this, that there was a specific kid that.
That was on an I E P before, and what happened is she had so many absences because of her family situation that we legally couldn’t qualify her for an I E P because she had [00:12:00] so many absences. This is obviously a very big story behind the story, but what I’m saying is guess what? When she had to come off of that IEP and when she didn’t re-qualify,
she was still getting pulled into groups for interventions that she most needed based on the data. The only difference was, She didn’t have an I E P, so it’s not like they were tracking goals on her progress. They were keeping track of her progress as far as the data monitoring goes, but they weren’t really following it in goals and she wasn’t getting like specific accommodations that were protected by law in the I E P.
Right? So there are big differences, but the cool thing is she was still getting the interventions that she needed, even though she was denied an I eep because of all of the absences and the family situation that was happening. Right. Obviously. We got them help. We’ve connected them with outside resources.
We did everything that we could, but it was, it’s a bigger story, right? So I’m not gonna go there. But the point is that sometimes [00:13:00] you can say, oh my gosh, they actually are getting what they needed, even if they don’t have an i e P for now. Now, if you switch schools or if something happens with the school system, or if you transition to middle school or high school
and they don’t offer the same kind of structure because of course this is like a building wide thing, and it wasn’t across the whole district until a couple years later. Then yes, like you might go back and say, Hey, well they were actually getting intervention. You know, you’re not providing it. Now we’re seeing this data slide, whatever.
Right? And this is when. Okay, the power hour is gonna be really helpful if you’re like, kind of trying to process through this and, and getting lost in all of the things that I’m saying, right? So the IEP Power Hour might be for you if you’re like, oh, well this is our situation. So that’s all I’ll say is that some schools more than others will have this amazing system where your kid actually might get what they need even without an iep.
And you have to decide for yourself if that’s okay. [00:14:00] Or if that’s not okay, and then move on and, and decide what you’re gonna do about it. Right. Okay. The second thing that I really want you to consider is that you have learned so much by the experience of going through this process, even if they got denied at the end.
So one of the huge things that relates to what they’re actually looking for in order to qualify for an i E P is what you just went through. So if you. Are new to the podcast, just know that we have an eligibility category, bonus series, and you can actually find an episode on each one of the categories laid out by I D E A.
We did an episode for each one. Anna used Colorado State’s Checklist for eligibility as an example to like give you some examples of what they’re looking for for this category. But every state is different and there’s been so many times when you come into the Facebook group, if you need help finding if your state has those checklists available, then you can come into the Facebook group and ask about ’em.
And there’s been so many times where it’s like, okay, [00:15:00] well this is a state that has the definitions available, but they don’t actually have the checklist. Well, if you just went through this process of the eligibility meeting, then you should have a copy of that eligibility checklist for the category that they were looking for to qualify.
In your packet of papers. And so now you can say, oh, okay, like they said, they didn’t qualify for this specific thing on the checklist. And so that creates some understanding about, well, do I agree with that or do I not agree with that? Or did they not get enough evidence to support that in their evaluation?
So that can tell you a lot about why they were denied or if you have the potential to get them an I E P based on that checkbox that they said no to. And you can either. Agree or disagree with that, and then figure out what to do from there. So if you’re new to the the podcast and you’re like, well, how do I find these eligibility category bonus series episodes?
If you go on my website, which is the iep [00:16:00] lab.com/podcast, like just slash podcast, after that, then you can actually see a menu on the right hand side, and you will see in big letters this category that says Eligibility category bonus series. You click on that and that’s all of the category bonus series
that are tagged, and so you can find them there. So if you’re looking for autism or if you’re looking for ohi, then you can scroll through and find the number that way as well.
So, of course if you need help, go into the Facebook group. That link to join is below this podcast in your podcast player. And of course, I can help you find an episode or, you know, give you small advice, right? With a limited knowledge that I have from a Facebook group post. But, you know, I can help you find what you’re looking for.
If you’re like, oh, I, I need to find this and I can’t find it, I will help you. Don’t worry.
So again, the second one is just to go through and reflect on the process. Sometimes you will discover what they’re actually looking for for qualifications. Sometimes you’ll figure out that they didn’t actually look at all the categories that you thought they had evidence to look at [00:17:00] and consider. So you
you have already learned so much by going through this process about like the culture of the school that you’re working with, all of these things. So you can take that information and you can move that forward into what you can do next. Right? And again, if you need help about figuring out the process or looking at the testing or looking at, you know, if they covered everything, then that’s where the power hour comes in, right?
And so my next question, number three here on my list is did they cover all your challenge areas? So again, looking at tho that bonus series that I did for eligibility, I harp on this a lot that before you even go into that eligibility meeting, you should probably have a list of all of the challenge areas that you feel like they’re having in school.
And then when you get the evaluation report, To look at because yes, you’re supposed to have a couple days to look it over before you go to the meeting. Then you can compare your list of your challenges that you think they’re having and make sure that those are all [00:18:00] covered in the evaluation report.
Did they look at everything that you wanted to them to look at now, if this is the first time that you’re hearing that, that you should always have like this checklist in your head or in a notebook or on your phone somewhere about the challenge areas that you want them to look at, that’s okay. If you’ve just heard this for the first time, make a list now of the challenge areas that you’re.
Hearing about from teachers or you’re seeing at home or whatever it is, your best guess is for what the challenge areas are in the school environment. Cuz I think you know them way more than you think you do. In most cases. Make a list now and then go back through that evaluation and see if they covered everything.
Now, if you find that they have covered everything, but you think that some of that information is just down right, wrong, then you have the right to request an I eee, which is an independent educational evaluation, and we actually just covered this in episode 1 24. So you can go back and say, oh my gosh, well I do disagree with the [00:19:00] evaluation, or they missed some pieces.
How do I like, what is this i e, e thing? You can go back to episode 1 24, which is just a couple weeks ago, and you can look at more information on that.
Okay, so the last thing that we’re gonna cover today is to say that maybe you’re fine, like you’re not super happy about it, but say that you’re fine with them not having the I E P for now. Say that they have a plan in place, or you know, you feel comfortable with what they’re doing for right now, or you’ve examined like why you wanted an I E P, or maybe you just wanted the evaluation because that’s also extremely valuable to have that evaluation, right.
Or maybe you’re just feeling really burnt out for trying to get this and then feeling like you didn’t get it so it is what it is.
Okay, so here we are and it is what it is, and you learned a bunch through the process, right? So if you really feel like they need one, But you’re okay with it for now. You understand that you can’t do anything about it, like right this second. When can you ask for [00:20:00] another evaluation again?
And so here are a couple things that people consider because I see this all the time in other Facebook groups where people are like, you can request it all the time, you can request it every month. You can request like just be persistent. And there’s a couple things about the system where that’s actually going to be a detriment to you and your case.
Because they’re gonna stop listening to you. And so you really wanna be strategic. And there’s a couple things to consider. So, This is when I circled back to the earlier question, the first thing that we talked about is what did you learn through the process the first time and why did they get denied and why do you want an I E P to begin with?
Right? Why do you feel like an i E P is the answer to getting them supported? And I’m not having you question that, actually, I’m just having you define it so that you can understand that enough to explain it to the team. So, firstly, if there is something that has changed,
such as their scores on the progress monitoring have significantly changed, or the standards of the grade going up. So they move [00:21:00] from, you know, first to second grade, or they move from fourth to fifth grade and those standards really jumped and they’re really struggling to keep up, or there’s a change in diagnosis.
That’s a really good excuse to ask for another. Evaluation or there’s a big change in the system, right? There’s a change from elementary to middle school or their executive functioning skills can’t keep up with that kind of switch or something has happened, right? That triggers that, and that’s a great time to ask for another evaluation.
Say like, oh, they got denied, but like, this is what’s different this time. And this is why I’m asking right now because they’re really struggling with this specific aspect, or I’ve seen the data come back and it’s really worrying me, you know, have an excuse why you’re bringing that up again. The other thing about the system is that most of the time those diagnostic tests that the schools use, they cannot be given again for another calendar year.
So know that if you request the reevaluation or an an initial evaluation, again, I guess [00:22:00] is how I should say that, then. If you request it before the year from the last time they were tested, the reason that you’re asking for that retest has to be pretty dramatic or significant for them to say yes and test again because they either have to use different tests.
Or they have to file review the last test. They cannot do that test again, that same test again. So in most cases, you’re gonna have to wait a full calendar year for them to encounter those tests again because it’s considered invalid if they do them within the calendar year of each other.
Okay? So I am absolutely positive that you may have something related to this topic that I did not cover in this episode. So if you have another aspect you wanna talk about, if you want to add a comment to your specific experience, hop into the Facebook group and make a new post with your comment or question, and we would be happy to support you in that Facebook group as well.
It’s also a really great time to take advantage of this one-on-one support with the [00:23:00] new advocacy power hours. And don’t forget that you get 20% off this summer, so absolutely take advantage of that offer as I’m here from you and I am totally amazing. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty darn good and experienced at untangling the specifics of your situation to get a plan moving forward and really working with you because you are the one in this relationship with the school,
and you’re the one who just went through this. You really need to have the support that you need to make that decision for yourself, right? I’m not gonna absolutely tell you what to do, but I’m gonna lay out your options and then you can say, okay, this one feels like it’s the one that’s gonna work the best for my particular situation, and we go from there.
I’m so excited to start those. And so many of you have been asking about them, so I’m really excited to be able to pull that together for you. So the link for more information about the Power Hour is below this podcast in your podcast player. Or you can just go to www.vieplab.com/power hour.
Thank you so much for listening this week, and we’ll [00:24:00] say you same time, same place next week. Thanks so much.
summer www.TheIEPLab.com/PowerHour