E133: Vision Statements
It keeps coming up again and again...to share your vision statement with your school IEP team is a MUST-DO to have a great year this year! So if you need some examples and a free guide to boot, this is your episode to brush up on how to write one and refocus for this coming school year!
It keeps coming up again and again…to share your vision statement with your school IEP team is a MUST-DO to have a great year this year!
So if you need some examples and a free guide to boot, this is your episode to brush up on how to write one and refocus for this coming school year!
Download the Vision Statement Guide: TheIEPLab.com/guide
25% OFF workshops and courses with code SUMMER TheIEPLab.com/products
Join the Facebook group and share your vision statement!
E133: Vision Statements
Samson Q2U Microphone: [00:00:00] So lately I’ve been asked to speak to a couple groups. I’ve been asked to speak to Mosaic, which is a parent organization that helps parents with kids with intellectual disabilities navigate this whole advocacy thing, both inside and outside of school.
And so I was able to speak to their group at their request. And I also am actually flying out to a conference in Boston to help a parent group with a specific diagnosis. And What happens when I start to make these presentations and the slides is that inevitably every single time I’m talking about a vision statement.
And so we really need to revisit this concept of a vision statement, Which is your idea and your opinion and your message of what you want your child’s education to look like both in a year and what the IEP should be striving to fulfill
and also what you want your child to be able to do when that educational system ends. So whether they [00:01:00] graduate or whether they go on to an 18 to 21 program and age out of the system. And so today we are revisiting how to write a vision statement and how important it is to have one and to communicate that with the team.
So stick with me because we’re talking all about vision statements today.
Samson Q2U Microphone-1: You are listening to the parent IEP Lab, the podcast that helps you become an informed parent advocate to get your child supported and learning in school. I’m Beth Levenfeld, occupational therapist who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEPs for their kids in over 400 i e p meetings.
Collaboration was the cornerstone of these successful parents’ advocacy, and that’s what we teach here to access everyone’s brain power to get everyone invested in helping your child be successful. But if I had to guess, you’re here to learn how to harness the power a parent has not only to help your child get what they need, but also to help fix this scrambled system and get its priorities back on track, one school IEP team at a time.
[00:02:00] My mission of the Parent IEP Lab podcast, and also the online courses, workshops, and summit of the IEP Lab, is to break down barriers to being able to advocate with collaboration.
We do this by providing you insider information from the school side, so that you have context to create informed, intelligent questions of your IEP team to have a clearer voice in your child’s plan. So let’s dive into the topic of vision statements today and think about what 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.
Samson Q2U Microphone-2: Have you ever found a new podcast and it’s amazing. It’s exactly what you need to hear . And then you get into it and week after week you start saying, okay that episode doesn’t necessarily pertain to me, but I still want to keep listening because it’s so helpful.
Well, We’ve kind of hit that mark as far as the Parent IUP Lab has gone because 132 episodes later and we’re starting to have some episodes that really focus in on some really niche, really small topics that may [00:03:00] not pertain to you, but you also might be missing past episodes that would be super helpful for you.
So, that is why I went through every single episode of the Parent IEP Lab podcast. We selected the most helpful ones and we organized them into categories. And that is available for download in the Parent IEP Lab podcast guide. So you can snag your free copy at theieplab. com. And if you’re like, well, what kind of categories are you talking about? In it, we break down if you are new to IEPs, what episodes are most helpful for that. We also have a neurodivergent student category. We also have a student with medical disabilities and learning disabilities so that we focus in on the topics that are most helpful for you.
And of course, we also have a top downloaded category as well. So click over to get your free listening guide, head over to the IUPLAB.
com slash listen. And that link again is below this podcast and your podcast player. Now let’s get into the episode.
Beth: I really wanna talk to you today [00:04:00] about writing a vision statement, which is just kind of a blanket statement of where you want your child to go. either in a couple years, which is the short term vision statement, or you start thinking about what is going to happen when school services are over.
That would either be when they graduate high school at age 18 ish, or they might qualify for an 18 to 21 program, and at that point, you’re thinking about what to do after those services. connected to the school. And it’s really, really nice when parents come in with a vision statement because it helps to steer the whole entire team towards a common goal.
Many times I see IEPs that are disjointed, right? The speech therapist comes in with their goals. The OT might have a couple goals. The special education teacher has a couple goals. But they don’t have a lot in common and they don’t mesh together, and this is a really good opportunity for parents to write a [00:05:00] couple sentences that you’ve put some thought into so that you can communicate with the team where you want your child to go.
Now, I hear a lot from parents that you feel like the IEP team doesn’t know your child very well. We all know that there’s a lot of things that should be happening in the schools that isn’t, and one of them is knowing your child really, really well. This is a very gentle and non confrontational way to communicate where you want your child to go, and I’ll tell you at the end.
How to use this statement. So you’re not just writing it to write it and it’s never going to get shared. That would be just a lot of work that you put into something that that won’t actually make a difference with the rest of the team, right? We want to be able to share it and we want to share it in a proactive way.
And towards the end, we’re going to talk about what you can do with the statement. So it makes the biggest impact. So I’m going to be upfront. I know that you guys do not have a ton of time. The [00:06:00] expectation for time to write this statement actually is relatively low, although I know that you guys have a lot going on.
So I just want to say, hey, this might take a little bit of time. What I’ve seen is that if you listen to this podcast and you kind of get the layout for how to write one, you might have to think about it for 20 or 30 minutes while you’re doing something else in the house, right? Maybe you have a conversation with your partner about what this vision statement should look like, what their opinion is and what your opinion is so that you refine your ideas.
But maybe you’re thinking about it as you go to school drop off, maybe in your commute to work, you’re thinking about it, you turn off the radio for a couple minutes and you just listen and you just listen to yourself and you think about what you want this vision statement to look like, or maybe it’s you’re doing dishes, you’re doing chores around the house, you’re folding laundry.
Something like that, where you’re thinking about it. Now, if you allow yourself some time to think, and then you come and use the free [00:07:00] guide that I have that I’ll give you the link to go download, it might take you 10 15 minutes to actually write down your thoughts and go through the worksheet. Because I’m going to give you what the worksheet says and the process to write a vision statement, and then I’m going to send you out to go think about it a little bit.
And then write it down. And then we’re going to talk about how to share it. So it actually makes a difference, right? So first of all, I want to share this a little bit. Um, I come from a family that has a very strong history of anxiety. And while I don’t think that I have like clinical anxiety, I don’t think I would ever get diagnosed.
It doesn’t impact my day to day life that much. It is this persistent feeling that I have throughout everything in my life that I just really want to be proactive. I remember sitting down as a kid and I was with my babysitter and my parents were gone out to dinner and I just had this Fear moment of what happens if they [00:08:00] get into a car accident, what would happen, where would I go?
What would we do? And it really helped me to process through what would happen. And I kind of took that forward. Okay. In a worst case scenario, we would do this. My sister would do this babysitter would do this. Okay. I think I can handle that. And that just calmed my anxiety down so much that. If I thought about what would happen in the future and broke it down into what steps we would take to handle that challenge or that problem, then it really made my anxiety go down.
So I tell you this because it really makes a big difference in how I teach and Just how this system, the IEP system all works together because what has happened is I’ve observed when I’m serving the 18 to 21 program, there’s almost this hesitancy and this shock from parents who are in that program when they get to that point that they’re like, Oh my gosh, [00:09:00] school services are ending.
This stinks. We didn’t plan for this. We didn’t take advantage of the system while we had it, and now I don’t know what to do. And so even while I’m taking you through this first step, which we’re going to get into in a second, I want you to think about what is going to happen at the end of school services, even if you have a preschooler.
Because This consistent anxiety or this underlying anxiety that I have really helps me to plan. It seems ridiculous to even think about your preschooler being at the end of their school career, but it is going to happen eventually, right? More often than not, they’re either going to age out at 18, they’re going to age out at 21, and I don’t want the first time that you think about this happening to be that.
IEP when they’re 18 years old. I want you to think about it beforehand. I want you to be prepared for that day. And then [00:10:00] you can think about the skills that you want your child to have at that time. And then you can work on it now because skills take longer, right? All skills that we build take a lot longer than we really want them to.
So that way you can break them down and really come down with two priorities in that vision statement for the next year, for the next two years. And you can be working towards that really big vision statement that you have for your child. Okay, so hopefully that helps you kind of think through what we’re going to do today, and even though it’s going to be hard for some of you to really think that far in the future, I have a couple tricks that I’m going to share in this first stage.
Now, if you are in a place where you can download that guide right now and you want to listen to my voice and you want to look at the worksheet at the same time,
Samson Q2U Microphone-3: Go to www. thieplab. com slash guide, G U I D E, or the link is in the show notes below this podcast and your podcast player.
Beth: So that is the worksheets that I’m referring to as well. [00:11:00] So let’s get into the first stage of two that we’re going to go through in how to actually craft this vision statement. And I have this broken down into two steps. The first process, and you’ll see it on that worksheet, is to really think about what is going to happen when school services end.
And I really want you to think about this. There’s kind of two different roads that people tend to take, and I’ll, I’ll get to those when we talk about examples, because at this point you might be saying, I don’t even know what you’re talking about vision statement what? This is just going to be a statement for where you want your child to be.
At a certain time. So we are going to think about what do you want your child to look like? What skills do you want them to have when school services end? Okay? So when you think about that, you’re gonna think about, are they going to wanna go to trade school? Are they going to wanna go to college? Are they going to wanna volunteer?
Are [00:12:00] they going to a day program? What is that going to look like? And if you are totally frozen and you have no idea, then this is my first really important trick. And I’ve mentioned this before, but I haven’t emphasized it like this. Find adults or young adults that have the same diagnosis or challenges that your child has.
So I’ve mentioned this before in the context of autism. In the neurodiversity movement, which is this amazing movement, it’s a civil rights movement, there’s a lot of autistic adults that are coming out and supporting parents of autistic children. Their heart is in just the amazing place and their information is so incredibly valuable.
So if you go to places like Facebook groups and you search either if your child has a diagnosis, especially if it’s somewhat rare, I was just talking to a parent the other day where she has a child with a somewhat rare disability. [00:13:00] She found a Facebook group of people that have that diagnosis or parents that have a child with that diagnosis.
Maybe they’re at all different stages and ages. She’s able to connect with people there and see what’s working for them. So that’s really important that you get connected to adults or parents with children of this diagnosis. It’s actually better if you find actual people with this diagnosis that you can talk to even better than the parents, right?
Because Just like you, they might not know everything, but we have a lot of people with diagnoses that are starting to help parents make decisions for their children when they’re younger, because maybe they didn’t have a great childhood. Maybe they wish their parents had done something slightly different.
They’re able to share that with you, and that’s really cool. You also just have a chance and an opportunity to talk about this. Hey, when school services ended, what happened? What has helped you? What skills are you really glad you had when school [00:14:00] services ended? What skills do you wish that they taught you before you were done?
That kind of information is just invaluable, especially when you’re trying to craft this vision statement. So if you’re like, Beth, I have no idea what that’s going to look like, then go and seek that out somewhere. Facebook groups are my number one recommendation. I think you can find these people on Instagram, but Facebook groups have just a more focused bent where you’re not just following somebody.
You can actually connect with the people inside the group. So I really love these for recommending parents get connected to people with these diagnoses, right? It doesn’t have to be a diagnosis. If you have a really rare diagnosis or you don’t have a diagnosis, maybe there’s a delay.
Maybe there’s a challenge in a certain area. You can still try to seek that out in those Facebook groups with keywords. If you need any help with this, please DM me on Instagram, send me an email and I will help you [00:15:00] find the group that’s going to be helpful to you.
That’s what I’m here for. So that’s the first step is really to craft this vision statement of what it’s going to look like after school. Now you can see in the examples that I’m about to get to that.
You might have several options, or you might just not have any idea at all. I have some questions embedded in this first example that’s going to help you kind of process through what that’s going to look like. Okay, so let’s dig into the first example that I have, and I do want to mention in that downloadable PDF that I have, that guide.
It does have a link embedded in the top of the vision statement for more examples. So if you’re like, Beth, I can’t see my kid in either of these examples that you’re giving, that’s okay. There’s way more examples in that link that I have at the top of the vision statement. So here’s the first one.
Let’s say that you have a child with dyslexia. And let’s say that they’re in third grade right now. So your vision statement might be when they graduate, [00:16:00] I want them to be able to go to college or trade school, and I want them to be able to have some accommodations that they take with them. You might want to put it more eloquently than that, but that would be a great vision statement.
Can you see how that They’re like, on a trade school track or they’re on a college track. We need to get them there. You know, it kind of lights a fire underneath everybody that, Oh, there’s things that we can work on to get to that. And it’s easier for that team member to see their role in getting your child to that point.
Right? So I have a couple of questions though. So is it more important that they are a hundred percent fluent with reading off of a paper page? That might be your priority. That might be something that you add into the vision statement, right? You want them to be fluent. When they’re reading off a paper page, but here’s a couple more questions that you might want to consider when they get older, when they get closer to [00:17:00] that graduation date or that 18 to 21 date, is it more or less important that they have tools that they can use, like assistive technology to get the reading done and understand the content more than reading straight off of a paper page.
And you might say yes and you might say no. I’m not giving you the answers here. You’re the one that has the answers because you know your child and you know where they’re going. Another question to consider, and another skill to consider, is it more or less important that they have tools that they can use, but also that they know those accommodations, which may or may not be tools, and It might be more or less important to you that they have the soft skills to know who to ask for those accommodations and when to ask for those accommodations so that they can advocate for themselves when you weren’t at college or trade school with them, right?
So it depends on the situation of the child. Now, when they’re in third grade, and this is the next step, I’m kind [00:18:00] of jumping ahead for a second to give you perspective. In the next step, we’re going to talk about, okay, so what is actually the priority when they’re in third grade? They might not know what an accommodation is yet, they might be just starting with those accommodations, so they might not have that priority right now in that short term vision statement of knowing their accommodations and knowing who to ask for them, right?
That’s a little bit too young at this stage in the game. But this might be part of your larger vision statement that you have for after school services end. So again, I want you to really think about when the school services end what skills do you want them to have. Here’s a second example for this big large vision statement.
If you have a child with a complex medical need like cerebral palsy or they’re autistic or they have epilepsy, you might want them to be as independent in life skills as possible. So something like this vision statement might look like. [00:19:00] The family would like Maggie to be as independent as possible with as many life skills as possible so that she can live on her own.
Okay, that might be a great long term vision statement. That doesn’t have a lot of specific skills involved with it, so I want to dive deeper into that right now with you. So, you know, life skills entails so many different things. And as an occupational therapist, we can have a whole podcast on this. We can probably have a whole podcast series on this, right?
But some life skills might be toileting. It might be cooking. It might be meal planning. It might be money management. Those are all different life skills, right? You might want to detail those out in your long term vision statement. And then again, when you look forward to the next step, you might want to narrow that down to like, okay, I think they’re ready to work on money skills.
They’re not ready to work on toileting yet. We’re just having some challenges around that. We’re going to plan, see that in Dr. Green’s words, which just means [00:20:00] we’re going to let go of those expectations for now, but maybe we feel like they’re really ready to get into some money management. They have a really good interest in getting a coffee, let’s say.
So they might be ready to kind of learn this because it has meaning for them right now. You might put that in the short term vision statement. So allow yourself to dream a little bit on what this would look like in the long term vision statement and then we’re going to kind of boil it down. Okay, so here are a couple more examples for those long term vision statements in more of a formal way, right?
Those were kind of discussion examples. I’m gonna get into like how I would actually write them if these were my kids. So the first one says, after high school, John will attend a trade school to study to be a diesel mechanic. You may or may not know these details. It’s okay. Don’t stress about it. He will need to be able to access manuals and texts that show him how to fix engines.
He will need to have accommodations that work for him and know who to ask for them and what to ask for when he needs them. [00:21:00] How cool is that? To be able to focus the IEP team on exactly the skills that he needs to get to. Right? So if you are in middle school and you have this vision statement, it’s all of a sudden like, whew, okay, we got four or five years to get there.
We’re going to get there. Let’s break this down and let’s do a vision statement for the next couple years, right? So this second example is after high school, Lucy will live at home in her parents basement that’s been converted to an efficiency apartment. She will have care workers to help her, but she needs to be as independent as possible.
She will attend a daycare program three times a week and as part of that program they volunteer at an animal shelter. She’s gonna love that part. She needs to increase her ability to ask for what she needs from strangers and navigate her wheelchair in smaller spaces. Really helpful, right? If the physical therapist or if the OT is trying to take services away because they don’t see a need anymore and all of a sudden you have this vision statement, [00:22:00] they’re going to be like, Oh, yeah, we can work on that.
That seems appropriate. You might get a little bit of pushback that that’s not necessarily school or academic related at that time, but here’s the thing. When you get into that middle school, high school life skills program, that’s when you bring this out again and you’re like, You know, we haven’t mastered the skill of navigating the wheelchair in small spaces.
We really, really need to work on this in these couple years so that she’s ready to go after this program ends. And that’s when you can pull back in service providers. So many parents think that once the OT or the PT or the speech therapist is gone from the IEP, that they’re never coming back. And that’s absolutely untrue.
I used to get pulled into high school IEPs all the time to get back on and I really actually wanted everybody to pull me back in in that 18 to 21 program. It just didn’t happen a lot. Once they got used to me not being there and those case managers got used to me not being there, they wouldn’t pull me back in.[00:23:00]
So really this is a great opportunity for you as the parent to say, Hey, I’d really like eyes on. If the OT can come by, if the PT can come by and look at this, that would be wonderful. So hopefully that helps you with thinking about a really big picture vision statement for your child. The next thing that we’re going to talk about is narrowing that down to pick one or two, maybe three priorities for the next year, and I say maybe three.
Because it’s really hard for an IEP team, and I’m doing this for context, not to give them excuses. I’m giving you context. When you have, you know, a speech therapist will have a hundred kids on their caseload. It’s really hard for them to focus on five, six, seven priorities. They’re not going to remember all that, even if they have a great data sheet and they look at it all the time, they’re probably not going to remember all seven.
And they definitely can’t address all seven in every session that they have that year with your kid. Right? [00:24:00] But if you have one or two priorities, that’s going to stick in their minds. And they’re going to be like, Oh yeah, that’s what we’re working for this year. That’s the emphasis this year that we’re doing.
Hey, I have some ideas about how to address that in every single session. Imagine the progress that your kid is going to make if you make it easier for the provider to focus on what you want to focus on. Also, it makes communication easier when you have that communication set up with your school team.
That’s what you’re talking about all the time. Hey, how is this going at school? This is what we’re doing at home to support that goal this year. This just makes it more targeted communication instead of, have you ever got communication from the school and they’re like, they had a great day. You’re like, did they?
I don’t know. Like our daycare just started doing more specifically what they’re eating. At school, because my son is a really picky eater, I wouldn’t say like severely picky eater, but he is more picky than other kids and that targeted information because when we sat down [00:25:00] for the parent teacher conference, I was like, what is he eating?
I don’t think he’s eating all that. Or if he is, he’s eating way more at school than he is at home. And they started detailing out what he’s eating. Guess what? When I picked him up from daycare yesterday, she was like, Oh, I was so surprised with how much he ate during lunch today. And so we have these targeted conversations that all of a sudden I’m like, Oh, okay.
He’s eating that there. Okay. He’s eating this here. Can I communicate that with them? It’s a more targeted conversation, which is so much better than, Oh, he had a great day or, Oh, he had a rough day. Give me more than that. I need more details than that. Maybe that’s just me. I don’t know. So that is the why behind having this vision statement.
that is really targeted to one to two, maybe three priorities for the year. So here’s some examples for that. We kind of talked about this towards the beginning with how to narrow it down depending on what grade they’re in, depending on where they’re at in development, depending on what their interests are at the time.
This [00:26:00] happens a lot with autistic individuals. Maybe they’re just not into math right now. So if we push math, we get behaviors because they really don’t want to do it right now. But all of a sudden, if it comes to buying their favorite snack when they’re out on a field trip, all of a sudden, we might be a little bit more interested because it has meaning now, right?
So you might have to focus on different things depending on age, depending on, what you hope the skill is that they’re going to work on, but also just interest level too. Sometimes it’s just not the right time, and that’s okay. We need to let go of that so that we don’t force things on people. Because when we force things, it’s just exhausting, first of all, and then it just doesn’t work.
Those skills don’t get built very naturally. Okay, let’s jump into a couple examples. I have two here as well. The family would like Tristan to work on being more emotionally regulated by this time next year so he can access academics and truly be happier at school. The family believes this would be well served with [00:27:00] a combination of increased understanding and support given to him by staff.
This might look like more flexibility for deadlines for assignments, which he’s is really, really hard for him and ask him to be able to communicate what he needs to regulate. So he’s asking when he needs a break or when he needs some other tool from the staff member. So you can see that I added in a couple things about how you think it could be addressed.
And we’re going to talk in a second about how to communicate this vision statement with the rest of the team. So I really want you to think about. These are kind of your expectations, right? We’ve talked about that before as well. Laying out your expectations for what you really want or how you want this to be addressed can really help the team understand where you’re coming from and then either meet that or explain that to you in the meeting,
so the next example is Maggie’s family would like to see her improve in math skills and use her accommodations. The [00:28:00] family thinks she might be embarrassed to use her accommodations, so she might need more education about using her accommodations or a buddy in her same classroom that uses some of the same tools so that she can see that it’s okay to use them.
I see this a lot, especially in third grade, where they start to say, Oh, why do I need this lamp board? Why do I need the computer instead of paper? I don’t want to be different. So this might be some suggestions to kind of normalize that for them. Because really, at the end of the day, when you think about that long term vision statement, does it matter what tools you use?
No, nobody cares. When we get past the middle school and the high school stage, no one cares what you use, right? It just matters that you can get what you need to get done. Done. And you can do them with the least amount of stress possible, right? Okay, so again, you’ll notice two things. I kind of layered in some whys, some expectations into that short term vision statement.[00:29:00]
This would be easier for the parent. team and everybody on the IEP team, the school IEP team to come to the table and say, Oh, okay, I see this as a problem. Let’s work on this. Seems like she has some accommodations set up. They’re not being used because she feels embarrassed. Let’s problem solve this problem together.
It really brings the school IEP team together with the parents. And now you’re focusing on an issue. It also helps give the team context. for who your child is. They might be really sensitive about using those accommodations, right? That’s telling your school IEP team a key part of your child’s personality that they might not be attuned to yet.
You might have some new staff on there. You might have some really stressed out staff. You might have somebody on maternity leave,
this can really help communicate that as well. So again, if you need more examples than that, there is a link at the top of that guide that will take you to a page that has a lot more examples, [00:30:00] a lot more explanation for how to do this if you’re stuck. But also I want to encourage you, if you’re stuck, if you want somebody to look over your vision statement, come join us in the Facebook group.
When you get your vision statement written, you can post it in the group and then let us know what feedback you want and kind of where you’re at, what you’re considering, and we will all pipe in and help you with refining that vision statement.
and give you some opinion to make it better or we’ll tell you if it’s wonderful and great. So I want to encourage you to do both of those things, both download the guide and join us in the Facebook group so that you can get some feedback there. So let’s do a little bit of a summary for this vision statement.
So first of all, we talked about why it’s advantageous to do a vision statement. This IEP team where you want your child to go. the potential that they have to reach and some of the skills that you want them to be able to do by the time that school services stop. Even if you have a child that is [00:31:00] in preschool and it’s really hard to think that far ahead, I want you to connect with adults with that same disability or those same challenges and really connect with them and really ask some questions about What should these priorities be?
What skills are most important to you? As you left those school supports, that’s really going to help you if you’re a little bit lost in what to do here. The second thing is that it really communicates who your child is and the potential that they have. So many IEP teams right now are overstressed and I don’t want to make excuses for them.
It’s still not right. But this is a simple thing that you can do. That communicates to your team what you want them to focus on instead of having 12 goals. I want you to take that smaller vision statement, make sure that it only has one or two things in there, maybe three. You could convince me to do three and share that with the team.
The last thing that we’re going to talk about is how to share this vision statement with your team because [00:32:00] I hate it when I go through online courses and they have me do something like they’ll have me write a transformation statement for the podcast, right? What I want you guys to get out of the podcast and I’ll write it and I’ll be like, okay, now what do I do with it?
And they’re like, oh, it’s just for you. No, I don’t want to put in all this work to this vision statement and then not share it. Going back to my low level anxiety, I love being proactive. It makes me feel really good and it makes me feel way less stressed if I’m proactive. What I love to see from parents for this vision statement is that you are sharing it before a meeting. And I really want to encourage you to share this vision statement with the whole team, with your current team, with your future team.
Write an email. You should have an invite with everybody’s email addresses on it. I want you to reply to that email and say, Hey, I was just working on this vision statement. I’ve heard it really helps everybody kind of come together and have one focus in mind for the [00:33:00] next couple of years or for when school surfaces end.
I wanted to share this with you so that we can all be on the same page when we come to this meeting. Super cool, right? I love it. It makes me so excited to think that some of you will do this. So before meetings at the beginning of the year, it’s a great time to share this out.
Again, you don’t have to have a meeting. You can just email it to the case manager and all of the team for that year. You can email the case manager at the beginning of the year and say, Hey, I know. Staff changes might have happened over the summer. Can you send me the emails of all the people that are going to be servicing my child’s minutes this year?
And so you’ll get an email back with all of those people or you can look it up on the website if they update their website really well, and you can send that out at the beginning of the year. Super helpful. The third way to share it, of course, is right before an IEP meeting. So before you have that annual meeting, before you have the eligibility meeting, maybe you have a tri annual review coming up.
Really focus [00:34:00] on sharing that before they do any new testing for that eligibility meeting, or just before that draft IEP is really made, because then you’re getting ahead of them, you’re saying, hey, I want you to focus on this, and then when they write those draft goals, they can have that in mind, and they can really pay attention to that.
Now, if you come to the meeting, and they haven’t read it, and they aren’t in line with that, You can ask to read that at the beginning. Hey, I sent this out in an email, or you can have it printed if you’re in person, or you can drop it in the chat box if you’re doing it virtually. And you can say, hey, I sent this out beforehand, but I know you guys get a lot of email.
Here’s the vision statement that I have for after school ends. Here’s the one that I want to focus on for the next year or two. Just wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same page with where we’re going. Can you see how Transformative that is and how amazing that is. Oh, I’m so excited to see your vision statements
Samson Q2U Microphone-4: Just a couple of reminders before I sign off But that vision statement guide you can access at theieplab. com slash [00:35:00] guide, G U I D E, and that link is also below this podcast in your podcast player. Also, the Facebook group, the link to the Facebook group is below this podcast in your podcast player as well.
And if you go to theieplab. com slash podcast, that link to join the Facebook at the top. There’s a big button to join there as well. If you haven’t done that yet, I would love to help you with your vision statements. So pop into that Facebook group and share away so that I can see what your vision statements look like for the coming year.
Also, if you are listening to this podcast as it is being released in July of 2023, then we are doing the first ever. discount of all of our workshops and our courses on theieplab. com. So, uh, make sure that you use code SUMMER to get 25% off of select courses and workshops so that you are all set and ready to go when fall comes.
So thank you so much for listening. We will see you soon. Bye bye.