Parents/Principals:
A United Vision for Success

Edition 1

Distributing IEPs to Instructional Staff

 It seems fitting to start our series with that most basic of special education procedures: the Individualized Education Plan. Enormous effort is put into crafting this contract, but it remains a meaningless piece of paper unless everyone who works with a student is familiar with its contents. At a minimum, the IEP must be distributed to each staff member by the first day of class. In small schools, this is easily accomplished; in large schools, it becomes a Herculean task. Last minute class assignments, limited numbers of copier machines, and the need to control access to IEPs because of privacy concerns are just some of the barriers.

 Robinson Secondary School is the largest school in the state and deserves our applause for managing this task smoothly. According to Mrs. Joanne Leone, vice-principal, IEPs to be distributed the following year are copied times seven in June. While they don't know who their students' teachers will be, they know that typically the students will have seven teachers each.  These copies are stored in alphabetical order for the summer. In August, copies are made of all of the students' schedules when the Administrative Assistant returns. The week before school, two or more IAs are assigned to check each child's schedule and put an IEP in the appropriate teacher's file folder.  The folders are then placed in alphabetical order and housed in a conference room.  An email is sent to Robinson staff that IEPs are ready for pick-up.  Teachers are then expected to stop by the assigned room before the opening of school or the first day to pick-up a file containing their students’ IEPs and sign that the information was received.  Each of the two special education offices has a lead IA who is responsible for coordinating the IA's who work on this project as well as be on the watch for new students to the school/county so that those IEPs can also be appropriately distributed.

 Of course, receiving the IEP is only the first step: the instructional staff members do need to actually read it. One parent wrote, “We always put on the last page ‘student should only eat foods sent in from home’ as our son has a lot of food sensitivities.  I had one ESY teacher phone me before school started and ask if there were any foods she couldn't give him.  I have been in a classroom where the teacher was giving him cheese cracker goldfish (‘because he looked hungry’).  Another occasion we asked him and he said he had eaten crackers and the teacher had given it to him but he is minimally non-verbal and doesn't have a consistent ‘yes / no’ repertoire. We don't get accusatory, though we do follow up on each case and such reports from him diminish.  His behavior starts to get wackier after such incidents.”

 Another student’s academic success was seriously threatened by lack of preparation on the part of his teachers. His mother wrote, “My son's middle school did not require teachers to read his IEP prior to the beginning of school. We had an IEP meeting the second day of school, and were told that it was unreasonable to expect that all IEP's had been read. The mainstream science teacher had not read his IEP, had no experience with Sped kids, passed the responsibility off to the Sped teacher. However, given her lack of experience with Sped issues, she more than made up for her knowledge through her efforts to help my son.

“I was also told by the high school Sped Head during our transitional tour, that she could not force Sped teachers to read IEPs. I was also told that many teachers prefer to get a "sense" of who each child is before they read, so that they will not meet the kids with any pre-determined decisions of who they are.

“For this year, not having read the IEP made the beginning of the year very difficult for my son and for me. My son has multiple disabilities, and after the first quarter, when we reconvened, many teachers wrote that his need to ask for help was due to work avoidance, that he shouldn't "use not understanding to avoid work", that he was lazy, and chose not to do work, when he really has several processing issues along with Non-Verbal Learning Disability. This wreaked havoc on us all…There are still
issues in the IEP that continue to be ignored, as they don't fit easily into what the school can provide.  This has had a negative impact on my son emotionally as well as academically, as the remedial work they have provided, at least in reading, has continued to prove unsuccessful just as it did in 7th grade. The result is that there is a stagnation of his academic abilities, therefore a widening gap between achievement and expectation. This is a huge problem that the school continues to blame on ‘whatever is going on at home.’”

 Contrast this with the experience at Thoreau Middle School, where teachers have the information they need to implement all accommodations by the first day of school. According to Mr. Mark Greenfelder, principal, and Mrs. Donna Wohlscheid, department chair, an IA is assigned to copy the IEP of all rising eighth graders before the end of the previous year. Mrs. Wohlscheid herself does the copying for the seventh graders over the summer. Five copies of the accommodations pages and the Present Level of Performance are given to each case manager to distribute to the teachers at the beginning of the year. A page is attached which says that the information is to remain confidential.  Mrs. Wohlscheid makes a binder of the accommodations pages for the Health and PE teachers.  She reports that once the general education teachers have their class lists, they often drop by her office to have a conversation about which students may need extra help. At the change of the semester, or when new IEPs are written, new copies are given to all the teachers. In the team taught classes, the special education teacher creates a grid of the accommodations for each student in a given class. “This is most useful when the teachers are discussing and setting up seating arrangements, delivering instruction, and during testing situations,” according to Mr. Greenfelder. 

 Although it is clearly the responsibility of the schools to implement IEPs as soon as they go into effect, a child’s education is a group effort, and parents will often provide summaries to teachers. One parent meets with each teacher in person and hands out the IEP with her child’s picture attached. In addition, the person most concerned – the student him/herself – needs to be taught to self advocate as soon as that is developmentally appropriate. Self advocacy training should begin by middle school and can logically include the ability to politely outline the mandated accommodations.

 With smooth systems in place and the cooperation of everyone involved, there is no reason why there should ever be any future incidences in Fairfax County of teachers reporting that they were not even aware that one of their students had an IEP until four or five weeks into the school year. As many schools have demonstrated, we can do better than that.