One of the hardest things as a special education parent is trying to figure out if your child’s proposed IEP is good enough and if not, what to request from the school.
Partly this is because it depends on your kid’s needs. The same IEP isn’t going to be a good fit for all kids with dyslexia or ADHD. “Individual” is right there in the “I” of IEP. The other reason it can be so hard is because probably you’ve never seen anyone else’s IEP. There aren’t many IEP examples you can look at.
Finding an IEP Example
You can find a template or outline of IEPs from most states and while that gives you the structure, it doesn’t usually include any sample data. It’s usually the empty IEP form like this one from Massachusetts. And privacy rules require that educators not share any child’s IEP (as it should be). Sometimes you can also find fictional IEP samples which can be informative even if their contents are not very typical.
Parents are pretty private about this too and don’t share them around. It can be impossible to ask “so what’s on your kid’s IEP?” Maybe you don’t even know a parent of another kid with a similar profile who is in your same school. This makes it really really hard to know what to do as a parent without spending a lot of time or money trying to answer that question.
At KidvoKit, this is one of the challenges we’re focused on. We’ve built a specialized app to make it much easier for parents to get instant answers and advocate for their kids’ needs. If there’s one thing parents need is quick reliable answers to our questions about special education.
A Real IEP
One additional step towards that goal is to share one completely real IEP (names and identifying data removed) with whoever finds it useful.
State: Massachusetts
Grade: late 1st grader
Diagnosis: ADHD and Dyslexia
What you will find in this example IEP
You might notice as your look at this IEP that this was a kid who was very badly lagging in foundational academic skills. And that’s where IEP Goals were focused:
- Decoding Goals
- Writing Goals
- Math Goals
As a late 1st grader who was essentially still a non-reader and non-writer, the focus was on intervention services for those skills. He also had accommodations, almost entirely focused on executive function and supporting his ADHD, especially on the inattentive side.
Reading the list of services in the table is a bit confusing. He was transitioning from being pulled out of his regular classroom for work with a reading specialist, to a co-taught program where services would be provided in the classroom. But that’s not explicitly explained anywhere in the IEP – it was documented by the school district in a different form.
Also since his annual IEP date was late in the school year, the services listed show both services for the rest of the current school year and changes that were being made for the next school year. So it looks like there’s a huge amount of services listed but really it’s slightly misleading and definitely confusing.
Diagnosing Dyslexia
The last comment I’ll make about this IEP is that you may notice that he qualified for special education under “Health” (Other Health Impairment), and that there is no listing of Specific Learning Disability (SLD). When he was in 2nd grade dyslexia became his primary diagnosis but as you can see there were services for those deficits beforehand. A lot more could be said about this but that’s for another blog post exploring do schools diagnose dyslexia.
Feel free to comment below or ask questions about the IEP. It’s only one example but it’s a start and it’s real.
