Kids Awareness Series

You might be saying, what in the world is an IEP. Parents with kids that have special needs need to know about an IEP or an Individual Education Plan. An initial IEP meeting is a time and place to develop a document with your child’s educators at school in order to develop a learning plan for your child. Children with special needs usually require having a modified curriculum (ie… allow additional time to complete assignments, reducing distractions in the classroom to learning, visual vs. auditory learning assignments depending on the child’s learning style) that is tailored to how they learn and the necessary changes made in order to accomodate their special needs.

An IEP meeting includes your child’s educators as well as the parents and parents or guardians should participate in developing any special needs or considerations that need to be made for your child. A list of your child’s strengths and weaknesses should be addressed as well as a list of your child’s needs and how to address them. The IEP meeting should not be a time where everyone in the meeting discussing a child’s behavioral or emotional problems, rather this meeting is a time to focus on the issues that your child is having whether they are academic, behavioral, etc.. and how they need to be addressed in school.

The next step to having an IEP is to develop goals that are specific to your child’s strengths an needs in order to be able to track your child’s academic progress in the school environment. Goals should always be realistic and be able to be achieved by your child. If the goals are not realistic, then your child will be discouraged and this will not encourage them to learn and they will become more frustrated. IEP goals should be specific to your child and should be identified in a sequence. For example, if a child with Asperger’s has a specific goal at school of mastering the computer than a sequence may look like this:
1.) the child will learn how to turn on the computer, sign into the internet, learn all the functions of a computer, how to use the keyboard, etc…
2.) the student will learn higher functions of a computer such as how to create documents and save information in the computer
3.) the student will learn how to use their e-mail or different programs such as Excel, Word, etc… on the computer.

The goal here is to have specific steps for your child to reach the goal which are achieveable and a date of completion should be included on the IEP document. The IEP includes the projected date for implementing the services, the duration of the services, and any revision dates. The document should also include how the school plans to report IEP goal progress. Lastly, an IEP should address how the current IEP represents that least restrictive environment as opposed to having your child have an alternative placement elsewhere.

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