We have been to many IEP Meetings over the years for our 17 year old son who is dyslexic & dysgraphic and our 15 year old daughter who has dyscalculia, both have had IEPs since they were in second the grade. That adds up to a lot of Eligibility and IEP Meetings, and we are still learning all the time. Some years are bliss and there are other years when you want to pull your hair out because it just seems to be roadblock after roadblock on the way to securing an IEP that will work for your child. We prefer the good, but will batten down when we have to face the ugly because this is about our children receiving the fair and appropriate education to which they are entitled.
When you sit down at an IEP Meeting and the first thing the principal says is that they don’t believe that they’ve done anything illegal, that’s a tip off it’s going to be a bad meeting. This was one of our son’s meetings that we requested due to the fact that when we left the first IEP meeting with a “dirty” or working copy of the IEP, and under assistive technology the “Yes” box was checked and when a cleaned up copy was sent home it was changed and it was marked, “No.” We were still learning about the special education system at that time, but we were pretty sure that since we agreed and signed a copy of the IEP with the box marked “Yes,” it shouldn’t have been changed. It was pretty awful when we were trying to ask questions and the principal learned forward and started yelling. We sat in astonishment that this had just happened because we had come from a school where the principal and teachers all offered suggestions and support to help make our son successful.
The IEP Meeting mentioned above was bad, but the ugly meeting was a few years down the road. It was a transitional IEP Meeting and a high school administrator was added to our son’s team. We were fortunate in intermediate school to have a team that was willing to work together toward our son's success. As we walked into this particular meeting, we were handed a completed copy of the IEP which had many changes, we were shocked by the amount of changes, but we understood that this was a fluid document so we handed out our IEP Worksheet which included both goals and accommodations that we believed our son needed. The first difference in the IEP was in the goals section, all of the percentages had been lowered from 80% to 65%. When we addressed this, the high school representative shared with us that with a 65%, our son could walk across the stage, get his diploma and the rest was up to us. We held strongly to our opinion that the IEP get back to the 80% and the high school representative told us that there are students with drug addict parents that would be happy with 65%. As we were unrelenting in our to push to get back to the 80%, we were informed that we were acting like the school was against our son, that this is how all of the high school IEPs were written, we were being aggressive and nothing in the IEP would be changed. We weren’t finished with the goals section but the high school representative moved on to the accommodations section of the IEP neither listening to our objections nor the intermediate administrator's objections when he finally spoke out about the percentages that were written in the IEP. At this point the high school administrator was going down the list, leaning over and telling the special education teacher which accommodations were acceptable. When I interrupted her to remind her that we were part of the IEP team, she said that she knew and that they were listening. Decisions were made without any discussion from the group because she was at this point only speaking to the special education teacher. Needless to say, we walked away from the meeting without an IEP.
After the meeting I wrote to several of the people we had worked with in the past who had taken the time get to know and work with our son and one of them stepped up for him. They contacted the administration of our son’s future school, had the high school administrator removed from the team as well as from the school to which he would be transitioning. The follow-up IEP Meeting went well.
We’ve learned a lot about IEP Meetings over the past few years. We walk in with an IEP worksheet that has all the goals and accommodations we feel will work and want the team to consider, prior to scheduled meetings we request a copy of the IEP that the school will propose, we go in wanting to work together, listen to what all team members have to contribute and we go in hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. We’ve also learned that it only takes one person’s ego to tank an IEP Meeting.