If you've got kids with special educational needs, you can be overwhelmed by the paperwork in no time at all. From the beginning of school to the time your child either graduates or "ages out" of entitlement to special ed services, the accumulation of IEP's, evaluations, progress reports, correspondence, notes, journals, samples of your child's work, and medical records, will fill several drawers of a file cabinet or take up most of your shelf space.
You might be tempted to throw out papers when they get out of hand, but this may be a mistake. Even the oldest documents in your child's history can sometimes help you make a case for increased or different services under IDEA.
Make sure you understand the relative importance of different documents and organize them sensibly.
Here are some guidelines to help you manage them.
Which Documents Are Keepers?
Here's a list of the different documents that you'll see over the course of your child's special needs education. You should keep them all!
1. Individualized Educational Programs (IEP's) and other official service plans. In addition to IEP's, you may have Individualized Family Service Plans (IFSP). These are service plans that govern early intervention programs for kids before they're old enough to receive special education services, or plans that are written by agencies other than the local school system (such as a department of mental health or mental retardation).
2. Evaluations by the school system and by independent evaluators. Depending on your child, these will include educational, psychological and/or neuropsychological, speech and language, occupational therapy, and physical therapy evaluations.
3. Medical records. You probably don't need to keep all medical records with your child's IDEA documents. Keep only those that relate to the disability or disabilities that affect his ability to learn or to access school programs and facilities. As with any other kind of document, when in doubt, keep it!
4. Progress reports and report cards. These are the formal documents where the school system periodically describes how your child is doing.
5. Standardized test results. School systems often administer standardized tests (such as the California Achievement Tests) to all students. These tests can provide a helpful comparison to the progress reports written by your child's teachers.
6. Notes on your child's behavior or progress. These will include notes from you to the teacher, from the teacher to you, or journal entries between you and your child's service providers. Sometimes notes from a concerned teacher tell a different story than the formal report the teacher develops at the request of her supervisor when the TEAM convenes.
7. Correspondence. Save any correspondence between you and teachers, special education administrators, TEAM chairpersons, and evaluators. Don't forget emails -- print them out and include them in your correspondence file. Also save correspondence from the school system that's addressed to you or to all special education parents describing issues that affect your child. This may include letters describing new programs, changes in programs or services, school system policies for children with special education needs, or budget issues.
Note: Do you use certified mail, return receipt requested, when you send letters or notices to the school system? Sometimes this is necessary, but more often, this just adds unnecessary delay to the delivery of the letter or notice.
It's better to hand-deliver the document and ask for a receipt. Remember that in most courts and administrative forums, a letter mailed in ordinary first-class mail is presumed to have been delivered within three days of its mailing.
8. Notes from conversations and meetings with school personnel, evaluators, the child's TEAM, or other interactions relating to your child's program or needs. Be certain to take excellent notes at key meetings or, better yet, bring someone with you whose only task is to take notes (especially at TEAM meetings). These notes can help enormously when, months later, you try to remember exactly what various people said or what agreements were reached.
Note: Should you tape TEAM meetings? Do you have the right to tape them? The answer to both questions is "probably not." Under the laws pertaining to discrimination on the basis of handicap, you may have the right to tape a meeting if it's necessary to accommodate a disability (for example, if one or both parents have a language processing disorder). You may also have the right to tape a meeting if it's conducted in a language other than the parents' first language. Generally, the right to tape a meeting hasn't been determined to exist under IDEA.
Ordinarily, if you ask in advance to tape a TEAM meeting, the school system should let you as a courtesy, and will usually tape the meeting also. You need to consider, however, that having a tape recorder may inhibit the participants and create a feeling of hostility at the meeting. Again, it's usually better if someone takes excellent notes.
9. Documents relating to discipline and/or behavioral concerns. These include notices of detention and suspension (both in and out of school), letters describing the concerns of service providers or school administrators about behavior, records of behavioral assessments, and records of behavioral plans for addressing behavioral issues.
10. Formal notices of meetings scheduled to discuss your child. When you get a notice like this, jot down the date you received it. Sometimes the question of whether a school system has met time requirements is important under IDEA. (It is sometimes a good idea to keep copies of the envelopes in which such notices arrive. Check the date of the notice or letter and the date of the postmark. It could be significant if the postmark is later than the date on the notice.)
11. Samples of schoolwork. You don't need to keep every scrap of writing or drawing that your child produces, but it can be helpful to keep examples each year. You can compare these to show how much progress he's made in different academic areas.
12. Invoices and cancelled checks. Save the ones from services that you provide for your child's educational development. For example, if you hire a speech and language pathologist for an hour of therapy each week to supplement the school system's services, keep a record of any payment. Eventually, you can seek reimbursement for this expense. (You must be able to prove that it was necessary because the school's services weren't allowing your child to progress effectively.)
13. Public documents. These help explain how your school system works with children like yours. They include newspaper articles featuring special education administrators, school committee members, or superintendents talking about reorganizing special education programs, cutting expenses, or new teaching approaches.
Remember that except in rare cases, you don't need to keep drafts of any documents. The drafts may lead to confusion if you ever need to seek services for your child through the due process system. This is one area where you can and most often should lighten your document load.
from Wrightslaw by Robert K. Crabtree
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