It's Time for Your Quarterly IEP Checkup

Okay, today we're going to talk about the quarterly iep compliance review. Now what exactly is this? So this school year is pretty much made up of 40 weeks; 10 months in. Most schools break up their semesters into two and distribute progress reports every five weeks. The IEP document is the blueprint for your child. It describes what their educational plan is, outlines their current levels and then the team has a discussion and as a result goals are developed to address the deficiencies that they have in any areas. And then once the goals are developed, then supports are put into place to help the child achieve those goals.

And then you have the finished document that kind of outlines all these different things. Everyone agrees signs off on it, Bam. It becomes part of their record. That's all fine and dandy because every year the team comes back together, reviews again, the current levels, looks at what the goals were, and then changes are made and the document is updated. But what happens in between that time? I know what doesn't happen is a lot of parents, at no fault of their own, they just don't know. They don't track the quarterly progress towards goals.

So every quarter, your child's case manager or case carrier or um, coordinator, whatever they may call it, the person who is in charge of monitoring your child, is supposed to submit to you the parent a progress report that says within this quarter the student has met x percentage of the goal, not met the goal, struggling in these areas, blah, blah, blah. And then at that point, the parent and the team should come together if there are some deficiencies. If there is no progress being made toward goals, then the team needs to figure out what additional supports can be put into place. As a former administrator, oftentimes when I reviewed IEP documents for the first time, I would see that the case manager went in and definitely tracked the progress toward goals; but if you're tracking something and you don't see an improvement and it happens quarter after quarter after quarter, what's the point in tracking it?

This is the importance of monitoring your child's quarterly progress toward goals. Now every school or every district may have a different type of process or document that you get. It could just be they checked the box on the IEP document that says, progress made or no progress made. BTW I think is ridiculous because it doesn't give you any details. Now what should happen is that the goals are reviewed and the progress is measured. How is progress measured? There needs to be some type of data, some type of evidence, so let's say, your child is in the sixth grade and currently reads on a third grade level. He has struggled with word fluency, and the team decided to make a reading goal or a fluency goal that says little johnny, will be able to read 50 sight words fluently, when tested eighty percent of the time. In this instance, the teacher should be giving Johnny fluency tests and measuring the percentage of words he can read. A great IEP will go even a step further and would attach a list of the sight words. This way when he is being tested, we get very specific data. For example, at the end of the first quarter, Johnny needs to be able to read eight of the words fluently to meet that goal. His progress report indicated that, during this quarter, Johnny was able to to read five of the 10 sight words fluently, and the list of the remaining five words that Johnny needs to focus is updated in the IEP document. Wow, what a great tool to have, because any service provider, teacher, or paraprofessional that's working with little Johnny, knows exactly which five words he needs to focus on for the next quarter.

So do you understand the importance of having a quarterly IEP goal review?

I am offering a complimentary IEP Goal Review session for any interested parents. Remember, you are your child's greatest advocate.

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