Time to complete adn IEP

I am a school psychologist who manages this processes daily. In many respects you understate the time delay of 90 days, because the teacher was concerned even prior to the time that the “referral was initiated”.

A time analysis would show that a sizable chunk of the time is due to scheduling meetings with the necessary people. Often this will take a couple of weeks to at least start. Then the scheduling problems reappear when we are done with the testing.

Your assumption that services should start immediately does not take into account the necessity of the time to do the testing. Testing a student can easily take 6 hours of direct student contact time — time he is missing class. And some of the tests simply must be given over the course of several days, simply because they can become burdonsome to the student.
Often this time for testing a “new” student comes out of the special education teachers “extra” time that teacher has when she/he is not seeing a student. (What parent or teacher would want us to cancel existing students so we can test the new students?) Some districts do have individuals who’s only job is testing but they often are itinarant, and are in the building only 1 or 2 days a week. Within in this time, we meet with teachers, parents, and others as well as trying find to “test” the student.

Finally, we often want to talk about and review a referral — And at least I do not want an automatic assumption of “we test — then we give services (write an IEP)”. Prereferral Interventions are a required and important component that should be done “when we first see problems”.

David

Teachers at our school get very frustrated with the “process”, especially when they sit in meeting after meeting and things don’t seem to be happening. The really good teachers, however, put in place a variety of accomodations and modifications and see how they work. Many students can be accomodated in regular education with the right interventions. There are manuals such as The Pre-referral Intervention Manual (sorry, can’t remember the publisher) that can guide you towards possible strategies. Our teachers may try having a volunteer or peer tutor work with the child, reduce the length of assignments, repeat directions individually to the student, provide the student with a checklist of assignments, allow the student more freedom to move, and so on. Think of it as each kid gets what s/he needs instead of each kid gets the same thing. I know it can be overwhelming when you’ve got a class full of these kids, and it certainly isn’t easy. Still, giving a child a disability label is a big deal and it should not be done before other interventions are tried for at least 4-6 weeks.

Speaking of teachers who are willing to accommodate without the right diagnosis. We had one in 2nd grade. My child’s VPD was so bad she wrote off the paper, across the desk and her arm fell off the other side (she never took her eyes off the board). The teacher had never seen a child do this in 20 years of teaching.

She immediately gave her a book, no board copying, the teacher moved to the part of the class where my daughter sat (instead of moving my daughter towards her desk so it looked like she was “in trouble”. She allowed her to write only the answers (fill in the blank) while all the other students wrote the entire question (It took her as long or longer). Those are some things this teacher did b4 my child was even tested (BTW, our testing was done privately b/c the school continued to insist nothing was wrong.)

Sure, it probably took some extra time, but my daughter left that class as student council representative (class appointed) and with her self esteem intact. When I hear how other LDers have had their self esteem smashed in the earliest years of school it makes me even more grateful for our teacher. Former students in HS and college still come back to visit her.

Oh, BTW! This is a teacher who REFUSED to teach whole language and instead used phonics books on the overhead. The class bought her a whole set of new books when we left b/c the others were falling apart.

Now THAT’s a teacher!