Out of Compliance

Special Education is all about being "in compliance." This means that all things dealing with special ed need to be in compliance (obeying the rules of) with special ed laws.

A huge part of compliance is doing things within a certain amount of time. For example, every year we hold IEP meetings. (Remember, IEP stands for Individualized Education Plan.) This ensures that parents are involved with their child and the child's needs are reviewed at least annually. Well, to stay in compliance, we need to have this meeting at least one day earlier than they had it the year before. So, if an IEP meeting is held October 10, 2011, it needs to be held October 9, 2012. Does that make sense? Along with IEPs, we have three year re-evaluations every...(can you guess how long?) THREE YEARS! These re-evaluations determine if a student re-qualifies for special ed. They can be kind of time-consuming if you have to do a lot of testing to determine if a student qualifies or not. Just like the annual IEPs, they need to be done the day before they were done three years earlier. So, if a re-eval is done October 10, 2011, then the next one is due October 9, 2014. Yay for special ed! haha And when I say due, that means that is the day we hold a meeting with the parents.

Whew. That was an awful lot of technicalities, but hopefully it will help you understand my serious situation.

Monday, September 12 I was assigned specific special ed students. (The split up all the students in the school among the 5 special ed teachers.) I am now called their "Case Manager." When I looked over my students and when their IEPs and Re-evals were due, I realized that one was due that Thursday, September 15. Was there anyway that was going to get done in a couple of days? No way! So was I in compliance? No way! Awesome. AND little new teacher me had no idea what I was doing or how to go about getting things done, SO I finally got this Re-Eval done last Friday. Let's see...how many days late was that? 22 if I counted correctly.

So, I finally got all of the paperwork filled out, and got the meeting set up. Oh! And half the reason it took me so long to get it done is that the parents speak Spanish, so I couldn't just call them up and set up the meeting because I don't speak Spanish! When I finally had the teacher across the hall call, we couldn't get a hold of the parents with the phone number we had. Double awesome. What I ended up doing was talking to the kid the next day at school, and what do you know? He called home and got a hold of his parents and set up the meeting. You mean I could have done that all along?! For pete's sake.
To make it even better, he was getting checked out that very day he set up the meeting, so I figured why not meet with the parents then!
What did that mean? Complete chaos. I had to get everything sorted out, figure out who would watch my class and who would watch another teacher's class so they could attend the meeting, and the most important question of all - WHO WOULD TRANSLATE? Well, as it turns out, they parents didn't have time because they had an appointment to go to, so all of that stress was for nothing.

The official meeting was held Friday, October 7th at 2:00pm.
This day was also a bit hectic because I had to get the paperwork all sorted out and what do you know, I got observed 6th period, and my meeting was held 7th period. I ended up totally missing my 7th period because of this meeting. (I wasn't happy about that because I seriously needed to chew out my 7th period because their behavior was horrific with the sub the day before.)
Anyway, I had also spent my entire 3rd period prep searching for people to come to my meeting, and most importantly, hunting down someone who could translate! The ESL person only worked until noon, the Spanish speaking counselor only worked until noon, the science teacher who had 7th period prep spoke Portuguese instead of Spanish, and no one else had a free period. That means I would have had to find someone to cover someone else's class while they translated my meeting! At the last minute though, the vice principal said he was free to attend so he could translate for me.

Hallelujah!

The meeting went smoothly and the mom was really nice. Mrs. Radant, the Special Ed reading teacher across the hall had a 7th period prep so she attended the meeting to act as an extra support to me. She was so great.

I was so relieved when I found out that I was done with that re-eval and it was good to go! (even if it was done so late)

What do you know though, I was informed that the Speech services person at my school hadn't added her stuff to the Re-eval form and we didn't talk about it at the meeting, so now we don't know what to do!
Is there no end to this Re-Eval? Sheesh.

Anyway, I guess we'll just have to hope for the best. Wish me luck!

-Ms. Damron-