After IEP

I survived the IEP in one piece and only managed to break one law, according to my supervisor. Not too bad in my book. The meeting was a long one, but overall successful according to the people participating. I had a minor internal debate to bring the meeting to a close without full input and dialogue with the student's parent. However, I realized it would be best for the school and parent to take the extra time and hopefully have both parties feel they are on the same team. Most importantly the student will now receive the additional support they need to succeed in school.

The IEP Meeting

Tomorrow, I will be leading my first IEP meeting. What's an IEP? IEP stands for Individualized Education Program, which is used to track and manage educational progress for students with learning disabilities. The IEP meeting is a meeting with the student's parents, school administration, teacher(s), psychologist and other staff. The meetings can be long and an enormous amount of paper work is passed around to review, read, and sign.

I am a little nervous about leading the meeting as this is my first official school meeting and this is the initial review of testing data for a student's parents. I have lead meetings with CIOs and CFOs of major companies, but I perceive a difference between corporate bigwigs and parents. I guess you never know how a meeting will go when you are sharing with parents that their student performs tasks slowly.

I am hopeful that the meeting will go well. I'll report more following the meeting.