What Are Some Things That Go Wrong & How Can They Be Fixed?

This is the million dollar question. The legal answer is, the student gets their services and supports. The reality is a bit different. Let’s break down subs a bit. First, there is what happens if a general education teacher is out. The classroom sub is never given the IEPs of students in the class– long term subs excepted. Sometimes teachers will leave behavior plan information for the kids who need it, but often they don’t. What happens in that case is a lot of prayers, hope, and luck. Ideally the special education team isn’t out that day and can be proactive– and the sub isn’t awful and a trigger for the student. Second, there is what happens if a special education teacher is out. If the teacher has instructional responsibilities, they get a sub. Maybe. Sometimes they don’t and a paraprofessional covers. The sub is typically not specially trained and often they don’t have access to IEPs either. If the teacher is a resource teacher/case manager/whatever, they typically don’t get a sub and the student goes without for the day. The third case is what happens if a paraprofessional is out. Typically what happens here is shifting. The neediest students always get covered first– and generally someone will shuffle the schedule to make sure some rando is not sitting with the most explosive child in the school. Basically, if there is a sub, except some chaos. There is all sorts of planning you can try to do to prevent the chaos– but subs are in short supply and many are of questionable quality, so good luck to you and your students.

An IEP gets called into question if someone is unhappy or something is going wrong. If everything is going great and everyone is happy, they are rarely called into question. It’s when things go badly that there are more likely to be questions. That could be the parent being like, “Hey, my kids isn’t making growth. Why not?” or “Hey, my kid just came home crying because they have no friends. Why isn’t the school doing anything to help?” Parents have the right to request an IEP meeting whenever they want one. Practically, schools could stall 10 to 30 days depending on the state/district. That means that even the most aggressive of parents would have trouble getting an IEP scheduled more often than once a month. If a parent is concerned about anything, however, they get to request a review and changes to the IEP. Schools can also request meetings between the annual IEPs. These are often done because a student is struggling and the school wants to document that they are doing something– or because the school is trying to put pressure on a parent to do something like get the kid to school, look at therapy services in the community, or take away the student’s phone at night so the kid sleeps. The other situation where an IEP gets called into question is if an advocate gets involved. Most are paid by the hour so they have a financial interest in holding lots of meetings and asking for lots of changes.

The answers vary by school but a lot of time it has to do with scheduling, habit, and staffing. It can be complicated to figure out how to schedule students with more needs in general education. Who goes with them? How are the teachers supported? That is often combined with staff shortages and the force of habit. In high schools, it is even more complicated. If you are at a heavily tracked school where students are in the highest class where they can be academically successful doing that curriculum, what do you do with kiddos with more academic challenges? They often get grouped together in de facto special education classrooms. People can dress up the reasons, but decisions about tracking, scheduling difficulties, staffing shortages, and inertias are behind a lot of the more restrictive programs I have seen.