A Question For Special Education Teachers ONLY?

Question

What would happen if a student transfers to your school the beginning of the school year and you find out at the end of the school year that he has an IEP? This really happened to me in the past and it almost happened again this year. We just found out today that a student who transferred to our school the beginning on the school year has an IEP.

Answer 1

Whenever a student transfers in - even if they come with records - we make it a policy to call the sending school to request a copy of their file (in the event parent has removed items and some do as they do not think their kid is Special Ed - we see this alot with EBD kids.) They then specifically ASK - WAS THIS STUDENT ON AN IEP.  Since the *** file and Special Ed file are not kept together - sometimes - if you are calling a big school they may not know - there can't be anything in the school file that indicates special ed.

Short of calling the Special Education Department of the sending school on ever single kid that comes in - I'm not sure what else you can do.

Answer 2

As a special education Advocate I would recommend that you file a complaint with your state department of Education against the district.

What they did is illegal. You child's school district denied your child what is called FAPE ( a free and appropriate education)

which the district is mandated to do by both the state and federal  government.

Remember, the whole idea of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), is that your child needs support to make educational progress. How can that happen if his teachers are not working on his IEP goals and objectives?

I would be shocked if any teacher would provide you with accurate and truthful information about this!

If I were you I would be mad that the school hamed my child in this way.

Answer 3

Your school should be doing everything it can to find out whether a student has an IEP.  To begin, the parent should be asked directly, as should his previous school.  That this is happening repeatedly suggests a flaw in your system.  If this information was reasonably discoverable, the parent could request compensatory services.

Alternatively, if the student is doing very well without accommodations and modifications, perhaps you should consider re-evaluating for eligibility.

Answer 4

Often parents want their child to be in regular education and do not tell the school officials that there is an IEP. Usually the student will reveal him or herself sooner or later, by failing everything or being a behavior problem. At that point, our regular ed teacher can request records from the previous school or our staffing specialist will hunt down the records.

Your district or you personally, cannot be held responsible for implementing an IEP that you don't know about. Once you find out about the IEP, then have your staffing specialist get him admitted and placed in special ed as a transfer student.

Answer 5

We have had a problem with this in our district as well.  The problem is that we don't require records from the previous school to register children, and sometimes the parent doesn't tell us that the child has special needs.  We ask them, and there is a place for special programs/status on the registration form, but parents aren't always knowledgeable or truthful.

We even had one parent, herself a teacher, who outright lied to us and said that the child was not in any special programs.  We placed him in a regular class and within a few days the teacher noticed that something wasn't right, so we called the previous school and found out that he had some serious issues that needed to be addressed.

All school records must be requested in writing, and sometimes it takes the sending school time to send them to the new school.  

Unfortunately, unless parents are required to bring records from the previous school or let us know the child has an IEP, there is really no way for us to know aside from what we see in the classroom.  

I guess technically a parent could sue the school if the child was not receiving services, but I would hope that before it got that far the records would arrive or the parent would let the new school know about the child's needs.  It also helps to have alert classroom teachers who can let someone know that a child's background needs to be looked into more carefully.

Answer 6

According to federal special ed law IDEA.   The IEP plan follows the child wherever he goes and is implemented WITHOUT DELAY.

Schools are very lacking in this and every other area of special ed, as is proven by the other comments here.

Schools KNOW that they will never have any enforcement to do right and follow the laws, so this continues.

I know it is not the teachers fault. Teachers do not know how they are in with the school in violating FEDERAL laws.

Not to mention the help the poor child is not getting.