The email that turns a phone call into a record Most of the important things a school tells you, it tells you out loud. The teacher catches you at pickup. Someone calls on a Tuesday afternoon while you are at work. A conversation happens in the hallway after a meeting, in the five minutes when…
Perhaps you noticed your child’s IEP progress report came back showing their goals are not being met. Maybe your child said they haven’t met with the guidance counselor for social skills in a long time. What if the long-term substitute in an ICT class isn’t a special-education teacher. Many parents assume that once a child…
There is a version of autism people think they know. The child who does not speak. The child who needs obvious support all day. The child whose disability is visible enough that nobody has to argue about it. And then there is the version that hides in plain sight. The bright child. The verbal child….
There’s a word that quietly decides almost every special education disagreement, and most parents never get it explained to them. FAPE. It stands for Free Appropriate Public Education, and it’s the promise underneath the whole special education system. Once you understand this one word, you understand what your child is actually owed — and you…
The first number anyone handed me about my son was the 99th percentile. He’d taken the New York City gifted and talented test while he was in Pre-K, the one that’s supposed to find the kids who are ahead, and he scored in the top one percent. We got him a seat in a gifted…
If you are reading this, something probably brought you here. Maybe a teacher said the word “evaluation.” Maybe a report card stopped adding up. Maybe you have known in your gut for a long time that your child is working twice as hard for half the result, and someone finally said out loud what you…
IEPs and 504 plans get talked about as if they are the same thing with different names. They are not. They come from different federal laws, use different eligibility rules, and offer different kinds of support. The shortest useful answer is this: an IEP is generally for a student who, because of a qualifying disability,…
