When people ask us for IEP meeting tips for parents to have a greater chance to get the IEP their child needs, these four must-haves are almost impossible to beat.
1) Record the meeting. Whether it is in person or via video conference, record the meeting. 9 times out of 10, you will never need the recording. It is the 10th time when the District offers something that does not make it into the meeting notes or when someone says something that you think, “We needed to have that on tape!” If you have been recording, you have that key part of the record.
Find a good recording app on your computer, tablet, or phone. If it is your phone, make sure that incoming calls will not interrupt the recording.
You must give school district 24 hours (written) notice that you will be recording the meeting. They will typically respond, “We will also be recording the meeting.” This is perfectly fine.
2) When you get the final copy of your child’s IEP, make sure that every page has a page number. We see IEPs all the time missing page numbers. How do you know whether or not a page is missing? You don’t, unless they all have consecutive page numbers. Yes, there are cases where key pages have gone missing.
The next item is one of the most important IEP meeting tips for parents:
3) If it is not written down, it never happened. You can have conversations with your child’s teacher or anyone else at school without a problem. You can email the team prior to the meeting to share concerns or talk about the directions goals will take. However, those must be written in the IEP document in order to become part enforceable as part of the IEP. You are welcome to have informal discussions on how to proceed at the meeting, just remember that anything that is not in writing is nonexistent.
All IEP-related items MUST be written in the IEP document or they never happened.
4) Do not ever sign agreement to the IEP at the end of an IEP Team Meeting. Once in a great while, we attend a meeting where everything is written into the IEP document while it is broadcast on a screen where everyone can see the words going onto the page. Most of the time, you talk between 1 to 2 hours, and hope that the person filling out the IEP document, participating in the IEP discussion, and taking notes gets everything written into the document. You then receive the written document between a few hours to several weeks later. What could possibly go wrong? You already know the answer to that. Even with the best team on the planet, things to which the team agreed are not included in the document. Sometimes there is a simple typo that drastically changes the meaning of the sentence.
Wait until you have had a chance to read the document thoroughly and process the actual meaning of the offering before signing that you agree with the IEP document.