Special education assessments are the basis for all IEP educational planning
Assessments are designed to determine eligibility, illicit areas of need, and
propose educational planning for the IEP process.
If you don’t have accurate, thorough, and complete assessments, you’re not going
to have a good IEP plan. If you have good assessment data, you’re much further
along the way to having an appropriate, well-constructed IEP.
And if there’s ever any question about changes in a child’s needs, the starting
point is always assessments.
For example, if a child is experiencing behavioral problems for the first time, then
that child’s behavior should be assessed. What are the causes of the child’s
behavior? What kind of replacement behaviors can be explored?
You can’t fully address the child’s new behavioral problems without conducting
assessments. Thereafter, you can call an IEP meeting in order to discuss the
assessment findings and appropriately program the IEP according to those
findings.
And assessments are the basis for all of the IEP components, such as present
levels of performance, where the team determines the current functioning of the
child in areas such as academics, behavior, social skills, etc. Those present levels
lead to appropriate goals, which is the growth the IEP team expects and proposes
the child to achieve in one year’s time. And then these goals lead to services that
are necessary so the child can accomplish those goals. Finally, the IEP team
considers placement, i.e. where is all of this is going to take place in an
appropriate setting? All of these components involve the assessment process.
How does the assessment process start? Well, there’s basically two different
ways. There are assessments that are initiated by the parent (or the parent
representative), or assessments initiated by the school district.
Let’s talk about the school district assessment. The school district has an
obligation to assess for special education services whenever the school suspects a
child may have a disability. In that situation, the school district must initiate and start the special education assessment process to determine if in fact the child is not eligible under an IEP. This obligation is called child find.
So, if the school suspects a child has a disability (such as the child is far behind in
academics, or maybe the child has poor social skills, or low emotional control, or
language deficiencies), then the school must initiate the special education
assessment process.
And watch the student study team meeting process, which is the informal process
to help a child who may have a disability. Sometimes the teacher notices a child’s
problems and calls an informal meeting with the parent, the teacher, and
administration to problem solve to see if something can be adapted in the regular
education classroom to help the child. That’s not always a bad approach,
particularly for students that don’t have severe needs.
However, if these prolonged student study team meetings occur with no
improvement in the child’s behavior, academics, language, skills, social skills, etc., then the school district must forgo these meetings and start the IEP assessment process. If they fail to start the special education assessment process under these circumstances, this may be a child find violation because the school district knew or should’ve known the child had a disability and yet they didn’t proceed with the special education assessment. At some point, the school needs to abandon the student study team meeting process and start the special education assessment
process in order to comply with child find.
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