From the school's point of view, nobody knows your child better than the teacher. So it's natural for the teacher to be involved in the planning of the IEP. Inconvenient, maybe, since it pulls the teacher out of a classroom or forces meetings into the constraints of the teacher's break time, but natural nevertheless. That's good news for you if you've built a rapport with a teacher, or if a teacher has a particularly good feel for your child's abilities and needs. If the agreeability factor is not so high? The teacher can be a pretty big fly in your ointment.
If your child has multiple teachers in the course of a school day, they won't all crowd the meeting. One of each of these types of teacher will get tagged to participate, and maybe they'll actually show up, too.
The Special Education Teacher: Your child's special education teacher -- or one of them, anyway, if your child is in a variety of classes -- will almost always make it to the IEP meeting. This teacher will be charged with outlining your child's educational progress and prognosis for the IEP, and with gathering opinions from all other teachers as appropriate. What you hear from the teacher at the meeting should be consistent with what you've been hearing throughout the year. If not, ask why. If you haven't been talking with the teacher throughout the year ... well, then I'll ask, why not? Don't be a stranger.
The Regular Education Teacher: Regular education teachers are supposed to be at IEP meetings. Their actual attendance? Spotty. Deciding factors may include how much time your child spends in the teacher's class, how directly the teacher works with your child, how much of a darn the teacher gives about special students, how pushy the case manager is, and whatever else is preoccupying the teacher that day. If it's important to you to have the regular education teacher there, make personal contact and urge him or her not to forget.
Schooling the Teacher
Your child's teacher can be a powerful ally on the IEP team, or a formidable foe. There are a couple of ways to swing the odds to the former:
- Give the teacher plenty of information about your child's disability. Don't make the teacher do research, or guess; provide plenty of helpful material, with your personal spin.
- Meet with the teacher frequently. Build a relationship, and let the teacher know you're always available for conferences, phone calls, or strategy sessions.
- Especially meet with the teacher before the IEP meeting, to float the issues that may be mentioned, present your point of view, and get a reaction. Working things out privately between the two of you will work better than trying to do it in a roomful of hostiles.
- If one of your child's teacher "gets" him or her more than others, ask that teacher to come to the meeting, even if a different teacher has been put in charge.
Getting the Straight Story
It's good to stay in constant contact with your child's teacher. Unfortunately, though, it may not always clue you in to what you'll hear at an IEP meeting. One year, my daughter seemed to be doing great in her self-contained class: good report-card grades, good comments on progress reports, and a consistent cheerful prognosis whenever I'd talk to the teacher.
"She's soaring!" I was told. "She's flying!" Well, hooray for that! So imagine my surprise when, at her IEP meeting, the same teacher reported that this girl had met none of her goals, understood very little, and couldn't possibly be mainstreamed. Um, soaring? Flying? Too close to the sun, maybe, to come crashing so resoundingly down?
It's not a huge amount of fun to have teachers give you bad news all through the year, either, but you want to make sure that you're getting a full and well-rounded picture. Let the teacher know you can take it. And document those comments so if they contrast with what you hear at the meeting, you can site the misinformation.
