Stronger IEP Teams
Every public school principal is familiar with this scene: It is five minutes until your next annual Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting for a returning student. But with your assistant principal out sick and the school counselor, special education director, and classroom teacher needed in the meeting, you scramble to find someone to cover the classroom and pick up any administrative matters that develop over the next hour. At the same time, you are hoping to review some notes before walking into the meeting with the child’s parents. As a new administrator in a school of more than 1,000 children, you don’t have a personal relationship with the child, and this will be your first time meeting with his parents or communicating with them at all, for that matter.
Federal law, as well as the regulations handed down by the U.S. Department of Education, specifically say that IEP collaboration with the child’s parents or guardians is mandatory to ensure a free and public education for all children—no matter what their physical or mental accommodations might look like. However, no explicit guidelines exist for how to successfully build and lead this team or how to maintain a functioning IEP school-family partnership.
The Need for Collaboration
The collaborative process of an IEP team that includes family participation has always been a part of special education federal law. In fact, parent participation is one of six primary principles of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As of 2004, section 300 of IDEA lists parents as the Number 1 member of a child’s IEP team. The difference in the last few years is that the federal government has moved from the requirement that parents should be involved to a policy of genuine family engagement. In other words, the federal government has opened the door for more genuine parent engagement in the development and implementation of IEPs.
While previous studies examine the importance of a relationship between children with disabilities and their educators, less research exists on school and neurodiverse family collaborations. In a 2022 study of special needs teachers and parents of students on the autism spectrum, educators reported that a good partnership is framed by more engaged parents and frequent communication. Additionally, teachers viewed parents as good collaborators when they implemented the same strategies at home as at school and showed a willingness to work as a team. Traits that turned educators off to a relationship included the fear of saying something to upset the parents, the fear of overstepping boundaries with their administrators, and difficulty navigating views that did not align with their own. Teachers also called the IEP meetings intimidating, with too many contributing voices.
One study led in rural Tennessee in 2002 found that general education teachers felt that, considering IEP parents are not educators, they were given too much say in their children’s education. And in another study of parent engagement, conducted in 2016, evidence suggests that, despite the administration and teachers’ best efforts, parents of children with special needs did not feel a part of the team. These parents could not shake the feeling that they were unequal partners in their child’s IEP because they had less information and less time to be full participants in the development and implementation of their child’s education.
Erica is a parent of a child with ADHD and on the autism spectrum. Her son, David, is in ninth grade, so she is no stranger to IEP meetings with more than 18 under her belt. Still, she is always nervous walking into these meetings and sitting down with the school principal, the school counselor, David’s general ed teacher, his special education coordinator, and his resource teacher—it’s intimidating. Erica feels that she is the only person there with a true understanding of her son and will be tasked with the heavy burden of ensuring David gets his academic and social-emotional needs met. Now in high school, he seems to lack some essential executive functioning skills, and so Erica looks through his binder every evening to see that he’s on top of his assignments in six classes. In addition, she is not aware of her son’s in-class behavior and his daily work habits at school. And even if she did understand his classroom struggles, Erica doesn’t know what resources and accommodations David’s school could offer. She would like to ask for additional communication with the classroom teachers so that she can understand where she can be of more assistance in her child’s success as he prepares for these critical next four years.
From Parents Versus Teachers to Parents and Teachers
So, how can your school leadership create a better understanding and cooperation among the parents and educators on the IEP team?
Implementing these federal collaboration laws and regulations on the local level is challenging. When it comes to teachers and administrators, there is no guidance on how to manage the emotional investment of a parent of a child with special needs. Education advocates, lawyers, and policymakers continue to publish literature on ideas for collaboration between parents and schools. Nevertheless, schools and parents still struggle to find ways to successfully engage in IEP development and implementation given the resources, time, knowledge, and communication gaps in the process. Therefore, all too often the burden falls on school leaders to take the helm in implementing better collaboration strategies for IEPs. Depending on the socioeconomics of a school, principals report that IEP management can be anything from a huge problem to an impossible situation for the school and the parents. Some parents hire an education advocate to attend IEP planning meetings with them. But not all parents have the time or money to seek out this expert guidance of how the system works. Nevertheless, one thing the federal government, schools, and families agree on is that the management of IEPs requires a working and evolving partnership between schools and families.
What Does a Successful Partnership Look Like?
Successful partnerships are constructed differently for every sector in which they function and depending on what challenges they are undertaking. However, over the years, research has provided us with several traits that go into most successful partnerships. Those traits include shared goals and values, mutual trust, and regular communications. Successful partnerships also share responsibilities for the functioning of their mutual collaboration. One form of partnerships, cross-sectoral, is designed to serve organizations and/or groups that are acting within different economic sectors or environments. For example, cross-sectoral partnerships may be between public and private organizations, government and corporations, or arts councils and neighborhood development organizations. They may also exist between schools and groups of volunteer parents, such as the parent teacher association. In this article, we are suggesting that the school, which is in the nonprofit sector, and the family, who functions as a member of the volunteer sector, form a cross-sectoral partnership to develop and implement an IEP.
10 Ways to Improve Family Involvement
Here are 10 suggestions taken from partnership literature that you can apply at your school to create more successful family engagement with the IEP process.
1. Establish the school-parent partnership at the inception. Creating a formal connection with meeting agendas and rules will give all collaborators more faith in the process.
2. Make one of the parents a co-chair of the partnership. This will immediately give parents a greater sense of respect from the school as well as formal co-leadership of the IEP development and implementation process.
3. Share decision-making between school and parents. Each IEP partner should work hard to find common ground on each decision.
4. Share knowledge and skills. Parents may say they don’t get the necessary information and teachers may claim that parents do not know enough to be full partners. By creating a plan for educating the parents that includes self-paced online lessons on IEPs, family members can be exposed to all the educational materials that teachers and administrators have.
5. Agree on goals for the student. While both the school and the parents want to provide an education for the child, their goals are inherently different. Beginning the relationship by agreeing on a set of goals, some including educational achievement and others including child wellness and happiness, will enhance school/parent engagement.
6. Create a partnership agreement that assigns implementation responsibilities for both the school and the family. Doing this will help to clarify roles while giving parents more of a stake in the team’s success.
7. Keep the relationship strong. Meet informally once a quarter, and, if possible, away from school grounds, to discuss partnership problems. Familiarity and informality between organizational team members will increase trust.
8. Keep two-way communications flowing. Each school (system) should have a website (with privacy secured) whereby, in real time, families and schools can discuss their child’s IEP process and implementation.
9. Use neutral parties as boundary spanners. These individuals would act as neutral brokers who are brought in, as needed, to help the partnership resolve difficult issues. Schools and parents could ask individual advocates or school personnel (assistant principals, general education teachers) who are not involved directly in the partnership to serve as boundary spanners.
10. Evaluate the partnership annually. What is the progress toward agreed upon goals? Has each group fulfilled their responsibilities?
Moving forward, parents and educators will continue to look toward administrators to lead them in building successful IEP teams. While we know that IDEA laws exist to afford all neurodiverse children their rights to education, we also know that their ultimate academic success is only as strong as their village—the IEP team. Therefore, schools must work with parents, as equal partners, to create a knowledgeable, actionable, and sustainable collaboration.
Jacqueline Renfrow is a journalist, a special education advocate, and a mother of three children—all with IEPs. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education where she is completing her master’s degree in education. Henry M. Smith, EdD, is an assistant professor of leadership at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. He served as a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the Clinton Administration.
References
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Mereoiu, M., Abercrombie, S., & Murray, M. (2016). Structured intervention as a tool to shift views of parent-professional partnerships: Impact on attitudes toward the IEP. Exceptionality Education International, 26(1), 36–52. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/eei/article/view/7734.
Munn, R., Ezzani, M., & Young, G. (2021). Parent engagement in identifying and serving diverse gifted students: What is the role of leadership? Journal of Advanced Academics, 32(4), 533−556. doi.org/10.1177/1932202X211021836.
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