Ask an Attorney: POTPOURRI
Franczek P.C.: Dana Fattore Crumley & Kendra Yoch
This week we are tackling three great questions! Please continue to send your questions and topic ideas.
For related service logs, should both direct and consult minutes be included?
The School Code requires “logs that record the delivery of related services administered under the child’s individualized education program and the minutes of each type of related service that has been administered.” You could read “delivery” narrowly to mean delivery of direct services to the student. But you could also read it more broadly to include all related services administered under the student’s IEP, direct and consult. As lawyers, we appreciate that recording time can be bothersome; also as lawyers, we recognize the importance of documentation. If a parent challenges whether a related service provider was actually providing the required consult minutes, having them recorded on the log is a great way to demonstrate that they happened.
When a student is in a self-contained classroom that has classroom paras, do we put individualized minutes on the IEP to indicate that? Or just if the student needs 1:1 assistance?
How to document aide support is a question that stirs up great debate. We generally see it written in the supplemental aids, accommodations, and modifications section or as a related service. Sometimes it is also mentioned within present levels, goals, a behavior intervention plan, or the notes. Neither IDEA nor Section 14 of the School Code mandate how aide support should be documented. (Aides are not listed on the non-exhaustive list of related services in IDEA but can be considered a supportive service to assist a child with a disability to benefit from special education.) So neither of the options is necessarily right or wrong – as long as the support is clearly documented. Based on the IEP, staff and parents need to be able to understand what the aide support will look like – and if the student moves to a new district, a new team should be able to determine what adult support the student needs. Is it a classroom aide, a shared aide, or an individual aide? What support does the aide provide? What parts of the day is the aide needed? In the situation in the question, if the student needs to receive specialized instruction in a self-contained classroom that has class paraprofessionals, that information should be explained somewhere in the IEP – we see this more frequently in the supplemental aids, accommodations, and modifications section than in the related services section. If the student also needs 1:1 assistance, that should be clearly documented as well.
Follow up to our last post about graduation requirements: What if the reason the student is not completing graduation requirements is truancy?
In special education, of course, all decisions are individualized. But generally, no, truancy would not warrant waiving graduation requirements so that a student can graduate. When considering a modification of the graduation requirements, the IEP team should consider whether the proposed change is due to the student’s disability and necessary for the student to receive a free and appropriate public education and have equal access to the programs and benefits of the school. If the student’s lack of attendance is related to their disability, the IEP team should convene an IEP meeting to address the issue. Additional assessments, accommodations, modifications, services, or a different placement may facilitate the student’s consistent attendance and credit accumulation. If the student reengages, credit recovery, schedule changes, and/or an additional year in high school may allow the student to earn the required credits for a diploma. But graduating a student who has not attended enough to complete the required courses may be a denial of FAPE as the accommodation is not supporting the student in accessing the general education curriculum but instead skipping it. Considering this, Districts do not need to graduate a truant student, but should be meeting with the student and parents to determine if the reason for the truancy should be addressed through alternative or additional special education services.
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