District 41 is lucky enough to employ 10 speech-language pathologists to staff their 5 schools. As a speech department, we meet monthly to discuss various agenda items including budget, best practice, tough cases, evaluation results, professional development, and other issues. One thing we discussed at our last meeting was how we go about making up missed sessions or coding missed sessions on our service logs. There were a couple key take aways that I thought parents might be interested in.
-Ms. Dettmer
- Many service providers (including SLPs, social workers, psychologists, OTs, and PTs) write our IEP minutes on a monthly basis. This offers us a little more flexibility in terms of making up sessions since we have a month to meet the minutes if we encounter a cancellation. Of course, we all do our best to see children on a weekly basis for consistency, but things do come up unexpectedly.
- Each school has one day set aside for special education meetings including annual reviews, domains, and re-evaluations. Every case mananger does their best to schedule all meetings on the designated day and service providers avoid scheduling students on that day as well. However, not all parents can attend meetings on a specific day of the week which causes meetings to be scheduled other days as well. This means sometimes sessions need to be cancelled so a service provider can attend a meeting. IDEA outlines that when considering if a session needs to be made up, think about whether the missed session interferes with the student's free and appropriate public education.
- I always encourage students to let me know if there is something going on in their classes that they don't want to miss (for example: incentives, reward days, their favorite activity, Quizlet Live, etc.). I always allow students to reschedule their sessions with me so they don't have to miss fun activities in class. They take responsibility for speaking with their teachers to find out which day works and letting me know the new schedule.
-Ms. Dettmer