Dana Marie: Hi everyone and welcome back to the empowered to advocate podcast This is Dana Marie and i am joined here with michelle and we are going to give you a quick little podcast today. So we are going to really quickly go through the timelines in special education that we think that you should know and be aware of. We've actually dropped these timelines in multiple other places over the last year or so whether it's in our webinar or in another podcast episode but we thought it was helpful to dedicate just this short little mini-podcast to timelines in case this is something that you're really trying to figure out or learn more about in a way that’s easy. Did I say quick because I'll say quick again so with that I'll turn it over to Michelle.

Michelle: quick quick quick! So the first timelines that we're gonna look at here or listen to is when we are requesting an evaluation. So when you write a letter requesting testing for your child, the school district has five days to respond to that request. So you should expect to receive a consent form either in the mail or email, depends on how the district operates. The team chair or ETL might actually reach out to you and say “hey I’ve received your request, these are the next steps please reach out with any questions.” Like that would really be best practice but that doesn't always happen. So they have five days to respond. Once you receive that consent form in the mail you want to make sure that you review it and you send it back. Once the district receives that consent form that's when the clock starts ticking! The district then has thirty days to complete the evaluations on the consent form and then forty five school days from the date of the consent for the team to come together to review and determine eligibility I forgot to mention that these are the timelines for Massachusetts. Under IDEA, the timeline is sixty school days. Many states have time lines that are closer to what i just described for Massachusetts

Dana Marie: That timeline goes for both an initial eligibility and a re evaluation if your child is due for a re evaluation. So then let's move to what if it's just an annual review year? So your child does not need updated testing and does not require any updated evaluations. It's just your annual review so like Michelle said, best practice in Massachusetts is ten days before the meeting is scheduled you should hear from somebody at the school informing you of the date at the time of the annual review meeting so that you have time to see if it works for your schedule. If it does not work for your schedule you can absolutely reach out to somebody at the school and request to have that changed but you should have at least ten days to consider whether the day and time that the school has proposed worked for you.

Dana Marie: Now you are at the actual IEP meeting. You are obviously part of the team. You're helping to develop this IEP at the annual review meeting. When the meeting is over you should receive a summary of the meeting. You can also request the attendance sheet from the meeting and then the formal draft IEP for your consideration should come home to you within ten school days. That can be either by email or in the mail. Sometimes it comes home with the child. It depends on the district’s policy on that but that should come to you within ten school days once you receive the IEP.

Dana Marie: You have 30 school days to review it and respond not just sign it and get it back which sometimes is how it's phrased. It’s thirty days to respond so your response does not necessarily have to be just a signature. It can be “I accept”t some parts of this iep. “I reject” other parts of it. It can be, “I accept all of it”. It can be,”I want to meet again” because there were things that were not changed or there were things that were not put into the IEP that we discussed at the meeting. So you have those thirty school days just to respond.

Dana Marie Of course if the IEP looks good to you and it looks like what was talked about at the annual meeting and it looks reflective of the conversation go ahead and sign it and send it back earlier if you don't need the full thirty days but just know that you have those thirty days which is helpful because you might have other people reviewing the IEP with you or for you family members. It might be the child's other parent, an advocate, a lawyer someone who might be looking at the IEP with you or for you so that's why you get that kind of chunk of time to look at it.

Dana Marie: In between all of these: an annual review, a re evaluation ( all of these happened either once a year or every three years). In between these you should be getting updates on your child's progress through progress reports, We actually mentioned this in our previous episode or maybe two episodes ago. But you should be getting progress reports at least as often as you get report cards and progress reports should specifically speak to the goal areas that your child is working on through their IEP so if your child is getting a report card four times a year you should be getting progress reports about goals four times a year. If your child is getting report cards sometimes for the younger kids it's only twice a year you should get progress reports twice a year so that's a time line that goes along with the school and the district time line around report cards and when those are sent home to you but it's important to note that when those are sent home to you you should also be getting the progress reports as well.

Michelle: And I think one of the things to make note of here is also when you have we say you have thirty days to respond to the proposed IEP if you don't respond in those thirty days the district will then re send it to you with a letter saying you had thirty school days to respond. You know sometimes it's because people forgot or whatever then you have another thirty days if you don't respond to the district either with an accept a rejection or a partial there's no response within those sixty days the district then to file that with the bureau of special education appeals the BSEA for a rejected IEP. Meanwhile your child is still working on their previous IEP and we'll kind of talk about this in another episode but just know that those timelines are not there to be a pain in your butt but because the school district wants to make sure that they're able to appropriately progress your child along with a new plan and if they don't have a response from you they are unable to work off anything but the old plan until they have their response so just want to put that caveat there.

Dana Marie: And the last piece that we want to mention is if you are new to the special education process and if you are going through the eligibility process for the first time an initial eligibility we have a couple of great resources for you that include these timelines and a kind of help you navigate that process so we are going to make sure that they're linked here but if you head to our website you can find our recording of a webinar that we did actually a few months back on the eligibility process and you can also find our one page eligibility cheat sheet. That cheat sheet will include for the state of Massachusetts all of the timelines that were discussed here today all in one place.

Dana Marie: Take a look at the show notes and also head to our website and you can find those two resources which include the time lines specifically for initial and reevaluation meetings

Dana Marie And of course if you have any questions at all about time lines we often hear from parents who say I think I was supposed to get a report already and I never got it or I think they were supposed to send the IEP but I'm not sure when they were supposed to send it and I never got it, please reach out to a schedule a free twenty minute consult with us to help you navigate that and kind of point you in the right direction to ensure that the school and the district are adhering to the timelines that they should be for your child and their IEP

Michelle: All right thanks so much for listening and we look forward to chatting with you in the next episode and hearing from you in the future. Take care everybody.