Dana Marie (00:00.59)

Hi everybody and welcome back to the Empower to Advocate podcast. This is Dana Murray and I am solo today with an episode on service providers and school team members. So in this really brief episode, I'm just going to go through who are the members of the IEP team, who might be the members at the table when you go to an IEP meeting at school, kind of the role of everybody, what everyone does.

Now, disclaimer, I will say we've been in lots of schools and lots of districts in multiple different states and it is different everywhere. So this is sort of like a general overview and sort of what we see the most, but know that depending on where you are, what school district you're in and what state you're in, this could all look a little bit different. So the first thing that I will start by saying, and this is something that we talk to parents and caregivers about all the time is, you might be super overwhelmed with all of the acronyms that come with school team members and service providers. So when I go through the list today of who might be on your child's team, I'll also try to throw in what the acronym is that the school team might be using in communication with you, in the IEP, in notices to you, et cetera. So let's jump right in. So in my previous role before joining Empower to Advocate,

I was a team chairperson for special education. Now, this is sometimes called an education team leader or an evaluation team leader, sometimes called a chairperson, it's sometimes called a facilitator. There are many different names. This person's role is if there is an evaluation, an initial evaluation or a reevaluation, this will probably be the person at the school and in the district reaching out to you to get some more information, to schedule the meeting, and to facilitate the meeting.

This generally is not somebody who has contact with your student on a day-to-day basis. It's not one of their teachers, it's not one of their service providers, it's not somebody working with them one-on-one. This person's role is really overseeing the process. You might not, during an annual meeting or during a reconvene meeting, or if you have monthly or quarterly check-ins, this might not be the person that you are checking in with, that you're talking to. You might only see them once a year or once every couple of years but know that their role is really overseeing the process, overseeing a lot of the paperwork, making sure the timelines are upheld, that you're getting things when you're supposed to get them. And this person oversees the rest of the team as well, making sure that they are similarly adhering to timelines, making sure you have all the information that you need about your child and what's going on in school.

You typically would have the most interaction with whoever your child's liaison is. Now this could be their special education teacher, it could also be one of their service providers. So if on your child's IEP, maybe they receive speech and language services and counseling services for a social emotional disability, you might not be in contact with the special education sort of academic specialist because your child may not actually need that service.

So the liaison can be anybody who works with your child and that's the person who you'll be in contact with around setting up meetings, paperwork, that kind of thing. Now I mentioned speech and language, so let's jump right into who some of those service providers could be that your child is working with. An SLP or speech language pathologist typically works with students on their expressive and receptive language as well as social pragmatics. So your child might need support in all of those areas. They might only need support in one of those areas or a couple, but the speech and language pathologist is in a school to work on those particular areas of need. Now, along the same lines when we're talking about communication, most schools or school districts have either in their district or somebody that they contract with from outside,

an AAC provider who, similarly to a speech and language pathologist, works on communication. Now this person is typically a speech and language pathologist who just specializes in AAC. Now AAC is Alternative and Augmentative Communication. So if your child is somebody who uses a low technology communication board or a high technology communication device, you will have contact with the

AAC specialist or AAC provider to help you implement that communication device or to understand how to utilize the communication device that your child is probably using during the school day. Confusing, the next one is AT. We very often hear from folks that they're confused about the difference between AAC and AT. So I'll jump into AT next. AT is Assistive Technology. And if you listened a few episodes ago, we interviewed Melissa Derr, who is an AT specialist. So she is an assistive technology specialist. Dissimilar from AAC, this is focused less on communication and more about accessing academics and the rest of the school day, right? So access to the environment and access to academics. So this could look more like speech to text to access writing, audio books to access reading so on and so forth. It can also look like Melissa talked in her episode about some sort of lower incidence assistive technology. That could be for students who are blind or who might need specific devices or tools in order to access their school environment. The next one, another acronym, an OT. An OT might be on your child's team. That is an occupational therapist.

The occupational therapist typically works on fine motor, right? So services fine motor skills, but can also work with your child if your child has challenges with sensory processing or requires some sensory accommodations. So the occupational therapist can work on everything from feeding, right? So if your child needs support with eating, that might be in the realm of the occupational therapist, but it can also be understanding, like I said, the accommodations that your child needs for their sensory needs. So understanding what fidget tools are appropriate for them, understanding what movement breaks are appropriate for them, so on and so forth. This person may also work on your child with things like handwriting or other really specific fine motor skills, depending on the age and the need, obviously, varies.

Then we have the PT. yet another acronym. The PT is the physical therapist. So the physical therapist is actually working on gross motor skills and gross motor access to the school environment. So this looks different than OT in a number of different ways. The physical therapist might be working with your child on navigating the stairs at school. They might have difficulty getting up and down the stairs. The PT might be working. with your child who uses a wheelchair to work on not just movement, but just range of motion, things like that.

Next on the list is, you heard it here first, another acronym, the BCBA. So the BCBA is the Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Once again, a couple episodes, we interviewed Karen Roy, who is a BCBA, a school-based BCBA.

This person, this is an interesting role in that it is similar to the team leader or to the team chairperson. This is typically not somebody who works directly with your child on a daily or weekly basis. Their role is really to evaluate the behavior needs of your child to maybe conduct a functional behavior assessment and then to create usually a positive behavior support plan if your child is eligible for behavior services. But like I said, this person is typically not the one actually doing the day-to-day sort of behavior needs with your child. The BCBA trains other staff members on whatever the behavior plan is, and those staff members like Karen.

told us a few episodes ago are the ones responsible for actually implementing it. Now, who can those staff members be? It could be an RBT or a registered behavior technician. It can be a paraeducator in the classroom. It can be the classroom teacher. It can really be any number of other service providers or many service providers who get trained on this behavior plan by the BCBA. The BCBA's role is to keep track of the data that is being taken about your child's behavior needs to update the behavior support plan as needed and when necessary, and to sort of be that point person for the school team, for the entire school team, when it comes to challenges regarding behavior or accessing the classroom or the school environment because of behavior.

So like I said, similarly to like a team chair or to an ETL, this person's not somebody who's working directly with your child every day, but who is more so overseeing the whole process.

School psychologist, similarly, typically, is in a school to conduct evaluations and to make recommendations, but not typically to work one-on-one with your child. So your school district or the school that your child attends might have a school psychologist. This person you might, once again, only hear from once every year or every couple of years when a new evaluation is completed.

Typically during that process, the school psychologist will do some formalized assessments with your child, will observe them in class, will probably even reach out to you to do an interview and to complete some writing scales, but outside of that, once the school psychologist gives their recommendations, their formal recommendations in a team meeting, whether that's an initial or a reevaluation team meeting or some sort of other reconvene meeting, once they do that, they really won't have much one-on-one time with you or your child. They're more in one of those overseeing roles. Now, if your child requires more direct services, counseling services in school, or more direct services for social emotional needs, that's likely to be a school social worker. I know in some schools it's called a school adjustment counselor, school social worker. That person is the one who will typically be implementing the one-to-one services with your child, whether that's weekly, daily, monthly, it totally depends obviously on the need of your child. Now, that's of course not everybody on the team or everyone who could possibly be on the team, but those are the service providers that we see most often on service delivery grids and IEPs and at team meetings.

Now the important thing or a couple of important things to note here, like I said at the beginning, first of all, this could vary from school to school, district to district, and state to state. So don't be afraid as always to sort of ask clarifying questions about who is on your child's team and which role they play. That's not a bad question to be asking anyways, right? That's not a bad question to be asking at an IEP meeting or at the beginning of a new school year is a great time to ask that question just so you have a better sense of who's on your team and what their role is. The other thing that is good to keep in mind is when you do have an IEP meeting, one of the things you wanna make sure is that the right people are at the table, that the people who can actually make the decisions about a service or the decisions about accommodations are at the table or the people who can give you more information, right? So when you are going to have an IEP meeting, whether it's an annual, an initial, a reevaluation, the school team should be sending you an attendance sheet beforehand, an invitation beforehand, who from the school side was invited to the meeting, who will be attending. You can take a look at that and see if everyone there who should be there is listed on the invitation and on the attendance sheet. The reason we have you do that because we see this way too often and all too often, we'll get to an IEP meeting or a parent or caregiver will get to an IEP meeting and they have questions or concerns about a specific area, say it is social pragmatics or expressive and receptive language, they'll get to the table, they'll look around and they'll realize that the speech and language pathologist is not present. That can be a challenge because that can mean that their concerns aren't addressed, that can mean that you might have to reconvene the team when that person is there and available and so on and so forth. So we do really recommend that you look or at least ask ahead of time who will be present at the meeting. So if you do have specific concerns going in or specific questions that you want addressed, the right people are at the table to help you address those concerns and help you to make decisions about next steps, updating an IEP, determining eligibility for a service, so on and so forth.

That is a lot of information. Those were lots of service providers in just a super, super, super quick overview of what they do. If you are a service provider listening and you're like, that's not all I do. Trust me when I say, I know that we know that school service providers are doing lots with kids and it's really individually based and it's really based on the needs of the kid. If you are a parent or caregiver and you have questions about who the folks are that are working on your child's school team what services they are providing to your child. If the right people are the ones delivering services or being invited to the IEP meeting, please don't hesitate to reach out. That's something that we can support you with, looking through an IEP, looking through the service delivery grid, making sure the right people are at the table to help you come up with the best possible plan for your child.

What I will leave you with, and this is A conversation for a whole other episode. You know me, I always like to think of how we can expand these conversations. This is a conversation for the next episode or a next episode. When we're talking about school based service providers, whether it's the SLP, the OT, the PT, even the BCBA, you will likely notice as a parent or caregiver, especially if your child has received private services outside of school with one of these providers you will notice that it's very different inside of school. That is something that we ask people to keep in mind. The providers who are working with your child in school are there to help them access the school environment, access their academics and access their school day. They might not be working on the same things or all the same things that an outside service provider might be working on.

If you're working with a SLP, say, or an OT outside of school, they might be helping your child to access their home environment and things that go on in the home and in the community and so on and so forth. So those are other great things to ask when you're at an IEP table, especially if your child's receiving services outside of school as well. Being able to ask, okay, what's the difference between the services that they are being provided with in school versus what they're being provided with outside of school? And how can we make it seamless between the two, how can we generalize between the two settings and maybe the two different service providers and how can we make sure everyone's on the same page about what is being worked on with your child and what goals are being worked on with your child. So that was sort of just the last thing I wanted to make sure that we note because that can get really murky and muddy sometimes about the difference between service providers outside of school versus service providers in school.

I will leave you with a couple of reminders. Don't be afraid to ask for the attendance sheet before an IEP meeting, whether it's an annual meeting, a reevaluation meeting, a reconvene meeting. Don't be afraid to ask questions about who will be at the table, who will be there, who will be in attendance. And don't be afraid to ask follow-up questions about if the right people are servicing your child and really meeting their needs for what they need in terms of services. And then finally, as always, if you have very specific questions, don't be afraid to reach out. We would love to support you with this. With all of that, we hope that you have a nice rest of the week. Thank you as always for listening. We will be back next week with another episode and then we have just one more episode after that for the end of season two. So we will talk to you next week. Thank you everybody for joining us today.