Michelle she/her (00:00.662)

Hey, everybody. It is Michelle from Empowered to Advocate here for the Empowered to Advocate podcast. So glad to have you joining me today and for all the episodes that you may have listened to in the past and in the future. Thank you so much for always supporting us. Before we get started on today's topic, would love to just invite you, if you are a caregiver in the Boston area, invite you to our caregiver retreat which is happening on September 28th in Peabody, Massachusetts. So if you're listening to this on the date that this is going live, which is September 22nd, and you are interested in joining us for a night of relaxation, some real gentle yoga practice that I'm going to facilitate for us, a sound bath, some reiki, and then afterwards, a little opportunity to just connect with some other caregivers that live in the area.

We did an episode about the importance of community for really everybody, but especially as caregivers of children with disabilities, it's really important and helpful to have a community of folks who you can connect with and ask questions with and just be friends with. As that, you know, as another support group for somebody who can identify and have an understanding of the experiences that you are having with your child. So I'm going to drop all of that information in the show notes. If you can't find the information in the show notes and you're listening to this before September 28th and you're like, I really want to go to this, you can always send us an email at empoweredtoadvocate at gmail.com. All right, so hope to see you there. Super excited for that retreat. If you can't make it live, we will probably do another one again in the future.

With that today, what I want to chat with you about is four reasons to schedule a comprehensive record review with empowered to advocate or with another advocate or somebody who can help you get organized. This is a service that oftentimes goes hand in hand with like people when they do the initial consult with us and you decide to work with us, we typically start with a record review. However, the record review can be a standalone kind of service. So if you are just like up to your eyeballs in paperwork or you feel like you're missing paperwork or you got your child's IEP last school year and you're like these goals sound like the goals my child had last year? Or I'm not really sure if anything was actually updated here. Has my child actually made any progress? And you're trying to go through all of this paperwork, especially if your child has had an IEP for two, three, four, five years, has had many assessments, has lots of progress reports, goes to extended school year. You might just have literally a boatload of paperwork for you to be trudging through.

So a comprehensive record review allows Dana-Marie and I, or if you decide to work with whoever you're working with, to really go through and identify, align, assess, and then equip you with the information you need to be successful at your child's next meeting, whether you have somebody joining you, for the meeting like an advocate, or if you were going into a meeting on your own. Ultimately, with Empowered to Advocate, our goal is to help you feel empowered to be your child's advocate. So if you are not able to have us at a meeting with you, or you're doing it on your own, we want you to have the skills to be confident to be your child's best advocate, right?

These sort of standalone services like a record review can really augment the knowledge that you already have and make you feel even more prepared and organized and on top of what you should be asking and even bringing up at a meeting. So if we think about identifying, so that first reason to schedule a record review. We're identifying any discrepancies, gaps, or potential issues that may be impacting your child's educational experience, right? So we're able to look through all of the IEPs, typically going back three years, if you have that, or to the last reevaluation or initial that your child has. And we can look at all of those reports and then look at the sequential IEPs that have come out from that eligibility meeting and make sure that we're identifying like, oh, it says here in this cognitive evaluation that verbal comprehension score was lower than other cognitive scores, visual spatial skills and such like that. And maybe your child is having difficulty following directions in class. We might say, gee, there was never a speech evaluation completed let's ask the team to consider doing a speech evaluation. So when we go through this paperwork, we're able to then look at and see where those gaps might be, those discrepancies, pulling all of those data points together. From an objective lens, we're then able to ensure that all the documents are actually aligned with your child's abilities, with your child's disability, with your child's strengths and your child's areas of support need, right? So we're looking to make sure that everything is aligned. Everything makes sense based on your child's strengths and areas of need to help make sure that they're getting the services that they need to make that progress.

We're also then to, we can look at and make sure that the documents are in compliance. And this is really important. And of course, people who work in schools are human and sometimes make mistakes, sometimes things are late, but we are able to then look for patterns where maybe IEPs are not being scheduled before the annual. And this is like become a consistent pattern or a reevaluation was not completed on time let's say a speech about that your child needed and the speech about did not happen with the rest of the reevaluation, but then just like never happened, um, fell through the cracks. We're able to pick up on that and make sure we're able to help you advocate to make sure that evaluation takes place. So we take all the things that you send us. You don't have to put anything in any order. You literally just send us all the things that you have. We go through everything, put it in order, look for what is missing, what do we have, making sure everything makes sense. We're looking at goals from year to year and saying, okay, this goal is really similar to last year. Wonder why that is if the progress reports are saying that they're on track to make progress every year. We're able to look at that and then be equipped with that data to ask these questions at the meeting and ask for additional services or a change in service because if a child's goals are very similar year to year, that indicates that perhaps they're not making the progress that we would like them to make and expect them to make. And maybe there's some decisions that need to be made about their services or how often they're getting those services, right?

So we're able to really identify where there are holes, where there are gaps. We're able to also identify areas of strength of the paperwork, to be honest, right? We're able to identify what might be missing, what might be lackluster, what might just like not make sense. So sometimes I see IEPs that have accommodations in them, like a number line or a sentence strip, and it's on an eighth grade inclusion kiddos, young persons IEP still. And this young person does not necessarily need a number line on their desk anymore. So sometimes things just like don't get taken out of IEPs. They just kind of linger in there and they don't really make sense for that child's needs anymore. So we're looking for that kind of stuff, too, to be able to clean up the paperwork if some of that stuff has just lingered. So we're identifying discrepancies, gaps and potential issues. We're making sure the documents are aligning with what your child needs to make progress.

We're assessing what can be tweaked, what could be cleaned up, what could we correct or augment in this IEP document at subsequent meetings to better support your child. And most important, the most important reason here for a record review is that after a record review, you are going to feel equipped to be able to know exactly what is in your child's and how to drive the conversation at the meeting, how to communicate with the teachers and administrators and the IEP team members. And when you are speaking with them and they're asking you questions or responding to your questions, you're going to feel more comfortable to have a general idea of what they're saying. And this is especially important if you do not have an advocate or you want to know that you are able to ask the questions that you want to ask and drive that conversation the way you want to drive and understand what people are saying back to you. So a comprehensive record review is a really great standalone service that we offer that can be very helpful for caregivers who are just like floating in so many piles of paperwork or you have like a million emails and electronic documents, especially from the pandemic. So many school systems like switch to sending things electronically and you might be like, you know, I'm pretty sure we did an OT of L, but I don't know where it is. We can then go through, you send us what you do have. We look for where those holes are. We then can help you request.

The rest of that information, the rest of those reports, the rest of those files, the rest of those documents from the school, you send those back on to us and we're able to pull all the pieces together to clean up those IEPs to make sure that your child is getting the services that actually align with what they are needing to make progress and making you feel even more comfortable and confident to advocate for your child at these meetings.

So if this is a service that you think would be really useful for you, please reach out to us at empoweredtoadvocate at gmail.com, and we will help you get that initial meeting with us scheduled. That's the other thing is during this record review, we're in constant communication with you, and we have a pre-meeting and then usually a midway meeting and a post-meeting to go through all the things. So every step of the way, we are a team with you while we're doing this review there to answer your questions. So if this sounds like something that would be useful for you, please reach out. Again, this is something that this is how we typically start out when we work with any new clients is with a record review. So this is a great way to just see if this is all you need support with, or it might turn into wanting us to go to meetings with you or stick around for future document reviews from future meetings. So there's always an ebb and a flow with our relationship with our clients. And we're here for you every step of the way that you are wanting and needing us to be there for you. So hope to work with you. Send us an email or you can also schedule an initial consult meeting with us. I will drop that link in the show notes as well, but it's everything you can find is on our website at empoweredtoadvocate.com.

All right, with that, have a lovely rest of your week. Remember, go sign up for that caregiver retreat that's happening on Thursday, September 28th. If you are listening to this before that date and you live in the Boston area, if you are listening to this after September 28th, 2023, or don't live in the Boston area, stay tuned for some other caregiver self care type events that we are really looking forward to hosting for you in the future. All right, everybody have a wonderful week.