Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Empowered to Advocate podcast. I'm Michelle, and I'm so excited to be here with you again today. I hope you are doing well and the school year is going well for you. We're approaching the end of September. Most students, most learners have now been in school for a month, maybe more than a month, depending on where in the country you are living. And I hope that your child is having a really positive start to the school year. If you're listening to this, your child may unfortunately be having some trouble or some difficulties. So I'm hoping that today's episode and all the episodes this season and season one and season two are useful and helpful for you to make whatever challenges are occurring right now less of a challenge. So your child has the most success in school.

So, today's topic is one that I wouldn't say comes up with like all the time, but does come up fairly regularly, especially post pandemic shutdown as schools districts are really struggling because of the teacher shortage to find high quality, highly qualified educators and service providers, speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, et cetera, to work in schools. It's been really a challenge across the entire country and definitely I'm sure there are certain parts of the country that are feeling this more so than others, but it is a problem. And that's in addition to regular absences that occur for teachers and service providers, because of course people get sick, people have babies, people, you know, have surgeries and reasons that they might even need to be out for a more extended period of time. There's all sorts of reasons that human beings might need time off from work. And when we're thinking about folks who work in schools, they are also people who might need time off sometimes, right? And unfortunately, that might mean an extended period of time for being out.

So the question that we get is, I just found out that my child's teacher has not been in school and the classroom paras or there's been a substitute providing the services for my child. And this might be going smoothly, it might not be going smoothly. And the question is, you know, how do I, especially if I feel like my child is not getting the services that they are supposed to have as outlined in their IEP.

How do I address that while also being understanding that folks might be absent from time to time, or there might be an open position at the school? And the first piece of advice is if you discover that your child has not been getting the services that they have on their IEP, or you find out that their classroom teacher has been out or is going to be out for an extended period of time, is to first know what your child's services are.

What does their IEP say that they are supposed to be getting each week, each month, each day for services? An IEP typically has three sections for services. The A-Grid would be outlining consultation services. So these are indirect services. This is when the OT talks to the classroom teacher to make sure the accommodations are working in the classroom.

This is when the school counselor might have conversations with the BCBA about behavioral strategies and mental health, right? So that's consult. Those are indirect services. The other section, the B grid is where students are receiving services within the inclusion setting, within the general education classroom. And then the C grid is where students are being pulled out of the general education classroom to have their services.

So first, looking at that service delivery grid and really understanding what your child's IEP is saying, they should be getting in order to have access to their free and appropriate public education. So FAPE, right? This is what an IEP is helping to provide for students with disabilities. We are building IEPs and goals and services with accommodations and modifications so that students with disabilities have free and appropriate public education just like their peers without disabilities. Okay. So knowing what their services are gives you the starting point to be able to then open up communication with your child's team. So depending on who the person that is absent is. So if it's the teacher, you're obviously not gonna email them, but typically I would always say to start with the teacher. So let's say the speech, you hear from your child that they haven't had a speech session in a couple of weeks, or you hear that they haven't had an occupational therapy session in a couple of weeks, you might reach out to the teacher and say, hey, I just, you know, Suzy just told me that she hasn't seen her speech therapist in a bit. I'm just checking in if everything's okay, right? And then from there, you might find out that maybe she just had speech that morning and, you know, just forgot or has a new speech therapist and didn't realize, depending on the age of the child, didn't realize that this new speech therapist was a speech therapist, right? So sometimes there can be miscommunications that are really quickly resolved just by having a conversation with the adults and your child you know, and kind of pulling all the pieces together. If it is a teacher that you are hearing has not been in school, reaching out to the educational, the evaluation team leader, the team chairperson, the coordinator of special education, whatever that person is called at your child's school, usually it would probably be the person who is in contact with you when evaluations are due reaching out to them or a building administrator and just saying, hey, I'm, I'm wondering if Mr. Ms. Mix has, so-and-so has been out. Um, Susie told me that, um, they haven't been in school all week. They're really having trouble understanding what's happening in class, wondering if we can have a conversation, right? And then from there, you can request a meeting to discuss what the impact on their progress is, all right, because there might be somebody who is in the classroom who is covering the classroom and they might be providing the accommodations, the modifications, the as outlined in the IEP. So the thing that might be missing might be that specialized service or that specialized instruction that we're going to want to then really closely monitor your child's progress to see if they then might need some makeup sessions, or you might hear the word, the term compensatory services. We might need to have a conversation about if additional or compensatory services are gonna be needed once that teacher or service provider returns to work, and or somebody new is hired for the position. And this is where, you know, one would, depending on how long somebody is going to be out for, or if a position is not filled in the school, one would expect that the school would be upfront and open about that and be in connection with caregivers about this absence. And again, it depends on how long. There's all sorts of different ways we can talk about this, right? And there's so many different individualized instances of what could be happening.

So again, knowing what your child's services on their IEP, what kinds of accommodations they have, opening up the communication, emailing the team chair ETL or the teacher and finding out, you know, hey, just heard that this is happening, wondering if we could have a chat about how my child is progressing and how services you know, are we keeping track of missed services? Are we keeping like how are we keeping track of any sort of regression or lack of progress that might be happening because of these misservices? And you know, I always say and Dana-Marie always says that being upfront and open about this is always the best way to do things and just having a conversation. I would say that so if your child is in, you know, a substantially separate classroom, so maybe they're in a specialized ABA based program or in a language based program and the teacher is out on leave, the teacher is absent and the educational support professionals, the paraprofessionals are then providing, they are essentially being the teacher in the classroom while the teacher is out, asking to have a conversation with them to see and make sure because every educational support professional has different levels of experience and understanding of the IEP process. Some of them are brand new and maybe have never seen the IEP until that first year that they stepped foot in the classroom. And some are like really seasoned folks who can have potentially more knowledge than a less experienced teacher in some aspects, depending on how long they've been doing this position. So having a conversation, if you find out that there is somebody like that that's supporting your child in the classroom, that is in the position of teacher while the teacher is out, having a meeting with them to discuss the IEP and how they are implementing the accommodations and modifications being provided to your child. And this is especially important if your child's coming home very upset, if your child is coming home feeling really low confidence, really low self-esteem, really sad. If like this lack of support or different type of support is impacting them emotionally. It's really important to just reach out and have that conversation to make sure that everybody is on the same page about what needs to be happening for your child in order for them to be successful in the classroom. And, you know, being understanding that the person who is in that position is most likely doing the best that they can. And once you have this conversation, things will likely get better because you've had the conversation. So again, know what your child services are in the IEP and then open up that communication. Find out if they are receiving the service at all. So if it's a teacher, maybe there's a substitute in the class who maybe not be a certified special education teacher, but it is somebody who can, you know, make those modifications, can make those accommodations, can you know, follow the lesson plan for the reading instruction while the teacher is out. That is really the best case scenario that can happen, besides there being a certified special education teacher substitute, which I'm going to be honest with you, I don't know how often that happens anywhere. It's really hard to find specialized educators, like special education teachers, to be substitutes.

Oftentimes if there is going to be an occupational therapist or an SLP or somebody, a counselor that's going to be out for an extended leave, oftentimes districts will contract with an agency to have somebody come in and fill in that those holes while somebody is out. And sometimes that doesn't happen and students miss their services. And that's really unfortunate, but it is the reality. So knowing that your child is missing the services and keeping track of and holding the school also accountable for keeping track of those missed services so that if your child needs to make up or have compensatory services to make sure that they recoup any progress that they would have missed from those missed services, you want to hold the school district also accountable for keeping track of that sort of information. And this counts for evaluations too.

Sometimes your child is due for a reevaluation and the speech language pathologist is out of maternity leave. So the speech eval part of the full reeval didn't take place. You wanna make sure that you're remembering that didn't take place. So even though the school district should be reaching out to you when the speech pathologist does come back and that testing is complete and meeting with that in addition to the bigger meeting that you had with all the other testing you're going to want to try to remember that information too, just so like both you and the school are holding each other, like are reminding each other about it. And it doesn't hurt to be like, Hey, I know the speech language pathologist was out at the end of last school year. Jose didn't get his speech about last spring with the rest of his reval just want to make sure he's on the list for evals this fall.

Again, you're communicating, you're letting them know that you remember that they need this and it's a reminder to them. Okay? So what are compensatory services? So this is, um, it's serious and it's something that is also not explicitly laid out in IDEA. Okay? So there's nothing in IDEA that says if a student misses five OT sessions, the school district then needs to provide five OT sessions to compensate for those five missed. And there's, you know, it's really looking at that free and appropriate public education. It's really looking at if your child missed five OT sessions, looking at they were not getting those services as outlined in their IEP, which is in their IEP to provide them free and appropriate public education. And looking at, so they missed five. Do they need five in order to, like, how much progress do we think that they didn't make because of those five missed sessions? And how many sessions do we think they need to have in order to make that progress?

And I know this gets a little confusing. It's not always necessarily a one-to-one scenario. So let's say the Wilson reading teacher was on maternity leave for 10 weeks. Your child is supposed to have five sessions of 30 minutes of Wilson reading a week. They did not have a substitute or somebody to provide the Wilson reading services while she was on maternity leave.

So your child missed 50 half-hour sessions or 25 hours of Wilson reading instruction.

One might think that the district is just gonna be like, well, they're just gonna make up 25 hours of Wilson reading instruction when she comes back in addition to just like restarting their services. But sometimes it's more of having a conversation and this happened a lot after COVID and after the shutdowns, looking at, okay.

We missed 25 hours of Wilson reading. We would have anticipated, based on their previous rate of progress, they would have increased by 10 words read per minute on the doubles during this time. They've only progressed five words per minute. So we can predict that they maybe don't need 25 hours of compensatory services, but maybe need 15 hours of compensatory services.

A lot of districts that I know and have worked with typically do the one for one as much as possible. It's like a little bit, to be honest, simpler to just be like, okay, they missed 10 hours of OT while we were looking for a new OT, we're going to give them 10 hours of OT. A lot of times these types of services will happen during the summer or will be offered after school hours because when a new Wilson reading teacher comes back or that a new OT is hired, they're then going to just like start the services that are in the IEP. So the made up services are going to have to happen probably outside of that typical 180 school day, school year, right? And that's typically what I see happens. But again, there's no real official guidelines for this under IDEA. So again, making sure that you know what's in your child's IEP and being in communication and being in open communication with the school, with the school district, and really trying to stay on top of, okay, I think that my child has missed this much. It really seems to be impacting them in this way and just having that conversation.

And again, if you ever have questions about this, this is again, just like super generalized information, but it is a question that comes up and has I've heard from a few people this school year so far and it's, you know, the end of September.

Well, this is not individualized for your and your child's unique learning needs. Um, it's just generalized. So if you have specific questions, reach out to us at empoweredtoadvocate at gmail.com, set up a consult with us. If you have never set up a consult with us, your first one is free and you can schedule that. I'll drop the link in the show notes. But if you go to our website at empoweredtoadvocate.com and go to schedule

And we can have a conversation with you about the specific situation that is occurring for your child so that we can best guide you on that communication. What are the next steps? You know, making sure that your child is having the success that they deserve to have in school while also being understanding, because I think this is the piece of it too. We're being understanding that schools are most often literally doing everything they can to hire the best and most qualified folks to instruct our children. And when somebody is leaves a job, when a position cannot be filled, when somebody goes out on leave, especially if it's unexpected, the school is most likely in most instances really doing the best they can. But that doesn't mean that your child does not deserve and should not be getting their services the way that they're outlined in their IEP. So coming into it, understanding, but also knowing to advocate for what your child needs. Okay. So I hope that this was helpful. It's again, it, there's no real black and white here. And depending on your child's specific situation, your child's specific needs and what is happening in the school to then try to rectify the situation and get your child with as much as they can, things can look very, very different.

Okay. So again, if you have questions that are very specific, let us know and we have a few more episodes this season. So if you have any questions that you would love for us to answer on the podcast, please reach out to us at EmpowerToAdvocate at gmail.com and send us your question because we would love to answer them here for you, okay? Have a wonderful day and a wonderful, you know, continuing on with a wonderful start of the school year or if the school year has been a little rocky so far, I am wishing for you that things get smoothed out soon. All right, friends, that's all for me. Take care.