Managing your documents under IDEA: Part II - What documents should you create?
Why create any documents? One simple reason is that you may have to tell your child’s story to another person - perhaps to an evaluator, an advocate or lawyer, or
Managing your documents under IDEA: Part II - What documents should you create?
Why create any documents? One simple reason is that you may have to tell your child’s story to another person - perhaps to an evaluator, an advocate or lawyer, or a hearing officer – in order to get help, and documenting events as they occur will help you tell the story accurately and in good order. Another reason is that documents can help clarify understandings you reach with people – particularly with service providers or school administrators.
Yet another reason is that a note written at the time something significant has happened may help to support you when you need to prove to another person that the event happened the way you claim it happened. It sometimes takes years before parents realize that they should have kept better notes of meetings, telephone calls and significant events in their child’s educational career. If you are the parents of a very young child with a disability in need of special education, you can get ahead of the game by developing this habit now.
The notes you take may be important later when you need an accurate description of what key people said at a TEAM meeting, in the hall after a parent-teacher meeting, in an evaluator’s office when you were given a report, and so on. Some parents keep a journal or simply a running chronology with dates, short descriptions of events or conversations and names of people concerned. This does not need to include every tiny detail of your child’s life, but a well-kept journal or chronology can help you explain to others (or to yourself) how you got to the current situation if you have recorded key events and communications along the way.
Among other events, you should record dates of meetings with school personnel, dates you received key documents (notices of TEAM meetings, etc.), dates you sent or delivered key documents (e.g., “December 1, 2005 - hand-delivered our consent to the proposed school evaluations”), dates on which you gave school personnel important information (e.g., “January 6, 2006 – told Mary’s teacher that Mary had been spending 3 hours every night trying to do 15 minute math homework assignments”), dates on which your child was suspended or otherwise disciplined, and so forth. Some documents are created in order to record understandings reached with others.
The most formal example of this type of document is a contract signed by the parties who agree to its terms. (An IEP should be treated as a contract. It records an agreement reached between parents and school systems to govern the types of services to be delivered to a child for a specific period of time, the location of those services, the identity of service providers and so on, and is signed by each party.) Even without such an official agreement, however, you can create a document yourself that can help prove that an understanding was reached.
Suppose, for example, that you have a conversation with your special education director in which s/he says that the school system will hire an expert on inclusion techniques to consult to your c