Finding the Right Special Education Classroom is hard!
Struggling to figure out if your child or students are in the right classroom?
Take 3 minutes and find out how to use this key word phrase "Full Continuum of Placements" to take the next steps!
Don't forget to grab your free IEP Checklists at www.iepchecklists.com
Special Needs Parents & Special Education Teams... I know you have heavy decisions to make in special education. Follow your gut. Listen to your heart. You got this!
Video Notes:
00:01 Hey Special Needs Parents and Special Education Teachers,
We're going to jump into a hot topic when it comes to making decisions in the IEP. There's this big place on the back of the document that states what a child's placement is going to be.
There should be three options listed or more that have been considered for our child and one of those options has been chosen. Now choosing the right classroom or finding the right placement for a child who has an IEP can be super tough.
I know this from being a special education teacher. For the last 20 years I've been working and helping special needs parents and teachers create the placements that work best for a child to be prepared for further education, employment and independent living.
So when you're looking at what needs to happen when it comes to creating a placement or a service plan or a classroom that works for a student is that you need to know these key words.
01:08 It's the full continuum of placements. In IDEA law, and remember I'm not a lawyer, I'm just teaching you where to look.
The full continuum of placements, that's the jargon that's used for that big kind of span of services that are available within a district, is everything from regular education with no support to maybe a residential facility that's in another state.
There's this whole continuum of placements that's available, but you may not know what is actually available and I'm not just talking to the parents. As a special education teacher, I was given a list of students and I was told what programs the child was coming from. When I was going to an IEP, I was told what programs were being considered, but I didn't necessarily go see those programs myself as a teacher. So sometimes there were recommendations that were happening that were really being directed more by the administration and I don't really know what was happening behind the scenes and driving all of those recommendations.
02:14 As a teacher, I'm not the one who got to go see all of the other classrooms. My administrator of saw those. As a parent, it's super hard to make those suggestions or know where your child wants to go when, if you don't know that full continuum of placements within your district. I always say you don't know what's right if you don't know what's wrong.
So even if you think that you know where you want your child or... Staff, where you want that student to go next... even if you think that you know, you have to know what this full continuum of placements really looks like within a district to ensure that you're doing what's most appropriate for the child so they can get access to their education so they can have all the supports, the the modifications. So the right staff to student ratios are available so the campus fits their needs.
Remember, full continuum of placements. If you are questioning if your child or your student's classroom is the right spot for them this school year, it's never too late to change. It's always an option to figure out if there's something more appropriate. You have to start that conversation by learning what the full continuum of placements is within your district.
