During October or November, you will likely be invited to an Individual Educational Planning (IEP) Meeting for your child. The IEP is a map of your child’s learning goals for the coming year. It contains goals or learning outcomes that are related to the identified special needs of your child.

Preparing the IEP is a collaborative process involving you, your child’s teacher, resource teacher, other special education support staff, other district staff such as a counselor or speech language pathologist and other community service providers that you may choose to invite. Parent involvement in the planning process is very valuable as you are the person who knows your child best. You will be asked to provide information about your child, advice about strategies that are successful in promoting your child’s development and your agreement prior to decision making regarding the goals for the coming school year.

The important and relevant information that you provide helps the school team to prepare an effective IEP. Some things to think about before the meeting are:

• Your child’s strengths and interests
• Any current concerns you might have about your child
• Your child’s progress or achievements over the past year
• Recommendations that you feel are important from the past year
• Strategies that you find to be helpful learning tools at school or home

Students can be included in the collaborative process in a manner that reflects their developmental age and ability. If your child is planning to be present during all or part of the IEP meeting, they may want think about the following questions in advance so that they are prepared to provide this information during the meeting.

• What makes them happy
• Their favourite toys or activities
• How they like to spend their time
• Their favourite places
• Who they like to spend time with
• What they like best about school
• What they would like to accomplish in the current school year
• What strategies they think work best for them

If they are not present, you may want to share this information on their behalf.

In some situations, you may be asked to provide information to the school based team either in person, by phone or in writing prior to the meeting. Providing information to the school team in advance of the IEP meeting assists the team in taking your information into consideration when planning goals and objectives for your child to discuss at the meeting.

For more information on the Individual Education Planning process in British Columbia, you can refer to the Ministry of Education 2009 document Individual Education Planning for Students with Special Needs which can be found at www.bced.gov.bc.ca in the Special Needs section, and Parents’ Guide to Individual Education Planning - A BC Superintendents Publication 2002 document which can be found at www.bcssa.org.

If you have tips for parents about preparing or participating in the IEP process we welcome your comments.