What’s an IEP and how many students get special education services?
The number of students who need access to special education is higher than you might think.
More than 1 in 7 public school students between the ages of 3 and 21 received special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, during the 2022-23 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
That’s 15% of all public school students. In Ohio and Kentucky, those rates were a little higher, at 17%.
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What is an IEP?
Students are entitled to a free, appropriate public education. Individualized education programs, also known as IEPs, help schools provide that education to students with disabilities.
Those programs are developed by teams of people – in Kentucky, those teams are called Admissions and Release Committees, or ARCs – who determine a student’s educational goals and the services the student might need to reach those goals.
These teams include the student’s parents, their general education teacher, their special education teacher, a district representative who knows what resources are available and any other related service providers the student might work with, including a speech pathologist, a physical therapist or an occupational therapist. Parents can bring in other specialists or advocates, too. The student themselves might also join, if appropriate.
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Together, an IEP team will identify a student’s goals, based on state standards. The team takes into account various data points, including school evaluations that show the severity of the child’s disability, state and district assessments that show the student’s academic progress, medical records and anecdotal data from the classroom. Then, the team will identify what special instruction or aides the child needs.
What if a school can’t provide the services a student needs?
If the school cannot provide the resources the student needs on site, the team might discuss placing the student in another school. If the team decides to send the student to another school, the home district must pay for that placement, said Glenna Wright-Gallo, assistant secretary in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services at the U.S. Department of Education.
By law, the preference is always to keep the student in the general education classroom of the home school they would attend if they didn’t have an IEP. For this reason, schools often hire specialists to meet students’ needs in-house.
“Only moving away from that if the student has specialized needs that can’t be addressed in that placement with additional services and supports provided,” Wright-Gallo said.
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