You know that moment when a teacher says "80% accuracy" and part of you nods along because... numbers, right? Numbers mean it's measurable. Measurable means it's good.

Kristy showed up to today's session and blew that wide open.

She took her son's reading passage. She used ChatGPT to remove 20% of the words. Then she showed that passage to the IEP team and asked them to try to comprehend it.

They changed the goal.

That's what yesterday was. Real parents. Real IEPs. Real moments where somebody figured something out.

Yesterday, we put on our detective hats and looked at 2 real families' IEPs, live, together. Here's some of what we found.

Jen's son Gabe is a first grader who loves VeggieTales, music, and the people who take time to know him. He was fully included in preschool and kindergarten. Then first grade started and the school moved him into a partial inclusion program. Jen has been fighting to get him back ever since.

• Jen rewrote his present levels herself in strength-based language. All the strengths in that IEP? She put them there. The team's original draft had almost none.
• The vision section, the one the whole team spent an entire meeting writing together, got lost. They had to schedule another meeting to redo it.
• His phonemic awareness goal listed 3 separate skills inside 1 short-term objective. Adding a phoneme. Deleting a phoneme. Substituting a phoneme. Three goals, one line. Easy to overlook, hard to measure.
• The word "peers" showed up in his goals. Before you celebrate, ask whether that means his classmates or the other kids in the special ed room. On IEPs, those are often not the same word.
• When Jen told the team Gabe loves VeggieTales and Danny Go!, the SLP started weaving his music in. A transition that used to be hard got easier when someone brought in Larry the Cucumber. That's what happens when parent voice gets into the IEP and someone uses it.

Billy's son is a fifth grader who watches your fingers when you play guitar and reaches out to push the strings. He pays attention. He communicates. His school has spent 3 years trying to move him out. 
His homebound teacher sat down with his IEP on her very first day with him and said: "Why are his goals so underwritten? He's mastered everything on here."

• The very first page of his IEP said the team believes Joshua needs "an alternate curriculum and a special ed setting." The IEP meeting hadn't started yet. That smells like predetermination, and it's a problem.
• His goals were copied from a 2024 IEP. No new baseline. No updated data.
• He's had a one-on-one para for years. She's never been trained for his needs. When Joshua vocalizes in class, she takes him into the hallway. He's trying to communicate. The IEP isn't built to hear him.
• His fine motor goal had him sorting small objects, pegboards, counting bears. Billy told us Joshua has spastic quadriplegia CP. Larger objects, whole-hand grasping, would mean something to him. The goal didn't reflect his actual body.
• The IEP listed Billy's input as "the parents believe." The district summarized his words instead of using them. Your exact words belong in that document.

If your child has goals that feel cookie-cutter, goals with no baseline data, no strengths tied to them, goals that get measured in the pullout room while your child is supposed to be in class learning with everyone else, this replay is for you.

Come watch. Click here.  Bring your detective hat.
 

What's Happening Today, Thursday
Today we're doing two more live Mini-Audits, and then I want to tell you about the Inclusive IEP Audit™, because if anything you've seen this week made you wonder about your own child's IEP, this is exactly what I built for you.

We'll be live on Zoom.  Use this link.  iep.today/Zoom
Hop on at 1 pm Eastern, 12 pm CT, 11 am Mtn.Time, 

10 am PT

Until every child belongs,

P.S. Did you see my definition for SSMMAARRTT goals?