Dear School Board Directors, Superintendent Jones and Senior Staff,
As you know, students with IEPs who have not made appropriate progress on pre-COVID IEP goals are entitled to recovery services. These are services additional to what is provided in a student’s IEP to address the ongoing impact of the pandemic. OSPI expects every IEP team to consider the individual need for recovery services for every student with an IEP from preschool to age 21.
Parents and caregivers are key partners in determining the need for recovery services as they generally have the most current information about their student, especially if the student has been in remote learning for most or all of the school year. The type, timeline and amount of recovery services should be an individualized decision for each student. As the OSPI guidance to school districts suggests, most recovery services are to be offered outside the school day, which could include the summer.
The Seattle Special Education PTSA is starting a “Did You Know” series on social media on June 1 to help educate families about their students’ rights to receive recovery services and the School District’s responsibilities.
We are concerned about emails that families have started receiving from schools in SPS regarding recovery services. For example, in one school, families have received the following:
School XXX’s Special Education team reviewed your student’s IEP goals and progress during this school year. Progress monitoring shows that your student made expected progress in all goal areas and recovery services are not needed.
The email then asks parents either to agree or disagree with the school’s conclusion that the student does not need recovery services. The concerns about this email include the following:
- The decision whether or not a student needs recovery services is supposed to be an IEP team decision, which includes parents of the student, not a decision by the school Special Education team.
- Parents or caregivers are supposed to be involved in making the decision, not put in the position of having to “disagree” with the school staff who have already made a decision.
- The email was sent to families shortly before a 3-day weekend requiring a response by Tuesday, June 1.
- The email appears to be a final decision on the student’s right to receive recovery services.
- No progress monitoring data was included for the parent to review to make an informed decision.
Another school sent families an email stating, “If your student has remained remote this year, we should wait until they return to in-person learning to decide, based on IEP goal data, when they return to in person instruction.” This means that students in that school who have remained remote are not even being considered for recovery services over the summer, which might benefit them and help them prepare to return to school in the fall. It also appears that the school team may not be collecting data on their IEP progress monitoring for the remote student, which is a requirement by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA.) The recent OSPI guidance to school districts clearly states that data/information to be considered when making a decision about recovery services include:
Progress reporting, student participation in remote instruction, benchmark assessments, teacher observations, evaluations, grades, IEP goals, work completion, formative assessments, unit assessments, informal reading and math inventories, parent and student input, etc.
Washington’s Roadmap for Special Education Recovery Services: 2021 & Beyond (www.k12.wa.us)
Another school sent an email explaining that SPS was applying for emergency relief funding to help support recovery efforts next year. Families were advised: “In the Fall please plan on working with your students’ case managers to access many of these upcoming supports for your student.” For students interested in Summer of Learning or Extended School Year (ESY), families were told, “Things are still being sorted out, but details will be coming to you as soon as they are available!” Again, at the very least, it appears that summer recovery services either will not be available or are being discouraged.
On April 26, 2021, our PTSA sent you a letter about the requirement for public input developing the plan that was due on June 1, 2021 — for SPS’s use of federal COVID-19 recovery funds. Among other items, we suggested the following for special education recovery services: tutoring, with summer availability for students with disabilities; robust and inclusive summer learning opportunities with access and supports for students with disabilities; and stipends for special education staff to teach and provide support over the summer.
If families of remote learners are now being told to wait until next year when their students return to in-person learning to decide about recovery services, then it doesn’t appear that recovery services over the summer are even being considered or made available. It certainly seems like the District does not plan to use the COVID-19 recovery funds to address the need for summer recovery services for students with IEPs.
We are concerned about the fact that families at different schools are receiving a variety of different information, some of which is not consistent with OSPI guidance regarding recovery services. We are concerned that a notice has not gone out to all families of students with IEPs explaining what recovery services are and how and when each IEP team will address each individual student’s need for recovery services. (Indeed, the SPS Special Education Department has not sent a newsletter to families since December 2020.)
We hope you will carefully consider these concerns and make sure that, as required by OSPI, an individualized decision will be made by the entire IEP team for each student regarding whether that student needs recovery services. There have been many public statements from the District throughout the pandemic about prioritizing students with IEPs, but the reality for many families is that their students did not receive services or instruction they are entitled to by their IEPs. Please do not continue to allow the reality for families and students to be the opposite of the promises coming from SPS.
Respectfully, Janis White
Seattle Special Education PTSA
