When I first published this article in October 2025, social media was in a tizzy over mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education, including major cuts to OSEP, the Office of Special Education ...

If you’re looking for IEP goals for low functioning students, chances are you’re working with a student who needs significant support with academics, communication, daily living skills, behavior, or ...

Coordinate graphing can get repetitive pretty quickly. Plot (4,7). Plot (8,10). Plot another point. Try to remember which number comes first. Wonder when math became an elaborate game of Battleship.

Students with severe and profound disabilities may have significant needs across multiple areas, including communication, mobility, health, academics, self-care and daily living skills. Some students ...

IEP modifications can be confusing, especially because accommodations and modifications are often talked about as if they’re the same thing. They’re not–and the difference really matters. It’s ...

Handwriting can become a barrier for students who know what they want to say but cannot efficiently get it onto paper. And this is where I see an unnecessary either/or situation all the time. Either ...

When a child has written expression disorder, the problem is often much bigger than messy handwriting or a few misspelled words. Your child may be able to tell you exactly what they know, yet struggle ...

Questions about schools, IEP teams, medical records and medication come up all the time. Can a school ask for medical information? Can an IEP team demand access to your child’s medical records? Do you ...

On your child’s IEP, somewhere along the way you may have seen the word “trials.” It’s usually part of an IEP goal, but you may see it on an IEP progress monitoring report too. For example, you might ...

If I say the words “assistive technology,” what comes to mind? An iPad with autism apps? Or maybe Stephen Hawking with his thought-activated chair and voice modulator? When we hear the term Assistive ...

Learning the alphabet in sign language is a fun and useful skill. While finger spelling out words can take longer than if you know the ASL common words, it enables you to communicate with someone. The ...

This is probably one of the biggest reasons parents dread IEP meetings. For the most part, we expect to be told “no” when we ask for something new, even when we have the data to support it. But when ...