Common Questions

Contact Student Services or special education department. You may be asked to document your concerns. Once they are notified of a suspected disability, Special Services will begin the appropriate process to address the student's needs.

Contact Student Services to alert them to the parent's concern. Typically, Student Services will take over from that point, but they may ask you to get back to the parent to let them know you have escalated the concern. Your Student Services department will have a policy that you should follow.

Preferential seating is seating that addresses a student's specific need. There is a common misconception that preferential seating means in the front of the room, however it does not necessarily mean front and center. For instance, for a student who is highly distracted by looking out the window, preferential seating might be the seat with the poorest window visibility. For a student with social anxiety, preferential seating might be a desk near the teacher to minimize attention from peers.

Chunking assignments means providing students with interim deadlines on longer-term assignments. For example, rather than giving students a single assignment of an end of term presentation, the teacher could break the assignment up into smaller parts - proposal; outline; draft; second draft; etc. - that are due throughout the term. The end result is the same but the teacher has guided the student to help build study and organizational skills. This is a very common accommodation for students diagnosed with ADHD or executive functioning disorders but is also good practice generally, particularly in the early secondary years.

If you do not understand something in a student's IEP or 504 Plan, you should reach out to the student's case manager. The case manager should be identified in the 504 Plan or IEP. General education teachers should review IEPs and 504 Plans carefully at the beginning of the year to make sure they understand them. It is likely that some or all of them will include accommodations or SDIs that will be implemented in the general education classroom.

A due process hearing is the legal proceeding that parents may pursue if they object to the school's special education plan. It is a right guaranteed by federal and state law.

Due process hearings are typically held in front of an administrative hearing officer, who is an employee of the state Department of Education, and whose job it is to function like a judge for special education disputes. By the time a hearing is held, the parents and the school district have typically engaged in extensive negotiations and multiple meetings to determine the student's educational program. The parent has been provided with the student's "educational record," which includes all of the student's educational, disciplinary, and other school records. The hearing itself is run similarly to a trial, with both sides calling witnesses to testify in front of the hearing officer.

If one of your current or former students family has filed a due process complaint, you may be required to testify at the due process hearing. The school district's lawyer will most likely contact you prior to the hearing to discuss why you will be testifying. General education teachers are most commonly asked to testify about the student's progress or behavior in the classroom, or how the IEP or 504 Plan has been implemented in the classroom. It is important to remember that you are not on trial. You are offering relevant information to allow the hearing officer to evaluate whether the student has been offered a Free and Appropriate Public Education.