Connecting the ETR and the IEP

When making decisions about how, when, where, and by whom specially designed supports and services will be delivered and provided to a child with a disability, the team must start with the ETR. The ETR drives the IEP, which allows your child to succeed in their educational environment. While the disability category is important to determine eligibility to receive special education supports and services, it is not that piece of information that is most important in determining what services the child needs to be able to access and progress in the general education curriculum. The category of eligibility just gets them through the door toward an IEP. It’s the needs and implications for instruction identified in the ETR that are going to drive the IEP, not the category.

The needs identified in the ETR can be addressed in the IEP as either goals or accommodations. Goals allow the team to use data to track the student’s progress on how specially designed instruction or related services are meeting the need. An IEP must contain at least one goal. Accommodations are other supports that the child needs to succeed. While all areas of need must be discussed by the IEP team, it’s not always necessary to address each one of them in the IEP itself. The team needs to prioritize the needs based on many factors and data. The team may choose to focus on foundational skills that are critical for making progress in other skills (phonemic awareness over sight words), behavioral skills, or related services. For example, where an ETR identifies multiple needs in the areas of math, reading, writing, speech, and behavior, the team might decide to hold off on a handwriting goal in order to focus more time on the main issue, which is the student’s behavior or the team might decide not to spend OT time working on the student’s poor handwriting because, at her age, the teachers don’t require very much handwritten work, and the student prefers the use of technology. Maybe they will decide to focus the OT time on a keyboarding goal rather than a handwriting goal. It’s about prioritizing, looking to the ultimate desired outcome, and making sure that there is enough time in the day to properly tackle all of the goals written into the IEP, without overwhelming the student or the staff.

The IEP can also inform the next ETR or reevaluation. Some important components of a reevaluation are current classroom and intervention data. By having a solid IEP with goals, services and accommodations that are addressing the identified needs from the current ETR, data from progress on the goals and success or lack thereof with the current services and accommodations can be integrated into the new ETR. This will ensure continued focus on the areas of need.