6 Key Questions to Lead a Successful IEP Meeting

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and today, we’re talking all about IEP’s and IEP meetings and how to collaborate with the school to help get what your child needs. For those of you who aren’t aware, IEP stands for Individualized Educational Program and it’s the legal document developed by the school team, including parents to spell out supports and services necessary to meet the educational needs of a child who qualifies for special education. So, if you are a parent who has been through the IEP process, chances are you have experienced some frustration along the way.

I work with many families all the time who just struggle with the frustration, the feelings of overwhelm, feeling confused by the process and how best to get their child’s needs met in the school environment. It can really feel difficult to advocate for your child’s needs and to know how to respectfully, yet firmly communicate with school staff. So, my guest today has spent his entire career in the field of education in various capacities and is now using his experience to teach parents how to productively engage in the IEP process with less frustration and better outcomes.

Vaughn Lauer is a Ph.D. who has over 30 years of experience pre-K through post-secondary as a teacher, professor and building district and state administrator of special education and has held various private organizational directorships in professional development and test development. He has presented at the state, national and international levels and authored a book on collaborative IEP development called ‘When the School Says No: How To Get the Yes’.

He has provided hundreds of trainings on IEP development to parents and educators and related service personnel. He has also attended over 1000 EIP meetings and reviewed over 2000 IEPs. He recently released an online program tool called ‘The Special Education Decoder System’, love that name, it is successfully being used across the country, helping all school team members to understand school evaluation test scores, enabling them to make informed decisions on eligibility determinations and in writing needs-based IEPs. I can not think of a better, more qualified person to have on the show to talk about this, welcome to the show, Dr. Lauer.

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Thank you so much, Nicole. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So, I’m thrilled to dive into this because as we were talking about before the show started, this is a topic that comes up literally every single day here at the clinic and that we get so many emails from show listeners, people in our online community just wanting resources and support around how to effectively participate in the IEP process, how to minimize the frustration, how to get their kids’ needs met. So I’m thrilled to dive into this. You obviously have a huge background, your entire career in various aspects of education. I’m curious how you came to create this structured, collaborative IEP process. How did that come about for you?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Well, let me start off by saying I wished I had thought of this a long time ago and applied in some of those IEP meetings. I simply didn’t, and it wasn’t until I had actually left public education and that was 30 years and some other years doing other things, I was like, “You know what? There’s a better way to do this.” I was actually teaching a graduate course and I was listening — and these were administrators, so I was listening to them and of course, I had been a teacher, so as an administrator, they’ll have that background, but I was listening and I kind of picked up the same problems I had. And the course kind of addressed it, but it never really focused on collaboration. It was a lot of co-operation. And co-operation just means I do what I’m asked.

The best example I can think of is, if a policeman pulls you over, just give me your driver’s license — you do it. You’re not working together towards a goal, and that’s what was always missing in IEP meetings. And they would go array if the focus of the child was lost. So what was interesting was that I was visiting one of my doctors. When you get older, you get to meet new doctors.

And I had already worked with her a couple of years and did not realize she had a child with autism and I said something, and she said, “Wait, what?” And she said, “You know what? We really need to write a book.” I said, “Okay, that wasn’t in my vision of something to do.” But I said, “You know? That would be really cool.”, because I just kind of figured out how meetings should be run and the short of it is, she became very ill. She recovered but she dropped out and said, “You’re going to have to do this yourself.” I said, “Okay, fine. But I’m going to interview you and your husband.” And they’re in chapter one in the book.

And so that’s how it came about. The idea was there, it’s serendipitous, it was a perfect timing, it couldn’t be better, so I had interviewed about 15, 16 or 17 paths to get the book together. But the ideal behind it was, we always knew — and my wife is a special education teacher too — we always knew that IEP meetings would get lost when the focus went over to somebody else’s needs. A school’s needs, a state needs, county needs, an educator’s needs or even a parent’s needs. And what happened was, the focus was lost, the kid was lost and time was spent trying to get them back. And one of the things that we recognized too was if you lose the meeting and you don’t even establish simple rules, then it’s very hard to bring the students back. So with all of that, it just like — wow, this is it. Let’s put it in place. And now, I get letters from folks that tell me they are using it, and successfully. So that’s, sorry, the long story of how it came about.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

No, that’s great and I think that often, almost always, the best, most practical things come out of experience and of solving problems that we’re having, right? And after all of those IEPs that you had sat through and working with so many families and their IEP’s — and I can speak from personal experience with that too, you see all the problems with this. And what you’re doing is meeting this very real need that everybody involved in this process has to put some structure to this and to keep the focus on the child. I love that you said that because I agree, as I think of so many situations I was involved in, in my work in the schools over the years and even now as a clinician — things just go off the rails so quickly when we lose the focus on the individual child. So, I love that. Let’s dive in and talk about — because you really had 6 key questions that you teach parents, teach people to ask during the IEP meeting and I want to make sure we cover those, so let’s dive into that. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Well, very quickly — we liken it to — I liken — that my wife and I are going to be presenting soon, and that’s where the ‘we’ comes from. She actually used one of your statements of going ‘offline’ I thought we both have it. But we liken it to the GPS system. If you think about getting in a car and I’ll do this literally fast because I can talk with it — you talk to the GPS, you say, “I want to go to Nicole’s place because she’s a really great lady and I want to see her.” And the GPS just sits there. And it’s not until you tell the GPS where it is, that it can start thinking about where it wants to go and that’s very much the IEP process.

So you key in Nicole’s address and it says, “hey! Great! Now I know where I want to go! Hey, would you like to know how to get there? Yeah, I would. And would you like to know where to turn left and right and would you like to know when you’ve arrived? Yeah, really I would because I would like to see Nicole, not her neighbors 6 blocks down the street. So we took that concept and applied it here. And the 6 questions are — and I’m reading them so I don’t forget, I’m old. So first is: What do we know? The second is: Where do we need to go? [Third is]: How will we get there? The fourth is: How do we know we’re getting there? The fifth is: How do we know we’ve arrived and the sixth, equally as important is: Where do we go from here?

It’s just like the GPS system. So we start with the first question and we say: What do we know? We go around the room — well even before that, we establish what I call ‘IEP Etiquette’. Other people call it meeting rules, and it’s where we post a list of 4-5 rules that we say: This will help us go through the steps but Nicole, are there any here that we don’t need or is there a missing rule that you think will be applicable? And we go around the room, we’re asking each person. And then when we’re finished, we have the entire group that says yes in agreement. 

What we’ve done is we’ve begun collaboration. And I call it the subtle, this is subtle collaboration because it’s all based on asking questions. Rarely do I tell somebody what to do. But by just establishing those rules, people are going — well, Vaughn was really interested in what I had to say. We all had participation, we agreed, let’s move from there. The key rule, probably the biggest one is staying on topic. And Nicole, I’m betting and I’m betting listeners were going, “Yeah, yeah, I was in a meeting where they wanted to talk about placement and we haven’t talked about my problems over here, my son or daughter’s problems.” And this way, we can say, “Remember we agreed that we can stay on topic? We’ll get to that but there is a sequence.” That’s what makes it structure, because you ask those questions in that order and ultimately, you are developing the IEP.

So the first questions I ask is: What do we know about the child? And I’m very sincerely asking, you can get the technical data from a report, you can get the informal information from the teacher because they’ve given a reading test or their observations, you also ask the parents, what have you seen? And let’s say communication is the topic and I’m going to ask every teacher there and everybody knows you have to have a general ed teacher and sometimes you pull in the adaptive PE teacher to be the general ed teacher and they’re going, “I’m not an expert in these areas.” They don’t need to be, because they’re going to be part of the process and they’re going to say, “Well, this is what I see in communication.” Recognizing it’s different from what you see in reading class or whatever it might be. But I’m trying to get a better understanding and a fuller understanding of the child.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that because that really sets the stage, not only for gathering information about the child, but for sort of creating a more equal feeling amongst the participants in the meeting too because I know one of the big things that parents face is they come into these meetings, it’s maybe one parent by themselves or maybe it’s the two parents who are there with this whole table-full with people with degrees and various titles from the school, and they feel very much like what do I have to contribute here, is anybody interested in what I have to say? It feels like an unequal playing field, and what you are describing so far about sort of the set up of this and starting by asking, “What do we know about the child?” That just, to me, feels like it evens that out, because obviously, parents know a lot about their child, and it gives them an opportunity to feel like their input is valued and that they are an equal player and an equal provider of information, which I just think is so important.

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

You’re right on target, you really are. And let me add to that, anybody can lead this collaborative IEP meeting, because the parent can say: “I’d like to set some rules up just to help me get through this.”, because sometimes I go astray and the team will go yeah, well we do too. So like what you were saying is, we’re also stopping that conversation that says, “I’m a parent — I know my kid best.” And the school is saying, “You know your kid best at home.” The truth is both. And the truth is, the adaptive PE teacher sees the child differently than the parents see during lunch than the reading teacher sees and it’s pooling all of this together. You have a lot of information and yes, he is different at home because the demands are different, the environment is different. He’s different in lunch than he is in reading, and you’re looking to see, what do we have in common here? And if it is different at home, can — and this is equally important, and I’m going to make you the parent, Nicole, tell me in different words, what you see at home so I can picture what you see.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that.

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

You’d say, “Wow, nobody has ever asked that. This is what it looks like…” And you as a parent can say, “I know you work with my daughter during lunch…” or whatever it is, “…tell me some examples of what you see.” That’s forcing everybody to be very behavioral, very data-based, it’s not a dirty word, and very in measurable terms. You know? “I see this.”, “How often?”, “Oh, once in a while.”, “I see this all the time.” “This is good, this is not so good.” And maybe what we are doing is saying, “This is a need, we should be focusing on this as we build the IEP.”, “This is not as important”, but I’m asking everybody, and like you said it kind of equalizes everybody, the focus is always on the child’s needs.

And when you ask questions, when you ask what the people are seeing, changes it totally. I’ve got to speed up a little because of time, but then, the next step is “Where am I going?”, just like the GPS, you arrive at a goal. That goal, that would be based on the present logos of performance. You’d better not be coming up talking about spaceship line when your issue has always been communication. There’s no match here, and it’d better be behavioral, not a dirty word, this is the behavior I see, and this is how often, but this is the goal and this is what I want to achieve. And you write it in terms that anybody can understand. You kind of think about that IEP micro at school — people at that meeting don’t exist, or you might move. So you want to write it in what I call ‘crayon’: something anybody can understand. We’ve all seen goals that are like this long, you could never say it in one breath and you go: “What am I talking about?”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And filled with jargon, we’re famous for that in the field of education, right? Our education jargon, our special ed where half the time, half the people on the table, parents included, aren’t even sure what it is that we’re saying in these goals and objectives!

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

You are so correct! You’re actually taking my presentation, how dare you! You understand and you have seen this and I’m sure you have sat there and gone, “There’s got to be a better way.” I think you know some of the steps we’re getting at. The next part, and again, I’m going quickly, is: How do we get there? And the GPS tells you turn left, turn right here. In our case, we’re saying, I need x number of hours of SLP, I need SLP in the regular classroom, I need so much of this, I need OTPT, I need this accommodation, I need this assistive technology in order to achieve that goal, and this — I’m going to forget this phrase, but the law doesn’t allow for “It would be nice.”, because maybe I need it later, I can never remember this phrase, and I always ask my wife what the heck is it, but often I have seen, “Well put this accommodation just in case.” Oh, that’s what it is — a just in case section.

What you end up with, in fact, one of the chapters in the book, the father says, “I wanted every single service I could get, I wanted every accommodation, I looked up every piece of assistive technology. I got it in the IEP.” And he said, “You know what, Vaughn? I made a huge mistake.” You could hear it in his voice. He said, “I didn’t need all of this. It had nothing to do with my kid. My kid was overwhelmed, the teacher was overwhelmed.” So when we put these things in, it’s not just in case, it’s because she actually needs it. And if she needs it, then she’d better get it. That helps when somebody in the team, an administrator, psychologist, teacher — it doesn’t matter, says, “We don’t need that, we don’t need to put that in there.” You as a parent, or any participant — “Well, let’s stop. We agreed that communication was a need and we’ve even identified the behaviors and put it in a goal. But you’re saying you don’t think that augmented speech devices are necessary? I’m not sure that that is a good decision.” And we go back to, “Nicole, what are your thoughts? How would augmentative devices help you in your work with her?”, and so forth.

In my view, hopefully, you don’t have that one person talking to the parents and everybody else sitting there going…. You’ve nicely and not provocatively invited everybody to participate, and not putting them on the spot. And I know you have, I have attended other meetings in other districts that have parents where they are going, “My God, these teachers are afraid to say anything because they’re going to get beaten up.” But if you started it with everybody’s input — and that’s one of the rules, everybody will participate, everybody will answer the questions, and you’ve already set it up, so — “Okay, explain why you’re saying that?” And we just go around the room to see how it might work elsewhere, so we’ve leveled it again.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, I think that’s so helpful because one of the things that often happens, where parents will come to the clinic talking about is, the discussions starts with what the parent or the teacher, the administrator thinks should be the program and services. I want a one-on-one aid for my child, or this kid needs to be placed in this type of classroom or whatever. And what you’re saying is, that’s really out of order. What we need to start with is, what do we all agree that the child’s needs are? And then where are we going? And then based on that, we start to have the discussion about the one-on-one aid or the classroom placement or the assistive technology or whatever. So often, I think, we put the cart before the horse and that sets up that sort of power struggle where different people in the team feel like, well — the administrator is just saying no, or whatever, it’s because we started talking about the — what was going to happen, before we really talked about what the needs were and where we’re headed.

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Exactly. Extremely well-put. And this sequence keeps us in that order. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So that’s questions 1, 2 and 3, right? So we’re on number 4?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Well then 4 is the next obvious thing. If we’ve written a goal and we know what the services are, how do we know we’re getting there? And in IEP world, it’s progress reports. And I’ve seen progress reports that are either like this: A, B, Kid’s getting a C. And you go — wait, that’s not how we wrote a goal. I didn’t ask if — and I said to my wife one night, “Oops, I have never seen an IEP written where the goal was to get A’s and B’s.” She said, “Umm, I have.” Really? But her district, a very large district is moving away from that and putting, let’s say it’s… I don’t know, it doesn’t matter what it is: x, 7 of 10 times.

What you should be getting on this progress reports is: X is the behavior, she’s achieving 4 out of 10, 5 out of 10, 6 out of 10, 7 out of 10. So they’re perfectly related. And the law says, that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s the progress reports are supposed to be measures of the goals. It is not meeting standards, approaching standards, it’s almost like: Could get to a standard, I don’t know, we haven’t introduced a standard. It has nothing to do with the goals that we spent so much time on. So I want the progress reports that are specifically addressing the behavior. In that process, you can do that in the IEP writing.

The other thing that we’ll get, and I saw this, 25+ years ago now, the first computerized IEPs, suddenly all of the district IEPs look the same. Yes, can I get an amen, and there it is. But the common response from teachers was, we’ll we’re stuck with this system so all we can do is give you standard scores, that’s when I remind folks that paper and pencil is fine too. You can send it home that way. So you’re not limited to… in my wife’s school, they have moved from the A, Bs and Cs to actually writing, sending them home. Well, that was what was supposed to be in place back in 1975. We’re catching up.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, and I think too, to your point about sort of the electronic IEPs and now just menus of options for things, we’ve lost sight of some of the individualized nature of it, we have districts that I have been a part of in the last 10 years, 15 years since the computerized IEPs came out where literally, they’ve got banks of goals that they just click and select from — and I’m going, “Wait a second!” That may be helpful, there maybe some goals or objectives in there that may be appropriate for a certain child, but we certainly can’t approach it where we say, “Here is the options that we have for goals based on what’s already in the computer.” So I love what you’re saying that handwriting things is okay, and even if it is a banked system of things, that doesn’t mean that you can’t write your own that’s appropriate for that child. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

The bank becomes a ‘just in case’ so this is all we have, so we’re going to use this. And suddenly, you’ve got IEPS that don’t make any sense. When you talk about the measure of progress, progress reports, you’re making sure that they’re simple for the teacher to do when they’re — and I literally have seen them, 35 words or more and there are like 7 goals written in one. A teacher can’t handle that. How do I assess this and give one report that is 80% accuracy 4 or 5 times. Wait a minute, 80% accuracy 4 or 5 times? 4 or 5 times is 80% of the time. 80% of 80% is 64%. What am I measuring? And so if they’re written in the crayon term, here’s the behavior and here’s the measure, here’s the progress report — life gets easy for everybody. Plus everybody understands.

That ‘s what helps us in the next 2 questions: How do we know when we’ve arrived. And we’re looking at that throughout the school year, but in particular at the end review time. Child may not have achieved it but I know where the child has been and I know the kind of progress that’s occurred, I’ve got the reports, I understand these words, so when I’m starting to write the next IEP, I already have most of the first questions answered, what do we know, where are we? Because you were kind enough to send home things that I understood. And one of the outcomes of the collaborative — there are 13 things that are beneficial to those processes, but one of them is shorter meetings. And they become shorter because I’ve already taken care of that first step answering a question, where are we? 

Now you can add or subtract things, that’s fine, but I also don’t lose the progress I’ve made up to this point because I’m going to base these present levels of performance on the next goal and so on and so forth. I’ve seen too many times, we’ve done the IEP and now we’re going to talk about Jupiter. Why are we talking about Jupiter? We haven’t even talked about Earth. It doesn’t even make any sense, but when you do it this way, the progression is naturally there. Everybody’s with you, even if the people at that meeting are different, the teacher who has this or the parent who has this can say, here’s the progress reports. Here is where we were, I don’t need to go over each one. I can tell you, you know the last quarter — “Nicole, you sent home, and said she was doing this. I’m going to guess she’s doing a little bit better,” and you say, “Oh yeah, absolutely, we’re here.” Okay, great. Life gets so much better. Not to abuse the phrase, writing in crayon, but we’ve made it simplistic so it’s usable. The likelihood that the IEP will be implemented: 10 fold, because I can do that. I can’t do accommodations that are this long. I’ve seen them and so have you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And that’s the thing, you know? I say to people that you can get 5000 things in there, but the more complicated the document, the less likely any of it is going to get done. And what we’re really looking for, I remind people both the professionals and the parents that the goal of this document is not just to have things written on paper. It’s actually to have something implemented. Our goal is implementation to meet the needs of the child. And the more complex we make it, the less likely that things are going to get implemented in any kind of a meaningful way. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

How can I argue with that. You’re absolutely correct. Now, the IEP is effective because it is being used. And that’s not the case because we’ve made it so complicated.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So what’s the last part? I think we got through at 5? There’s one more, correct?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

No, I kind of collapsed the last 2. How do we know we’ve arrived, but the last one is: Where do we go from here? We go from here based on where we are. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and what I was thinking about when you were talking about that too about it, when you have a well-written, collaborative IEP that is simple and implementable — how much that cuts down on the bureaucracy of things, right? How long meetings are, how many do we need to have? And I’m thinking about that question of where do we go next, particularly for kids — like I’ve been involved in some transition planning meetings recently — like when they are ready to maybe transition to a different program or a different building, or whatever, when you have a document that’s well-written that’s then formulated through a collaborative process like that, it does make those transitions to new themes or new people or next steps. It makes those much smoother. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Or even if you transfer to another state. And I’ve been there when you look at an IEP and you go, “I have no idea what this means. I don’t even know what these words mean.” And most states give you 30 days to figure out what you’re doing, but if I had an IEP that I could understand, I wouldn’t have to spend as much. Okay, good. We can do this, not so much I can do it, but I understand what the school was looking for, I understand what you’re looking for here. Without that, it doesn’t work. And what makes this subtle again, is because you’re asking questions instead of making statements, and your questions, and anybody can do this and with a little practice, you can get very good at it and everybody else will pick up on it: If I ask a question, I’m serious — she wants to… and so do I. Let me ask what you’re seeing, but your question is: “Oh yeah? Prove it to me.” I’m having troubles understanding what you’re seeing. Could you use other words or if you have any work samples you could show me so I could understand? Wow, that’s a diffuser all by itself.

And people will go, “Well that’s a fair question!” Or it’s a fair question, you’re saying we don’t need this service but if we agree to this and we agree to this — and staff seem to see it, but you know, Nicole, miss administrator — this would be beneficial to me. Because you know you’re going to be asked, nobody gets out of this. And even if you have a limited understanding, you could say, I don’t work in that area — or what I love about the example of reading, where you would ask the PE teacher. One of these days, the national PE organization is just going to jump all over me, but I pick on them because they don’t have the years in teaching reading. That’s not their expertise, or any of the other areas. But I’m in a position to say: Miss PE teacher, do you think there might be a reading problem because I’ve explained whatever? And the reading teacher goes, look — that’s not my expertise, but the way you explained it, this, this and this — it really looks like there could be a reading problem. And that’s all I can tell you. Fair enough.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. That pulling everybody in and instead of position one or two people around the table as the “expert” and the ones who are going to make all those decisions, really making sure that everybody is heard and that it’s being communicated and written in a way that’s understandable even to people who don’t have expertise in that area because that’s really important too. I want to have you spend a few minutes talking about successes that you’ve seen. Maybe any case examples or even in general — when you’ve put this process, these key questions into practice, what do you see as the outcomes of that?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

What I get back from folks are like ‘Aha’ moments. And I taught this, you don’t get in just the 25-30 minutes here, but I would say, when I was asking a question, the way you said to ask it — parents would say, I saw the teachers go, “Oh, I get it.” Without saying it. And there was that connection that they saw this process works. I get why you ask questions the way you ask them. It’s that kind of feedback. I can not go back to IEPs before I retire from public school but I can certainly tell you here. And I should add too — it’s not a guarantee that it’s going to work because one of the things that you need are reasonable people. In the book, you’ll find lots of examples where there are unreasonable people and it’s not always the school, it can be the parents too, and that’s problematic.

I’m not going to go into those because I don’t think we have time, but it’s insightful as you read it to go, oh wow — parent’s shouldn’t have said, teachers shouldn’t have said… and I did the analysis on these scenarios that you can say, “Oh, here is where it went wrong.” It was going great up to this point, and then — but if you had done this, you would have.” Point is that you do need reasonable people. And if they’re not there, then you move to the principle or you move to the district office and you say, “I need help, I need interventions.” And they’re always going to say, “Well what have you done?” So you need to be prepared and go, “Well, this is what we talked about…” I love this part: “This is what we agreed to, this is what we discussed, this is what we wrote.”

Attorneys love this too because — I’m not for due process, I am for — you can collaborate. And a good attorney will do that first, before we go to court, can we resolve this? But it’s that kind of thing. And if it is not there and you need to get an advocate, then do it, because you don’t know what it’s like to advocate for yourself. You just don’t do that. I forget what the phrase is, but a fool is his own lawyer or something like that. It’s true. I know advocates who are great, but not fool their children. And they will tell you. And I say, “I told you to get an advocate! Get yourself out of the middle of this.”

But you need reasonable people. And you can make them — that sounds terrible. You can make them reasonable by asking for their input with absolute sincerity. And I say, “I’m not sure I understand your perspective. Given everything we have agreed to, why do you say that?” That’s the need part that I get back.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So even in situations, because there may be some parents listening who say, “You know, I’ve tried really hard to work with my child’s school — we seem to always just be at odds about things.” What I think is wonderful about the process that you’re teaching and recommending is that even in situations where you have one or more unreasonable people and where it comes down to maybe needing to look at, if not an advocate, looking at mediation or whatever needs to happen — this process lays the foundation for that in a really nice, tight way where you’re documenting good, helpful communication agreement about needs, about those things, so even in the rare situations where it may need to go up the chain to some of those other processes, there is still great value in having laid the foundation with these questions and this process. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

There is because any good administrator is going to say what I said earlier, “What have you done so far? What have you agreed to?” And if you’re in a position to say, “As a team, all 27 of us agreed to this, all 27 but the one person said no.” It’s like, alright — we need to do that differently. In fact, there’s one of the stories that runs exactly like that. Director of special ed said, “Well this doesn’t make any sense, we’re going to put this into place.” But the parents were there trying to explain what they were trying to explain, and they actually brought in a video to help the one person and the team to understand what they were seeing and how whatever they were doing would work.

And the parents said, “You can see the team going, got it.” Except this one person said, “No.” We’re going to do an AT evaluation an hour away, they were in a position and they go to the director and say, this is what we’ve talked about, here is the video. And the director said, “Okay. What we’re going to do is we’re going to implement that and we’re going to monitor it over time to see if it is effective.” Which is another things that you can say if you are a parent, you say “You might not totally agree to this, but could we try it? Let us do it under 4 weeks. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, then I am with you,” But at least we will be in a position to say, I did it here, this is the result and it wasn’t — or if it is, great! It’s a whole lot different than “I insist on doing this because I want it.” 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. So helpful and it sounds like the book is filled with scenarios or examples walking through this, right?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

It is. It’s taking those 6 questions against the story that they tell me about the IEP and there’s never a single IEP… it’s over time, but the analysis is there and I’m able to say this is how the parents are good at this. So are teachers. You’ll see in some of the things you’ve got — what’s going to go wrong? And then it does. You go, oh — but I understand because question 3 wasn’t answered, or that father who said “I wanted everything under the sun.” And then “What did I do…” 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s great because it walks people through situations to see how this plays out and then to apply it to their own. So I love that. I want to have you share with people, where can they find out more about your work, where can they get your book. So it’s “When the School Says No: How To Get the Yes.” Where can they find that, where can they learn more about what you’re doing?

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

In terms of the book, you can just go on Amazon and type in the title, When the School Says No Vaugh Lauer, and you’ll get it. Find it very easily. In terms of what I’m doing now and I know we don’t have time but I’ve come up with a program that helps understand those pesky test scores. You know the reports that are 30-40 pages long and you’ve 50, 60, 70 data — I mean you deal with it. But how do I understand it. There is a program there, that if you go onto the webpage specialeducationdecoder.com 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Love the name. 

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

The video at the bottom will walk you right through it and this is another one of those where people have written back to say, I saw those ‘Aha’ moments you’re talking about. The whole staff went, “Mom! Now I know why you’re saying this is a problem,”, because it helps build/show the meaning of the test. It doesn’t take the place of the team meeting, but it helps because it’s a visual. We’re not turning pages. And we’ve all tried excel, we’ve all tried drawings. I mean I’ve seen a psychologist — Let’s see a paper napkins and I’ll show you the bell-curve. And now I’ve got 37 data points on here and you go — It’s the blob! It’s just the blob! This mechanically allows you to show and hide test scores so they start to make sense. It’s a whole bunch of stuff that if you look at it, you go — why didn’t I think of creating that!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s fantastic because that’s such a huge need! Not only for staff members but also for parents. You get these huge documents with all these things! You go, how do we make sense of that! So I love that you have put that system together that helps people really to decode that and to help that make sense — that’s fantastic! So specialeducationdecoder.com. Great! And all those links will be with the show notes! Highly recommend to all of you listening that you get a copy of this book. And check out the resources that Vaughn has on the website there. Great stuff! Vaughn, thank you so much for being with us today! Such an important topic, one that touches so many families and you gave some really practical, really great advice that people can take into their next IEP meeting, so thank you!

Dr. Vaughn Lauer:

Thanks! I’m easy to find!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Alright, everybody! That does it for this episode of the show! We will see you next time on the better behavior show.