By Frances Shefter, Esq. (and mom)
Full Parent’s Guide to Reading an IEP Series here!
Part 9: Extended school year
We are almost at the end of our Parent’s Guide to Reading an IEP. Over the past eight parts, we have worked our way through the IEP one section at a time. We started with the Present Levels because we first need to understand your child’s strengths and needs. From there, we looked at goals, accommodations, Supplementary Aids and Services, Special Education and Related Services, progress reports, what should happen when your child is not making expected progress, and finally placement. Throughout the series, I have encouraged you to look at all of these sections as pieces of one coordinated plan designed to support and educate your child.
Now we are ready to talk about Extended School Year, usually called ESY. This is another section of the IEP that can cause confusion because when parents hear ESY, they often immediately think “summer school.” While ESY services are commonly provided during the summer, I want you to think about this section a little differently when you are reading your child’s IEP. The bigger question is whether your child’s IEP can be implemented during the regular school day and school year, or whether your child needs additional special education and related services beyond that time in order to prevent regression and maintain progress.
That distinction is important because it brings us right back to everything we have already reviewed. We have identified your child’s needs through the Present Levels, developed goals to address those needs, determined the accommodations and Supplementary Aids and Services your child requires, and identified the Special Education and Related Services necessary to implement the IEP. We have also looked at the progress data to determine whether the plan is working. Now, when we get to ESY, we are asking another question: Is implementing this plan during the regular school day and school year enough for my child, or does my child need services beyond that in order to maintain progress?
Start With the IEP You Have Already Reviewed
One of the nice things about getting this far into the IEP is that you should not have to start from scratch when you reach ESY. You already know what the team has identified as your child’s needs. You know which goals the team has developed to address those needs, what services your child is receiving and, hopefully, what the progress data tells you about whether those services are working. All of that information should help inform the ESY discussion.
For many students, the special education and related services they receive during the regular school day and school year are enough. Other students may need additional services beyond those parameters to prevent regression or maintain the progress they have made. That is why I do not want you to get to the ESY section, see that a box is checked “yes” or “no,” and simply move on. Just like every other section we have discussed throughout this series, you want to understand why the team reached that decision and whether the decision connects to the rest of your child’s IEP.
Think about what you already know about your child. Does your child tend to lose skills when there is an interruption in instruction? If skills are lost, how long does it take to regain them once instruction resumes? Is your child at an important point in learning a skill where interrupting instruction could interfere with the progress being made? Are there particular skills that seem especially vulnerable when there is a break in services? These are the types of questions I want parents thinking about as they read this section of the IEP.
Go Back to the Data
If you have been following this series, you probably knew I was going to bring you back to the data. Progress reports are not just pieces of paper to receive every quarter and file away. As we discussed in Part 6, they help us understand whether the IEP is working and help establish future Present Levels. That same information can also help us understand whether the services being provided during the regular school schedule are enough for your child.
I encourage parents to look at what happens when there is an interruption in instruction. School breaks can give us useful information. Maybe your child was independently reading a particular group of words before winter break but struggled with many of those same words when school resumed. That gets my attention, but I would not stop there. I would want to know how much skill was lost and how long it took your child to get back to the level they had reached before the break. I would also want to know whether we saw something similar after spring break, previous summers, extended absences, or other interruptions in instruction.
Remember, we are looking for the whole picture rather than one isolated data point. Most of us need a little time to get back into the swing of things after a vacation. A child struggling on the first day back from winter break does not necessarily tell us that additional services are needed. A repeated pattern of losing skills and taking a significant amount of time to regain them tells us much more.
You may not have all of that information sitting in front of you, and that is okay. You do not have to walk into the IEP meeting having already figured out the answer. Ask the team to help you understand the information it considered. You can ask, “Can we look at the data from before and after school breaks?” or “How long did it take my child to regain this skill?” The goal is to understand what the data tells us about your child and whether the ESY decision makes sense based on that information.
Data Detective 🔎
Let’s look at an example. Suppose your child has a reading goal and has been steadily making progress during the school year. Before winter break, the data shows that your child reached 70% accuracy on the skill being measured. When school resumes after winter break, the first data point is 50%.
I would notice that drop, but I would keep reading. Suppose the next several data points are 52%, 58%, 64%, and finally back to 70%. Now we have more information. Your child did not simply have one difficult day after vacation. The data appears to show that your child lost some of the skill during the break and then needed a period of time to return to the previous level.
At that point, I would want to know whether this was an isolated occurrence or part of a larger pattern. Do we see something similar after other breaks? How much time does it generally take your child to regain lost skills? Are we seeing this only with this particular reading skill, or does the same thing happen with other important IEP goals? I would also want the team to consider whether the current IEP, implemented during the regular school schedule, is sufficient to maintain the progress the child is making or whether additional services beyond that schedule are needed.
Notice that as a parent, you did not need to know the answer before asking the questions. You read the data, noticed a pattern that deserved a closer look, and asked the team to explain what it means for your child. That is advocacy.
If Your Child Qualifies, the Discussion Is Not Over
There is something important I want parents to know before they walk into an IEP meeting: the details of ESY are not usually going to be laid out for you in the draft IEP. ESY is generally something the team discusses at the meeting. That means reading the draft ahead of time is only part of preparing for this section. You also need to be ready to listen carefully to what happens once the team determines that your child qualifies.
What I often see is that once eligibility for ESY is established, the conversation quickly moves to logistics. The school team may say something along the lines of, “Okay, ESY this year runs on these dates, these days of the week, and during these hours.” The conversation can start to sound as though determining eligibility automatically means placing the child into the school system’s standard summer ESY program.
That is where I encourage parents to slow the conversation down. The determination that your child needs ESY and the determination of what ESY services your child needs are not the same decision. If we have just determined that your child requires services beyond the regular school day or school year based on their individual needs, then we still need to discuss what those additional services should look like for your child.
The standard summer ESY program may be a perfectly good fit. It may provide exactly the amount and type of instruction your child needs. But we cannot know that simply because the program exists. We first need to understand what your child needs from ESY and then determine whether the proposed program meets those needs.
This should sound familiar after our discussion about placement in Part 8. There, we talked about why we should not start with a program and then change the IEP to fit what that program typically provides. The same concept applies here. We should not start with, “ESY runs four days a week from 9:00 to 12:00,” and assume that is therefore what your child needs. We start with the child.
I encourage parents to ask what the team is trying to accomplish through ESY. Which skills are we concerned your child may lose without continued services? Which IEP goals need to be addressed? What type of specialized instruction is needed to maintain those skills? How frequently does your child need that instruction, and for how long? If your child receives related services such as speech, occupational therapy or physical therapy, does your child need any of those services as part of ESY as well?
Once the team has had that discussion, then you can look at the program the school is offering and ask whether it can provide what the team just determined your child needs. Maybe the answer is yes. If so, great. The standard program may be an appropriate way to deliver your child’s individualized ESY services. If the answer is no, however, the conversation should not end simply because that is the program the school usually offers.
This is also why I would not assume that every service or every goal from the regular school-year IEP should automatically continue during ESY. ESY is individualized, but individualized does not necessarily mean duplicating the entire IEP outside of the regular school schedule. The team should be discussing which services are necessary to address the reason ESY is needed in the first place.
As a parent, you do not need to walk into the meeting knowing exactly how many hours of ESY your child needs or what the schedule should be. You can simply keep bringing the discussion back to the child. If you are given the dates and hours of the standard program, ask, “How did we determine that this amount of service meets my child’s needs?” If certain goals will be addressed but others will not, ask why. If your child receives a related service during the regular school year but it is not being proposed during ESY, ask the team to explain how it made that decision.
The goal is not to reject a standard ESY program simply because it is standard. The goal is to make sure the team does not substitute the existence of a standard program for the individualized discussion your child needs. First determine what your child needs. Then determine how those needs will be met.
And, once again, ask yourself: Does this make sense for my child?
Qualifying for ESY Does Not Mean Your Child Has to Attend
There is another distinction I think is important for parents to understand. A determination that your child qualifies for ESY does not mean you are required to send your child to the school’s ESY program. Eligibility and your decision as a parent about whether your child should participate are two different questions.
Some children do very well with the continued structure of a summer program, while other children really need a break from school. Some children may have opportunities during the summer to attend camps or other programs where they can work on independence, social skills, communication or simply have opportunities to be a kid. Families may have travel plans or other experiences that are important to them. For some children, participating in the school’s ESY program may be exactly what they need. For another child, the family may decide that a different option makes more sense.
This is something I have encouraged parents to think about in other parts of the IEP as well. More is not automatically better. We are not trying to fill every available hour with intervention simply because intervention is available. We are trying to make thoughtful decisions based on the individual child, including their educational needs, emotional well-being and the other opportunities available to them.
That can be especially important for older students. Depending on the student and what they are working toward, summer school or another targeted academic program may sometimes make more sense. Another child may benefit from a camp or community program that gives them opportunities to practice independence and social skills in a different environment. There is no single answer that is right for every child, which is exactly why I keep bringing you back to the same place: look at your child.
How Shefter Law Can Help
My goal with this entire series is to give you enough information to read your child’s IEP and have many of these conversations yourself. ESY is a good example of an area where you may be able to get the information you need simply by slowing down, looking at the data and asking the team a few thoughtful questions.
If you do not understand the ESY decision, ask the school to explain what information it considered. Ask what the data shows when there are interruptions in instruction and whether your child has difficulty regaining skills. If your child qualifies, do not be afraid to continue the conversation when the school starts talking about the standard ESY schedule. Ask what your child individually needs from ESY, which goals or skills need continued support, what services will be provided and how the proposed schedule was determined.
You do not need to know the special education law behind every question in order to ask the team to explain its decision. There are times when families may still need help. If you have asked these questions and still do not understand why your child was found eligible or ineligible, the data does not seem to support the decision, or the services being offered do not seem to connect to the needs the team identified, another set of experienced eyes may be useful. Shefter Law can review the information with you during a Strategy Session and help you determine what questions to ask and what your next steps may be. But I encourage you to start with the IEP, the data and the discussion at the meeting. You may be surprised by how much you can advocate for your child simply by asking the team to explain how it got from your child’s needs to the services being proposed.
Final Thoughts
When you reach the ESY section of your child’s IEP, do not think of it simply as the section that determines whether your child goes to school during the summer. Think about the larger question the team should be considering: Can this child’s IEP be appropriately implemented during the regular school day and school year, or does this child need additional services beyond that in order to prevent regression and maintain progress?
The information you need to start answering that question should not come out of nowhere. Your child’s Present Levels tell us where your child is now. The goals tell us what the team is working toward. The Special Education and Related Services tell us what the team has determined your child needs. The progress reports help us understand whether the plan is working. The ESY discussion asks us to consider whether implementing that plan within the regular school schedule is enough.
If your child qualifies, remember that eligibility is not the end of the discussion. The team still needs to determine what your child individually needs from ESY. The school system’s standard summer program may be a great fit, but we should reach that conclusion because the program can meet your child’s needs, not simply because that is what the school system offers.
You do not need to become an expert in ESY to have that conversation. You already have the most important starting point: you know your child. Use what you have learned throughout this series to look at the IEP, listen to the discussion, follow the connections between the different decisions and keep asking the question we have come back to again and again: Does this make sense for my child?
Next → Part 10: Putting It All Together