Building a foundation

I look at it as building a foundation. The support services build a foundation. There's no point in building more until you have a strong foundation. Now with kids, they can have a good foundation in some areas but not in others. Also, sometimes they have a good foundation, but as you keep building, they have weak spots. If you just gloss over those weak spots, they follow you and show up again and again.

Emily right now gets pulled 3x a week for speech (I had to stand on my head to get that much) and she gets 7.5 hours a week of special ed support (most in the form of an aide). She probably isn't getting as much support as she's entitled to - ex. a hour a day the special ed teacher is in her room working with another math group, but "available" to Emily though she needs no help in math. That counts toward her time. I'm letting it go for now because she's doing okay, but if she falls behind, you bet I'll be jumping up and down.

Anyhow, this is working well. But if there was an area where she wasn't learning the material, even with the aide, I'd ask them to pull her for small-group or one-on-one instruction to try to catch her up.

Some kids can't catch up though. My friend's daughter is mainstreamed but can't catch up with math - she's got a bona fide learning disability. So now they are talking about self-containing. What she really needs is pull-out for math that will teach her developmentally so she can do as much as she can do. There's no point in holding her to a grade-level standard if she can't do it, but if she can learn to count money and can learn basic concepts, then when you hit the limit, teach her to use a calculator, she'll function just fine as an adult.

This is what INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION PLAN is supposed to be.