For parents walking into an IEP meeting
Most of your IEP meeting gets decided in the two weeks before you walk in
There is a date on your calendar and a packet you have read four times. The draft usually exists days before you get there, which means the ninety minutes you are dreading is a revision session. The question is whose paper gets revised into it.
Start with The First MeetingFree. Print it, fill it in, take the folder.
Who ends up here
Two parents end up here
One of them just got the call. Somebody at the school said the word evaluation, the meeting is a week out, and the thing they are most worried about is being the difficult parent.
The other one has done three of these. They know what FAPE means, they can read an IEP front to back, and they keep going home with a document that says what it said before they walked in.
Both of them name the meeting itself as the worst part. The first because they do not know what is coming. The second because they do.
What is written here works on the two weeks around that meeting. What to ask for before the door opens, what to say while you are still in the room, and what to put in writing within two days.
What is here
The First Meeting
Printed and filled in by hand for the first one. The order the room usually runs in, a countdown you work backward from, the email that asks for the records and the draft, and the page about your child you hand across the table before the first agenda item.
When They Say No
Twenty sentences a district says when the answer is no. Two pages each. What the sentence usually means, what to say back before the room stands up, and the email to send afterward.
Nineteen of the twenty carry a letter written to be sent as it stands. Copy it, fill in the brackets, send it.
Checkout link not yet configured. Set it in src/config.ts.
Get the free one first if nothing has gone wrong yet. It will tell you when you need the other.