Students and IEP meetings

While working on the assignments for class last week, the question came up as to whether a girl, Nicki, should be included in her own IEP meeting. I answered no without hesitation. Obviously this girl was too young, and would only stand to have her feelings hurt or disrupt the process. After class last week, my opinion on that has changed.

While it does make sense that some children would be too disruptive to stay for their entire meetings, it also makes sense that a child should not be excluded simply because of his or her age. After all, should the teachers and parents really be saying anything about their child that they wouldn't want the child to hear? He or she almost certainly almost knows about the difficulty he or she is having in class as well as that the parents and teachers are meeting to talk about him or her. Personally I think I would prefer to be in the room so that I could hear firsthand that those involved were working to help me rather than just to criticize. 

Legally children who are 14 and older in NC have to be included, but from kindergarten age through thirteen, who should stay in the meeting and who should either be excluded or be excused after a certain point? I think that there are a lot of factors and questions to consider, and that there is no one size fits all answer to the question of which children should stay in the meeting or how long they should stay. Here are a few of the questions that I think would be helpful to consider:

• How fully does the child understand his or her disability?
• Does the child have significant behavioral problems that would disrupt the meeting?
• Will leaving the classroom to attend the meeting disadvantage the child?
• How will the child react to necessary criticism? 

I think there are many other important aspects to consider when making this decision. I know that it was mentioned during the chalk talk in class that the discussion of weaknesses might hurt the child's self esteem or feelings. The response to this was that parents and teachers could easily word the necessary criticism in a manner that is not hurtful for the child. This brought up a really good point, that maybe even if the child is not present, we should act like he or she is. This would probably lead to a more respectful tone overall in the meeting. 

After giving this issue much thought, I still don't have an answer to the question of whether or not a child should be included in his or her own IEP meeting. I do, however, know that whenever the question comes up in my career I will make sure that I come to the most appropriate answer for the student that I can rather than answering based solely upon the student's age.