What can an education consultant help accomplish?

[Anonymous]

Is having an education consultant helpful with the IEPs and placement?

[Anonymous]

I found having one very helpful because it signaled to the school that they needed to take us seriously.

[Anonymous]

Is that all?

[Anonymous]

Invaluable for our situation. Have two early elementary aged children both dx this year with SLD, dysgraphia, etc... both in charters. Our educational consultant has helped me strongly request evidenced based services, weed through the data, request evidenced based progress monitoring tools, observe DC's classrooms and provide important feedback to the school, provide training to the special educators on how to best support our child and has helped analyze data points that haven't matched up. The cost for this support is high but our rationale at this point.... because we are early in this long road of supporting learning differences..... is that it is less expensive to pay for the consultants input/ services then to pay for private SNs school tuition. Finally, I will say that our consultant has greatly decreased our learning curve and hopefully has minimized major missteps.

[Anonymous]

They can do observations of your kid in class to determine best supports and placement. They know what your school system is able to offer and not. They are familiar with what kind of programs are right for which kids. They are familiar with privates also. They can interpret testing results and can suggest best testers to use. They attend meetings and support you there. They will not get overcome with emotion at said meetings. Often they are familiar with the various school personnel and what these people like to recommend for your type of kid. They work with lawyers and will recommend the best one and tell you when to kick the issue up the chain. I wouldn't attend a meeting without one. Even with ours I still feel intimidated in meetings.

[Anonymous]

It is important to find the right consultant. Some are doozies some are great.

[Anonymous]

Ours prevents me from reaching across the table and strangling particular awful team members.... Honestly, I swear I would have lost my marbles long ago without an advocate to provide an important reality check (as in yes your reality is right not theirs) for me about our situation.

[Anonymous]

Can folks suggest local names?

[Anonymous]

Schools tend to retain the same goals year after year. A good ed consultant will update and refine goals.

[Anonymous]

It depends on the school, child, situation. Our first one was great. Our second one, despite having a tremendous reputation, was a disaster and made things worse.

[Anonymous]

Could the PPs share names please of good and the not so good? It's really hard to figure out whom to go with.

[madmomxyz]

Patty Murphy- well known within MCPS system

[Anonymous]

madmomxyz wrote:Patty Murphy- well known within MCPS system

Good or bad?

[Anonymous]

We used a tutor who had a Masters in Special Education as well as training as an Educational Advocate. The tutoring services she provided filled in important gaps in areas that MCPS ignored. Having her at IEP meetings helped in that she knew how to prepare for the meeting in ways that I didn't. She had the knowledge to interpret data that the school team had to disclose prior to the meeting and because she was the tutor, she knew of homework examples or skill assessments she could give to bring in additional data.

Our experience for elementary, middle, and high school teams was that MCPS typically minimizes or completely ignores problems kids may be having. 3/4 of the year teachers fail your child for assignments and send emails complaining of behaviors then an IEP meeting is scheduled and problems vanish on Edline, emails, and the meeting teacher reports. Keeping notebooks of records the entire year so you have info. at hand for meetings is important. But given the limited time parents have to speak (often much less than any other member of the team) an educational advocate knows how to prioritize the most relevant and how to ask questions of team members to highlight points so meeting objectives can be met.

The most important aspect for me personally is that it took a lot of stress off my shoulders. I could focus on being a mom and the advocate would do the preparation and have my child's back at the meetings. I often felt that I could say the same thing as the advocate but because I was the parent, the team would never listen to me the way they did the advocate.

[Anonymous]

Joni Einbinder is very good. http://iptutoring.com/about/