Reply to IEP meetings, do they always suggest autism?

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Reply to "IEP meetings, do they always suggest autism?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think one has to be careful about distinguishing between "without a label" versus "with a different label."  Every IEP needs a diagnosis or disorder.  The three prongs of the legal test require 1) disorder, 2) adverse impact and 3) need for special education.

If a child loses an autism label and has no other diagnosed disorder, legally it will not be possible to provide an IEP.

On the other hand, if a child loses an autistic disorder diagnosis and has instead an ADHD diagnosis, then the school is legally obligated to do an individual analysis of the child's needs and provide the necessary support.  It is illegal to deny services on the basis that a child does not have a particular kind of diagnosis, i.e. the school can't say, "we only provide social skills classes to autistic children and your child is not autistic thus he doesn't qualify."

However, I think many schools say the above and hope that the parents will either go away not knowing any better, or not understanding how to fight the decision or not having any money to hire legal counsel or other help to fight the decision. IME, schools do illegal things all the time and wait for the parents to force them to do what they are supposed to do.  That is why burden of proof legislation is so important.  However, even with burden of proof legislation, I imagine it will still be relatively harder for schools to deny services when a child has a label that has clearly delineated deficits and recommended "therapies" and easier to deny services when the deficits and recommended supports are less universally acknowledged.

In addition, I think that schools think rather narrowly -- they have programs which are recommended for certain types of kids/problems.  Just like the mainstream area of the school, IME, teachers are largely unable to "differentiate" special ed programs to meet the individual need of the student.  The teachers simply don't have the knowledge or experience, IME, with rare exceptions.  So, if your child has an autism diagnosis, he may be eligible for the social skills program geared to autism kids.  But, if your child has ADHD or a language disorder, auditory processing or executive function disorder or any other diagnoses that come with social skills deficits, the school simply doesn't know what to do because there is no special program.  This happened to my ADHD/language disordered child.  The school had a social skills group geared toward bullying, so that is what they gave him, even though it didn't at all fit his specific social skill deficits.  [/quote]

This is it except we didn't "lose" an autism diagnosis.  We were never given one.  But the school is trying their best.[/quote]

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