EP 69 | IEEs as a Bridge— Audio from the SELPA ADR Conference 2026

Welcome everybody to the Empower LEP podcast. My name is Janna Parker and I'm a licensed educational psychologist in California. I just returned from the Selpa ADR conference 2026. It was really fun. I usually go to conferences for school psychologists and this time I decided to put in a proposal for this administrators conference. It was a different vibe, a different group of people to present to. I presented on some different content, but content that I think is really relevant to LEPs, school psychologists, special educators, administrators, attorneys, advocates, parents. The audience for this was a combination of Selpa administrators, district leaders, different kinds of educators in school districts, as well as parents and maybe some attorneys and advocates. But I think it was mostly parents and administrators. But the conference was really about using ADR and kind of like how to work best in IEP meetings where there is conflict or in situations where there is conflict and how to really work together to, you know, for the betterment of the student, which is what I think we all got into this business to do. But sometimes it doesn't feel like that. So I gave a talk on using IEEs as a bridge for those of you who are listening who don't know what an IEE is. It's an independent educational evaluation. And I just talked about how to use them as a collaborative tool rather than potentially something different. So I'm just going to post it here because I think it is, I don't know, I think it was good. I think it was useful. And I really recorded it for my own team so that I could bring it back to my own team who conducts these IEEs because this is, you know, one of the methods I use to teach them and consult with them. But I realized that this is just like a good thing for anybody to hear. So listen in. Welcome everybody. I just said the hardest part really was putting this content down. I have a lot to say and it was difficult to decide what April's I was going to take and what we're going to be my most important points for today. So hopefully I do this topic justice. Can I just get it just kind of the general sense of like if you are part of a school district or a school district, just breach of hands that I know I'm talking to. Okay, great. So most of you. Wonderful. Okay. The other thing that was difficult about this is like this is kind of a controversial subject. Yes. And I was like, yeah, some of something to contribute to this to this conference. And then when I started thinking about how I could have like their new degrees of audience, I got nervous, you know, like I don't want to offend anybody. But there are some just realities that we are dealing with. And I am going to explain to you why I feel qualified to talk about this in a second, but I think that this kind of IEE world is uncomfortable for everybody. It's uncomfortable for literally everybody involved the parents, the educators, and the person doing the IEE. Okay, especially if you have worked in schools before. But if you have worked in schools before and you're doing IEEs, I also think it can make you much better at doing that. So this is I also the other caveat I'll say is that I am pro public education. Okay, I am I promise. Even though some of the things I say today maybe you think otherwise. But I'm here today to kind of talk myself out of the job. Even though I know that they'll never have them. Okay, but I would rather be here. I would almost rather be helping people do this process of using information to help understand kids rather than using an evaluation as a weapon or a validation tool. I would rather be in a setting like this helping people who are here because they want to learn how to use IEEs as a bridge. You know, this is not entitled. How do you use an IEE against a family or against a district or something like that? Okay, so couple caveats. Here is this is why you are all here today because you know that things are just increasing. The data is increasing everything. All of the hostility and all of the things are happening at an increasingly significant and quick rate. So I think this last point 38% of all national mediation requests are filed in California. I mean, I'm kind of not surprised, but that's I mean, that's crazy. So IEEs are also I think being requested at an exponential rate that's part of this rise. And so I really am always going to come back to like it's not whether or not this is happening, but what do we do about it? Okay, so I own a private practice. We do private pay evaluations and IEEs. And just in the past couple of years alone in my practice, this is just literal data as to how many IEEs we have done in my company. And we're just like we're a small community based company up in San Jose. And we've done 29 so far this year and it's March Madness. So you know, they're like coming in. They're coming in. Okay. So here is where I come to you from. I am somebody. My name is Jana Tartfier. I should have said that at the beginning. I'm a licensed educational psychologist. That means I was a school psychologist. I was a school psychologist for 12 years in public schools. While I was a school psychologist, I had the opportunity, like very fortunate opportunity to start working in a private practice in my area next weekend. I wasn't doing IEEs for them because that would have been good lighting. Okay, none of that. But I was doing private evaluations where I didn't have to go to observations. I didn't have to sit in IMP meetings. I could just do an evaluation of the kid after school. I talked to his family about what that meant. These families were usually not trying to get IEPs. Okay. What why I say it was fortunate is the experience that I got sitting in a room doing the seeing maybe the same things I would have said as a school psychologist to this family and helping to answer questions about the student and what we could potentially do to support them in a way that was transparent and collaborative. It was just a far different experience than what I had in the schools even though I was doing the same kind of evaluation. We were just answering different questions. One is what's going on and what do we do about it? The other is are they eligible and maybe how do we pick that? You know, or how do we help that? And it was just a different mindset. But what I really learned is that parents don't know anything about what we're doing in special education. They come in and like all they know is that they're scared. They are fearful. They are emotional. They want the best for their kids and they want to partner with people who are going to work for them to have an experience where they feel like they're making good decisions and moving forward to support their student. So this elevated my school psychology practice. So for the last, you know, five years of being a school psychologist, I was thinking what I was learning from families who were coming into my practice, scared and fearful and just lacking the knowledge about processes and what happens when and I was building relationships that didn't feel where I felt like less, less pressure or like less defensive. They were coming to me for answers and they were looking at me with like wide eyes and I was like, "Oh, I can just replicate this in the schools. Things are going to go much more smoothly." Right? And that's what happened. So I elevated my school psychology practice and I'm going to talk about a couple different ways that that that also contributed to why my last five years as a school psychologist was was really great, which some school psychologists in the room might hate me because I've been kind of going to tell you maybe you should be doing a little bit more. But I transitioned, I was like, "Okay, do I want to do private practice? I really love this and I'm an excellent clinician if I do say so myself and I thought, do I want to do this or do I want to go into administration in public education?" So I tried it. I tried it. I was a program specialist and after a year or that, I was like, "Nope, this is not an organization." I'm like, "So, who does to all of you who are doing that because we need you so badly?" I just felt like I wasn't able to use the clinical skills that I had at home so well and I really wanted to be doing that work and to move up in special education. You get a lot better at being like a collaborator and a manager and a leader, but you don't get to necessarily use the clinical skills that you were building as what I was, which was a school psychologist. Okay? So fast forward, I leave schools in 2022. Okay, so it hasn't been that long. I started building my private practice nights and weekends, right, because I have been doing that already for almost seven years. And I start building my private practice and then I leave schools in 2022 after four years as a program specialist, so I could get my stirs, right? And so I now run in multidisciplinary practice where I have there are five of us who are licensed educational psychologists, one of who still works in school. So she does testing on weekends, that she doesn't do IEEs. And then the other four of us do private pay and IEEs. And then I have two speech pathologists, we do private pay and IEEs have a BCBA and I have several special educators. They don't do any of the assessments. Okay, so when we get an IEE, it's just all the educational psychologists doing that. But they do intervention in my practice. So we're in San Jose and then we just moved expanded to Morgan Hill. So it's been it's like this kind of dream come true to like walking the work and be like, who am I assessing today? And isn't this a wonderful experience because nobody is like jumping down my throat about timelines or compliance or any of the things we just really get to do the work that we want to do. But then we do do IEEs. And whenever there's an IEE, it's uncomfortable, like they're not comfortable. And there are so many reasons why? But we really make an effort to try to stay client centered as we're doing it and right in the middle of a district and a family and try to solve problems. So when I'm talking about using IEEs as a bridge, they really can be, but I think they take up a lot of different components all working together to get there. Other things that I do are I train school psychologists at the local state and national level and the top things I like to talk about are dyslexia assessment expert and why school psychologists need to know more about academic achievement assessment because guess what? If you know anything about what school psychologists do in California, it is not achievement testing. So the school psychologist and this may be something you already know, but school psychologists are usually in California doing cognitive and processing measures. And then we're relying on teachers to give us information that's going to help make very critical decisions about kids. And did these teachers get into teaching to do testing? Usually not. Okay, usually not. And are they highly trained in giving assessment? Usually not. You get a couple people, a couple special education teachers who love it and are excellent at it, but most of them just didn't get into teaching to do testing. That's just the reality. So as I started giving the achievement batteries in 2013 when I started working in private practice, I was like, oh my goodness, how am I a school psychologist and not doing this other very critical piece of assessment and relying on somebody else to give me this data? Now I've also had teachers who have been like, oh, I want to do the testing because I want to know what's going on. Yes, that's how they should not should. That's how they could be thinking and some of them do, but most of them literally say, and just being honest, they say, what test do I need to give to my school psychologist so they can go do their thing and figure it out? Okay. And I'm also coming to you as a trainer for the Woodcock Johnson 5. Okay, so come like what was it? July 2025, weeks of in February, new version of a very popular test comes out that we give as school psychologists and special educators. And so it's a digital platform versus booklets. Okay, so districts are adopting this and then Riverside Insights has hired clinical trainers to go out and train school districts. So I have trained because I was like, sure, why not have another job? I have gone out and trained thousands of special educators across California on this new assessment tour, special educators, teachers, and school psychologists. I get three or six hours with a group depending on what the district has purchased. I teach them about the differences between the four to the five, what the digital platform is all about, what are the new tests that are in it? I have them practiced for a half hour or two, an hour and a half depending on how long that training is. I show them how to run a report and say, good luck. And I literally feel like it's a liability. You know, that's all the training they get. And the school psychologists, they kick it out. They got it, right? And because they do testing all the time, but the special educators who are now giving this critical assessment to kids where we are using these test scores to determine eligibility and change the course of children's lives, maybe get three or six hours of training, and maybe get nothing because it depends on whether or not the district gets quite close to the money on it. You know? So I'm coming to you with that lens too. Okay? And talking to lots of special educators and getting a sense of what their experience is while they're learning these new assessment tools and the kinds of conversations that we're having while this is happening. Okay? All right. What is the night eating? Well, this is what happens when a family disagrees with something about the district's assessment, and then they get to, you know, ask the public to pay for it. It is a, you know, a decision where districts when they're faced with this either have to fund or file, and it's, you know, from what I've heard from people that I know, it's just a lot easier to find it because it's less money. Okay? But then it often becomes like a, like, okay, fine, do it. But, you know, and then a couple months later, like, oh, let's have this meeting and come back and talk about it. The process of like what this actually means and what we're doing during that process kind of gets lost, you know? And as the people who are scrambling trying to get the information from the district to be helpful, there's just a lot that there's a lot to the process that to be desired. Okay? And IEE is really a second opinion. It's an objective view at something. And I think that is a critical piece because just because there's an IEE coming in does not mean that defenses need to go up, but it does mean that the fences usually go up. Right? Who wants somebody coming in and telling them that they did something wrong, you know, or what I think is better. So it really depends on the, it's like once you are doing an IEE, if as a district, you're fostering a collaborative environment and trying to put defenses aside and look at this new evaluator and assessor or somebody who's going to come in and help your team answer questions and give some recommendations to move forward, then you're going to be in a better place with that person. And I'm also not going to say that every IEE assessor is coming in with that kind of lens. Okay? I fully am aware of that. It's just what we do. The evaluator has to be qualified. I think you all know that and not employed at the district, but what parents I don't think understand a lot is that the district really only has to consider those results. We have literally gone to IEP meetings where they have said, thank you very much for your results. Goodbye. And like, come on south of Zoom. Like, okay. Really? Oh, oh, I'm not. Okay. Okay. So, but really, they only have to consider and you know that, you know, but hopefully somebody is coming in with something valuable for you. But I think that parents are often confused by that. And so we try to make it, you know, we make it pretty transparent. IEEs, as you know, are often viewed as adversarial. And it happens when trust breaks down. The biggest reasons we see for IEEs are just mistrust and miscommunication. And in practice, they can reveal gaps in your system, right? Which makes it scary, right? It makes it scary because somebody could be coming in and saying, maybe you should have tried this or how about this, or they did qualify, right? So it's natural to feel defensive against that. But they really do have the potential to create alignment. And like I said before, I mean, that's, we come into every IED with that. If any of you standing in the back want to sit down, there's like seats up here. You're welcome to. Yeah, please, please sit. All right. So here's some things that we have learned from IEEs. Parents are requesting them because there's a lack of trust. There's a lack of trust if something could be long-standing. funding lack of trust or it could be something that just happens. It could have to do with, you know, so many different things, but that is like a very, very apparent thing is that there's a lack of trust. I do think, and this is just observational. I didn't get any data on this, but I think that we can all probably agree that the rise of social media and information that parents have at their fingertips also seeing into what was going on during COVID, lots of people trying to get business from parents and, you know, kind of giving information away, some of which is very objective and true and others, which are maybe not so much, right? Parents are much more informed, okay? They're much more informed, and I think that this is giving rise to some of what we're experiencing. But parents really feel a lot of confusion about the results. So the assessment might actually have been fine, but there's confusion around what they understand about it. So sometimes when we're talking with families and we're reviewing a report, we're going through with them what they didn't, you know, seeing things in a way that either wasn't explained to them, well, or maybe they just weren't in a space to be able to hear it at the time too, right? So they come into a safer space and then they go, "Oh, you know?" And we end up just in schools talking about a lot of things in a kind of legal, these compliancy kind of way, and sometimes we lose the, "Well, what does this all mean about this student that we just did at this evaluation form?" There's also a real lack of understanding about the special education process itself. Like I was saying at the beginning, like, this is when somebody steps into the potential of meeting special education services, it's like a whole new world, and it's a world that we live in day in and day out, but we forget. I think it's very easy to forget that parents just really have a lot of lack of understanding about the process. Sometimes someone say to me, "You know, they just, you know, now it's been three years and for some reason, they want to do another assessment. You know, whatever they're doing, another assessment right now, because it's a twin unit, like they just don't know, okay? A lot of times parents feel unheard, you know that. There are oftentimes legitimate concerns that haven't been heard or haven't been addressed, or maybe it's even they haven't been addressed in a way that the parent expects that they were going to be addressed, okay? So they had a different, they had an expectation for a different outcome." So those are kind of the top reasons why VC, these requests for IEEs, and what you guys are experiencing as districts are legitimate too. You've got major time constraints. I mean, everybody is overworked. You are understaffed. The hugeest one for me that I kind of touched on earlier was just how many roles your special educators have, okay? So teachers get in for teaching. Little do they know they also have to be exceptional at organization and case management, because oh my goodness, the paperwork. It is, and then we're like, why haven't you, you know, done that? There's so much that they're trying to be a teacher. They're trying to differentiate for the 10 different kids in their class who all have different needs that they're teaching all at the same time, well, one of them is under a table or out of the, there are so many different things they're managing all at once. And then it's like, well, what about all these things with your IEPs? Oh, and then you have to also be an evaluator, right? You also have to do testing. There are just way too many things that they're doing with far too few resources and not enough training in really any of them, because when does a teacher get to get out of their classroom and go to professional development or a conference of their choosing? Not a lot. They wouldn't even do it if they had the opportunity sometimes because they're like, I can't, I'll get behind, right? Or I don't, I can't leave my kids. There's a lot of pressure on them. And I think that that's, I mean, that is a real big systemic problem. I'm going to give you like a potential solution at the end of this, but it is probably one of the biggest problems I've seen because again, as school psychologists, we are relying on their test scores for eligibility purposes as part of what we use for eligibility. Okay? That is extremely important. I think overall districts are experiencing variability in their assessments just in general. You might have some people who do an exceptional evaluation. Another is not so much. You have major communication breakdowns between even staff or staff and family, right? And there's a lot of defense of this from districts under pressure, which again is understandable. This is, there's a lot riding on all of these decisions and things that we're doing in special education. Some of the common patterns that we see in the assessments that we're actually doing are a lot of times it's like the student didn't qualify and so they have requested an IEEE. We do a lot of those. And I've had a director say to me, when we, when we get one of these and we do an IEEE, we're pretty sure you're going to come back and tell us they qualify. And it's true. It's true because although we want to think that special ed is black and white, it's not, it's gray. And have that on another slide. I'll just say it now. It's gray. And it's about the, it's not about the numbers. It's about the need, right? And a lot of times in districts we get held up on numbers. But also you think about the fact that like you could have a first-year school psychologist who's bringing into this has the same expectation as somebody who's been in the business 15, 20 years doing assessments, right? But they're expected to understand kids or in the system in the same way and it just doesn't happen like that. A lot of times we get weaker, unclear academic data. I'm going to show you an example in a second. We get a lot that are facing their eligibility on like academic, oh, academics alone, right? And not really looking at educational impact more than academics, which is really problematic because there are so many more things. But it's like kind of what you're taught in school. And if you don't kind of expand beyond that, then you might be a professional who thinks, well, all of the scores came back in the average range. So, D and Q, right? But it has to go deeper than that. A lot of times parents feel like there were areas that weren't evaluated in areas of suspected disability and we'll see it. I mean, we'll see a pretty clear intellectual disability profile with no, like, I don't know, lacking some of the assessment that you would do in that, like maybe an adaptive or maybe they did do adaptive, but they still didn't say we're rolling this in or rolling this out. Okay. So, we see some of that. And then just a limited explanation to families with a lot of templated language and assessment reports. As a school psychologist, I can flip through pages and tell you exactly what is compliance language, what is this came from the test publisher language, this is a table and if a report is written like that with all of that in it, a family doesn't know where to look and read. Like if I saw an assessment like that, I might just be like, I don't even know what this says. Do I need to read the words that are in this little box right here? Oh, that's just about this. I mean, they just don't know. Okay. So, the way that we, the way that reports are written is problematic as well. Okay. I'm going to share a little case with you. I'm Ali who is a third grader. Now, I did an IE for Ali because the district did not qualify her. Okay. She was a DNQ and as soon as it was a DNQ, parents enrolled her unilaterally in a school for kids with dyslexia. Okay. And she requested an IE. So I did the IE and in fact, I got a lot of the same scores as the district. Okay. A lot of very consistent information to what the district got. Well, it was interesting about what the district had done though is because based on a PSW model and using some of the software systems like the X-Bast that some school psychologists are using, you can, if you have like three different scores and two of them are consistent and one of them is not, you can just throw out that inconsistent score. Well, unfortunately, the school psychologists threw out all of the low scores because they were consistent with the higher ones and also said this kid has dyslexia, but it's mild and she doesn't need an IE. Okay. So it was a DNQ. Now I'm going to do my best to play you this little snippet of sound. And I don't know how to do it. No, how do I do it? There's a sound bite in here. Okay. I'm just going to go on. I'm not going to worry about it. There's a little sound bite in there somewhere, but it's missing. This girl read this. It took about a minute and a half. I wasn't really gonna play the whole thing, but it's. took a long time for her to read this. The this passage or this part of a passage is from a reading comprehension test on an achievement battery, which is not something a school psychologist would have given. It's something that a teacher would have given, but this is in my office, and I have her do this assessment. The reading comprehension assessment took her an hour and a half, okay? It's supposed to take like 20 minutes. It's read some passages and answer comprehension questions. So at the end of the test, I said, can you just read this out loud to me because they read silently. So I can't tell what she's what she's doing. I just know that it's taking her an hour and a half to do. And she's doing a pretty good job, okay? She's doing a pretty good job because her language was very strong. Okay, she was a very, very girl. She had really great language, good vocabulary, good compensatory strategies for figuring out information in text. So her ultimate score was a 115, which is above average. On this reading comprehension test, that took her an hour and a half to do because she was reading at a snail's pace, okay? But if I had not asked her to read, I wouldn't have had that observational data. If my teacher had given this test, she probably wouldn't have told me, okay, it took an hour and a half. And then I also tested the limits and had her read so that I could listen to her. And I realized what kinds of errors she was making and why this was taking her so long. So in an IE, I'm able to get more information that says to me, this might have been a standard score of 115, but that does not mean that this kid is not struggling with reading significantly. And are we going to say, you don't get an IEP because ultimately you can come to the, you can comprehend what you're reading, which really just means that you're using strategies to figure it out. Or so are we just going to provide you accommodations as a third grader, have like things can be right allowed to you, or is it our obligation to teach you how to read better, right? I think the latter, right? We need to teach this third grader how to read better, but instead of it being a, like let's really take a look at this, at which her lived experiences, it was a DNQ have some accommodations, sorry, you know, sorry and parents just were like, no, we're going to move into the school. So she ultimately did end up staying at that school, which probably wouldn't have happened, had they just offered her an IEP and put their services in place first, right? To try it out, but that's just not what happens because she ended up staying at the school for kids with dyslexia for at least a year is what they settled on. So kind of just an example of what happens when you're doing an assessment, and if we are in schools and we're number one, it under significant time crunches to get these done and we have so much going on that we're doing, and then number two, you don't have people who are necessarily like truly evaluating to understand what's happening for the students that they're evaluating, which happens under time crunches, not because people don't want to be, right? Or it's a teacher who's just like doing it to get it over with because they've got a million other things to do, you end up in situations like this. So the reality is, again, like special it is not black and white, there's a whole lot of gray, and a lot of the cases we see involve the misalignment, the miscommunication, and the missing information. All right, so now we're going to reframe, refraining the role of IEEE's using kind of ADR lens. All right, what IEEE's are supposed to be, but ultimately become, all right, they're supposed to be an independent perspective, they're supposed to give you additional data, they're supposed to support your team decision-making. They're not often used like that, okay? They're often used as a second opinion battle, a parent's validation tool, and a source of defensiveness, just all around, and we feel that as evaluators. And again, I'm not saying every evaluator comes to the table like we do, but I wish they would, I wish they would, and I'll talk to them about in five. I doubt who they are, but because we do truly experience, so just as you're working with IEEE evaluators, we feel a lack of trust. We feel a lack of trust, it's uncomfortable. We are faced with significant contracting requirements these days, asked for like this, that and the other, where I'm just like, I'm just gonna get whatever it is that they need so that we don't run into these battles. But it's hard to just get the contracts going, and then we look at the case in Palo Alto recently, where there was undue delay for a family because of all of the insurance requirements and things that IEEE contractors were being asked to have. And then it just delays out the whole process. We experience a variety of things, like some districts are like, okay, we already have a contract with you this year, so we're just gonna amend this contract, super easy, and then we have others who are like, oh, all new kids, all new contract, all new kids, all new contract. And it just, for us, we're like, okay, we can take this case right now, and we can get this case done in three weeks to a month. But if you're making, if you're making us wait, and then the parents like, have they given you anything? And we're like, not yet, and it just, it kind of like just is kind of undue burden, understand what we're working with in systems, but there are just a lot of challenges around that. We have had some difficulty getting information from districts. Like we're doing this IEEE for you, could we get the IEEE, the psych report, that time and stroke, it's like these things, can we, who do we need to set up the officer for you to win? We're kind of like, it's kind of wild, wild west sometimes. Other times, it's like, here's the list of all the people you need, and the things that you need, and it's amazing. And then we're just like, go, you know? And then sometimes teachers are very difficult to communicate with. Other times, they're awesome, okay? It's all over the board, but this is what we experience. So then, like I was saying before, sometimes we are invited to present at meetings and included in the conversation to be helpful. And then other times, we are literally cut off the second that we're done. Sometimes we have to wait months to have the IEEE meeting. So we are committed to finishing our evaluation fast, because they're now on to the next. So for people who are doing a lot of evaluations all the time, if you have to wait four months, like just as the evaluator, four months, six months to have a meeting about a kid that you tested like so long ago, you don't really remember, right? You have to totally refresh yourself. And what good is that rapport going to do when it was supposed to help the problem that was happening right now, and we always evolve and change. And so what's happening at one moment isn't necessarily happening six months down the road. So if you're truly using an IEEE to be helpful to solve a problem in that moment of time, quickly scheduled IEP meeting would be useful. So sometimes we do experience a very, very long wait time. So in the utopia, right, instead of asking, who is right about this kid? What if we were asking, what does this child need for us to understand about them? How do we get there together? Right, if every time we do an evaluation, we're doing it to figure out that question. As the evaluator, we're not trying to, you know, like pin people against each other. We're trying to figure out, you know, what is this kid need and how can this team help them get there, right? So I am going to propose to you three tiers of change. Some of these things you will be like, yes, and others you'll be like, what is she, is she crazy? So, but I think that they are, well, I know, I know because I've done them all or known people who have done them all, that they can be done. So tier one, what can you do right now? Okay, tier one, you can work to improve your assessment quality. You could do that in a number of ways. It could be training or if you're staff, I'm going to suggest something in a minute here. Actually at the bottom, so I'll just talk about that. Have your school psychologists do all of the testing? Haven't you got the whole thing? What is that going to add to a school psychologist plate? Two hours and a whole lot more informative data, right? I mean, how happy would your teachers be? (laughing) This is, like, I tell you, I would never give the testing back to my special educator. If he begged me and I've had some great ones. I mean, I've worked with some amazing resource specialists and special teachers who we worked like this together. But for the most part, if I were going back in the schools to do assessments, I would, I would want to do all the testing myself. And you know, California is only one of a few states that does it this way. when I was just at the National Association of Social Psychologists three weeks ago in Chicago, it was like snowing. And when I asked the question to my audience, how many of you do academic testing, actually two thirds of them raised their hand because there are only a couple of states that do it like we do it here in California, a load of teachers are getting the access to academic assessments. I know, and I didn't know that because I was in California. But it's true. So what if we improved our assessment quality? Okay. Number two, or second bullet, training staff to walk families through the I.B. process from start to finish. Every single time you are coming to the table, or every time there's any element of IEP going on with the family. Remember, these are people who like we live in every day, but this family is only living it once a year and they've probably forget it. You know, like walk them through all the steps that the more transparent you can be as a teen, helping families walk through this process. The more they will understand and not have pushed back. We do some consultative work in our in my practice, call it tier one advocacy. We don't really call that just to ourselves. We call it that we just call it their parent consultation. But to ourselves, we call it tier one advocacy because we are not advocates. We do not want to go accompany you as an advocate to a meeting. We want to be the psychologist if we're going to a meeting. But if family comes in as just like, I don't understand this paper work. Can you help me understand the cycle for it? Can you tell me what, you know, why are these goals like, you know, just anything that a family has questions about in the IEP process? We walk them through it when we just inform them and power them with knowledge. Talk to them about what the process is like and help them power them so that they can go in and ask more collaborative questions because we also know that the second you bring an outside person into your meeting is the second district's yellow flats go up, right? And we don't want to create that if we don't have to. So we try to empower them through like a problem solving like what questions we asked of your team to help solve the problems that you're experiencing. And then if you need to, we'll refer you to an advocate. But like we would rather you just try to work throughout yourselves. So we know that's going to work best. So another thing is sharing findings with families before the IEP meeting privately in a safe space. So at the last district that I was in as a school psychologist, I did this. So this is part of what elevated my school site practice while I was working in private practice. I was like, what if I didn't just share the assessment report so that they could read it. But I actually sat down with them in a private space where they could emotionally sit with this information where they could ask me questions where I could explain it to them without a whole bunch of other eyes on them in a way that they could digest, right? And no matter if the student, if I was recommending through my professional expertise, whether they were going to be eligible or not eligible, it was okay. I wasn't predetermining whether or not they were eligible. I was saying this is what I found and why. And I'm going to defer, we're going to talk about this as a team when we get to the table. You know, but this is how I came to this eligibility criteria. This is what I'm working on though. And then you could even have the questions like, "Dash, she does have dyslexia." But she doesn't have this other piece that requires specialized academic instruction. And this is why. Per tier two intervention is working great. Why would we change that? Maybe we up that a little bit. But why would we change what's happening in this while she's making progress over the past eight weeks that they've been doing this evaluation, right? There are many reasons that are kind of like more digestible to families, even if it's not necessarily what they think they want to hear. If you see it in a room that's private. Now, is this going to create more like do schools like I'll just have to spend more time doing this? Yes. But with that time, be saved on the backend. Yes. Okay. So we're trying to do preventive care rather than fixing problems that happen afterwards. Okay. Also, just on that note, there are other states that have a meeting where you talk about assessment results. And then you have a separate meeting where you develop the IEP. That's also another California thing where we're like, okay, we've got 20 minutes left at this hour and a half long meeting. Let's do the IEP, you know, and parents are all like, oh, what did we just go through? Okay. So continuing on with tier one, practices that any team can adopt tomorrow build the relationship before the triadal. So here's another to school psychologist. I know I'm putting a lot on you, but I have done this before I've done all of this. So when I started in the last district that I was a school psychologist in, they said, guess what? You go to all the annuals in this and you are the LEA for all of the annuals. And I was like, what are you talking about? I go to triadal. That's it. Because that's normally what we do. This school psychologist right, we come in for the triadal. Well, I was like, all right, I got to do this. So I started going to all the annuals and I started meeting all these meetings. And guess what? I knew all the families. I had established a relationship with all the families. We already had open communication. And I learned about their kid every year. So when we got time to do the evaluation, we had already built that relationship in the trust and not went such a long way. So I had very few, if any, issues communicating with these families, even if I was telling them something that they didn't want to hear, because I had already developed this relationship and it just went such a long way. So I'm not giving you guidance on anything that I have not done myself. Okay, I've done it all and it's possible. And then lastly, another suggestion is to really do some proactive legal and compliance training, especially for teachers. You know, as a school psychologist, I was fortunate enough to be sent by my district every every year to legal and compliance trainings, but the teachers didn't get that. And not all schools like colleges get it either. So then you have people case managing and running IEP meetings, and they're just kind of being told the things that they're going through, but they don't really understand why. And I think the legal and compliance trainings are so informative and helpful. And if more of the team is still being like, "I think I'm in trouble. Now we have to do this compliance training," but instead it was just like, "This is some cool stuff that you should know about because you do this process every day. It could be really helpful." Okay, so tier two, I want to talk about a mindset shift. So how do we like, once you're in the IEP process, what are some ways that you can shift the way that you're thinking as a district to use evaluators and IEPs in a way that's more effective and collaborative? So building relationships with the right evaluators. This is tricky because if you build a relationship, like for me, if I have a relationship with a district and a director and we're doing an evaluation and we feel not like we have to side with the district, but that we have a good working relationship and they're trusting us to come in and help their team. Now a parent might say, "I don't want my evaluator to have any relationship with this district." And in fact, we get emails from parents saying like, "We want to use you, but do you have any relationships with these districts?" And that, and I want to say to them, and I do, we do say to them, "Actually, this is more helpful to have a relationship so that we can help you solve your problem." And we don't take every IEP case that comes our way. We don't want to feel coerced by a family or by an attorney or an advocate. We really want to feel like we can sit in the middle and help solve the problem. So along the same lines, can we agree on the scope of the work before the IEP begins? What are the problems? What's happening here? What do people not agree with? And what do both sides feel like? We're not here to litigate that. We're just here to understand what both sides are experiencing. And that's a conversation that can happen on both sides. What questions do we want? Answer can be agree on that. Using LEPs as consultants. So I'm going to talk about this alternative model here. So there are kind of three ways I see you being able to use an LEP or a psychologist, okay? Who knows about this process? The first would be when you need to, yeah, do the whole evaluation over again, right? Because that's what a lot of people think of as IEPs like, "Oh, they're going to come in and they're going to do a whole new evaluation." Well, gosh, that is just not always even ethical. Like do we really need to evaluate all of the areas again or what are the issues that we do need to evaluate and can we focus on those? Okay, can we agree to that? So number one, sure, maybe we're doing a full re-evaluation. But number two, maybe we're doing something that is more targeted. Okay? And then number three, maybe we don't need to actually do any assessment at all, that hey, these people who are licensed educational psychologists, they know, they should know, a lot about the school district and processes. What if we just bring in an outside consultant to help us understand this, to do some observations and some interviews, and understand the environment, and review the records in the IEP, and just give an outside perspective to help the team problem solve. I'll give you just two quick cases. This was actually the first IEEI ever did, at as I was finishing up at the place that I was working at before I started my own practice. The reason I took it was because I didn't have to go to the school and do anything. They didn't want me to go do an observation. They didn't want me to do any assessment, except answer the question, why is this kid struggling with reading comprehension? He was in high school and he had autism, and Mon was just really hung up about why he was having difficulty with reading comprehension. I didn't do a full battery. I just answered the questions that she had, and they have worked this out ahead of time, but Mom and the parent came to the practices office to have the feedback meeting. Mom and the director came to the table with me, as if I was having a parent feedback meeting in my practices office. We talked about the evaluation report. This was already agreed upon ahead of time. I had nothing to do with that. I just showed up that the assessment had the feedback meeting, and it felt like a private practice case rather than an IDE. I confirmed what the district had found. Yeah, this kid had comprehension deficits, and I was able to explain why in a way that Mom could hear. She just needed somebody else to say it to her, not the district hadn't done anything wrong, but I think that the director had offered this as an olive branch. Let's look at this from a completely outside person, and Mom accepted it. We didn't have any adversarial dynamic. The process just felt safer for her. It worked out really well. I think you guys could be creative when you're thinking about things like this. Another one we had more recently. I was on the phone with a coordinator who wanted us to do the site. She said he's a young kid. There wasn't any issue with the assessment. It was really just the placement. I don't want to put this kid through more assessments. Nobody has any issue with that. What if we just come in and we do some observations and some interviews and really understand this? Let us come in and do a couple of different observations and help you. The coordinator was like, "Wait, that would be amazing. Let me see if the advocate and the parent are on board." Because she had established a positive relationship with both, and they were able to communicate about it, they agreed on that. That was the scope of the work that we did. We came in, we did that, we helped the team problem solve. It is possible for you to use IEEE providers as someone who will do a whole evaluation, someone who will do something that's more targeted, or someone who will just come in as a consultant. I think any and all of them could be useful, depending on the situation and the questions that you have. Then tier three, this is a programmatic change and shift. This goes back to thinking about how we could have not every special educator doing assessments. Because let's think about this. Let's say you have a special day class teacher, if you have those with 10 kids in their class, and maybe two of them have a trial deal back here. That means that teachers only do two assessments the whole year. How much practice is that person getting and doing assessment? Do you think they're going to be very good at doing assessment every time they do it? No, they're not practicing it. They just don't, it's just not something they do every day. At some districts, they are having assessment teams. I used to work for free-mongering and high school district. I know that they do this at San Jose Unified. I also know that San Mateo Union High School District has a version of this. I know the most about free-mongering and high school district, and I interviewed the director. I also interviewed one of the school's psychologists who are all these assessment teams. They have dedicated IEP specialist teachers who are released from teaching and their case load to just do evaluations and IEP development. The case managers then get to focus on instruction, progress monitoring, and any amendments that come up. Yes, sir. Are those just because IEPs were their reviewing assessment? They're also doing annuals. Yes, they're also doing annuals. So what they do is all the academic assessment for initials and tries, and they do all the IEP for writing for initials, trials, and most of the annuals, depending on the program. This has really improved the competency and the working relationship with the school psychologists and the teacher because now the teacher and the school's psychologists are just like the school's psychologists is working with maybe two teachers, and that's it. So their process is really improved in terms of assessment, and they do lead the AER process for more complex cases. So they do have like a section neutral funding, so they didn't hire additional people to do this, but it did mean that the case load would be increased and the class size would be increased for the teachers who were teaching and case managing. Okay, so then I do, if you walk this, these slides are in the portal, so you can get this, because this is literally how they did it. And so you get like this was, you know, they're doing it at two and a half sites. Okay, they're not doing it everywhere. They're doing it at the bigger sites because the bigger sites had more leeway in their numbers. So now their academic reports or their psychoanalyst reports are not more consistently written, they're more comprehensive. They have team meetings between the evaluators every week so that they can case all their kids. So it's just a more collaborative, interpretive kind of case process. And there's no data on if they've gotten more or less i.e.s, so there's no actual data, but they do have very few i.e.s just overall as a district, and this could be one of the reasons. So if you want to replicate this, you do really want to show the staff some concrete scenarios of what this could look like. You want to show them what the case loads of class size impacts would be within without the model. You really want to tailor to each site because obviously the size and the staffing is going to be impacted. And then you have to find the right people because in a training that I do of academic specialists, education specialists, you know, two to three of them are like, yes, I love this. And the rest of them are like, hey, if you take it off my plate, I wouldn't be upset, right? So you will have those people who raise their hands and want to do it. And those are the people that you want to do it. And then they do build in an annual review of this. So you will want the model to be reviewed and evolved, not just be a senate and forget it kind of thing. The last thing I think I was going to say about that, I can't remember. So it is doable. Now, I know that in San Mateo Union High School District, the director there, said to me like, they're a newer administrative team. And they said, like, I don't know if we like this because coming from a person who was a special education teacher, he said, I don't want to give my testing up to somebody else. I mean, there are definitely teachers who are like, I don't want, I want to do it. Okay. But maybe those are the people who should be doing that testing then because they want to, because that's not the reality for a lot of the teachers. Like they want to know how to teach the kids, but the standardized testing isn't necessarily going to teach them how to teach the kids. Yes. So I did that as long as the evaluation part is concerned assessment part is concerned, I did it because just now what you said standardized has nothing, not a whole lot to give you what we need to teach the students. But when it comes to money, but you also said developing the IEP, that part I have a conflict. I wasn't at least so specialist for years now. I have no head sweatshirts. And I see when you're sitting in the meeting and you're asking the teacher because we had a sub. So the other teacher did the assessment and asked for some information. She's like, I don't know, I'm not in the classroom. Thank you for saying that was actually the other thought that I had. So thank you for queuing me unintentionally. Yes. So the one, the one thing that the director said about the potential outfall, downfall of the program was that there was a little bit of disconnect between the case manager who's now case managing the student and the IEP itself. And so they're working on that. Yeah, I absolutely. That was the one piece of it who that is, you know, that is questionable like they felt just a little bit disconnected, right? So something something to work on. Okay, so kind of in summary, good. Oh my god, it was amazing. Okay, so when I use work best, it's not when you're trying to prove someone wrong, right? We're not trying to prove someone wrong. And I will also admit again, sometimes people are trying to prove someone wrong, right? But hopefully they're not. We do want to just help teams understand what is going on, what to do about it, add an objective perspective and support decision making. And they really just don't have to create division. They can create alignment. And so hopefully this leads you with a new lens on some things that you can do with IDEs practical ways to reduce conflicts when they arise, ideas for improving some of your systems and some strategies for a stronger collaboration. I do have a couple of questions at the end here that you can just think about of what you might do differently. And if you have any questions or want to make any comments,