Fighting for a non-academic IEP

[MKW]

I wrote about my daughter back in November who was only given a 504.  We are going to address the school again to get an IEP going for the fall.  I am just wondering what supports to ask for for her.  She received Speech, OT, PT, and works with the counselor on social skills currently.  She has autism and anxiety, her IQ was around 124 which is why she was denied.  She needs support with social skills, she struggles to understand the unwritten social norms around friends.  She did an assignment in January that had a fill in the blank and the sentence said " School makes me feel worried"  School constantly tells us she is doing so well or she's come so far but she consistently comes home expressing how hard it is for her, or that she doesn't want to go, or that she doesn't understand certain social interactions.  I know she needs more support but I don't know what to ask for and I don't trust that they will make her a robust individualized plan

[Carolyn Rowlett]

Request a special education evaluation in the area of social/emotional/behavior.  List all the reasons you state above.  Attach the autism and anxiety diagnoses.  Ask the teacher to report what he or she sees in the classroom, at lunch, at recess, and at specials in terms of her responding to questions, making conversations, having friends, etc. and attach that feedback.  The school must already see a need in terms of social skills if she's seeing the counselor for that.  Those skills can be addressed in an IEP with goals and specialized instruction.

[JSD24]

She needs better social skills so she can participate in group projects.  This is why this is a "school" issue.  Has the school evaluated social skills?  There is at least one assessment for this:  SSIS -  Social Skills Improvement System.  The other area of need the school should evaluate (and it seems that many schools skip with an autism diagnosis) is pragmatics.  Your child might be masking at school given she's bright.  If the school does an eval like the TOPL, you want to see them do the optional extended part so she's challenged to the point where she can't mask.

What we saw was the guidance counselor didn't have the skills to teach a student like my daughter social skills via a 504.  I'm thinking that the level of service - 30 minutes once every 6 weeks/3.4 hours per year - might not have been enough time to cover what she needed.  With a 504, there is no progress monitoring so they weren't looking at how effective the services were.

If you go to school & mask for 6-7 hours as well as being surprised (to use the language from Social Thinking) by how peers react to you socially, the situation will be hard.  It's good that she's bright and doesn't have academic struggles because that would make school even harder.