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The school does the eval to see if a student qualifies for special ed & an IEP. You cannot have an IEP meeting until after the eval is done. The eval can be used to see what services are needed in whatever school he ends up at. If the public school cannot provide FAPE, they need to pay for another school for the child. (Not sure if this would be the school the parents would pick.) The public school need to evaluate all areas of suspected disability. Some states require gifted IEPs so they might need to look at that if giftedness is suspected. With an IEP, the student gets special instruction (504s provide accommodations & only accommodations). They must provide what the student needs. Your child does not need to be present for IEP meetings. He will need to be there for the school to evaluate him. I feel that vision and hearing are done so the child becomes familiar with the school and the 'strange adults' who will need to work with h to do the eval. You should read what you sign. Not all private schools will provide FAPE. When a student is parentally placed and no sp ed eval has been done, you don't know what FAPE is so you can't tell if the school will provide it. I've seen parents have the public school do an eval & they take it to a private school so they can do their best to support the student. BTW, this sort of eval would cost $3000+ if a parent had to pay & not covered by insurance given it's educational & not medical.

I would assume this evaluation is pursuant to the local school's obligation under Child Find. An evaluation has to come before a determination of eligibility for special education, then after a determination of eligibility (assuming eligibility is found) a meeting to draft the IEP is held. So no, what is scheduled is NOT an IEP meeting and only an evaluation. You do not have to consent to having the child evaluated. Did you sign anything? It would have been a consent for evaluation form. If you did, you can reach out to the school and revoke your consent. In extreme cases, the school could take you to court (due process) to order the evaluation, but I don't think they would do that if you explained to them you are in the process of getting him into a private school. I don't know what ESA is and so can't speak to how funding would be affected. I would suggest reaching out to that process and ask that question directly to them. This level of disability is not my expertise, so hoping others will chime in to correct or add to my answer.

Is this group or 1:1 instruction? My child needed social skills/pragmatics instruction. The person we saw did 1:1 until she was at a good level to know what to do in a group & then she did group. Finding a good group can be hard as you can't force groupmates to be friends. In school, you can't put typical students into a special ed class. My kids felt anything push-in would make them the target of bullies. It was hard to work within the rules of special ed and get them the services they needed. I can see why the school might not want to do push-in. Is it the teacher of the SLP who will be overseeing this? Should be the SLP.

Hi Brooke. I agree with you that this goal a bit much for one goal. I would also think it would be a nightmare in terms of progress monitoring and data collection for a SLP. I would ask specific questions such as: 1) How are you determining whether he "participates in collaborative conversations...?" What specific skills are you teaching? Making eye contact? Conversational turn-taking? I think an actual skill needs to be identified in order to teach it and then collect data for it. I would ask these questions for each of the items stated in the goal and then ask that each skill set have it's own goal and data tracking/progress monitoring. 2) What does "minimal support" mean? I know they have given a percentage (25%), but what does this actually mean? That he will initiate conversations 3 out of 4 times on his own? Not walk away from a conversation 3 out of 4 times? Maintain eye contact without prompts 3 out of 4 times? And so on for the other skill sets. They need specificity. Here is a link to Lisa's social skills goals: https://adayinourshoes.com/social-skills-iep-goals/ As far as the minutes, I would make the argument that the goal is always to work toward the least restrictive environment (being able to transfer the skill set being taught in spec ed to the general education classroom). Taking away push-in minutes and adding more to the spec ed setting is going backwards and especially shouldn't be done when he is making progress.