School Assessments: Finding Meaning & Advocating for Success
Feeling overwhelmed by school assessments? GPS Education Consulting’s life-changing advocacy & consulting services will guide you from confusion to clarity.
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Today we’re continuing our series exploring services that we use to help get your learner on a path to school success. Last week, we continued our deep-dive into the often emotionally-charged and confusing world of school assessments and psychological reports. We summarized some obstacles that are encountered when hardworking school professionals attempt to juggle competing demands within overburdened systems. We focused on implications of, and remedies for, the first obstacle.
Let me paint you an image to introduce the second obstacle:
“Opportunities to collaborate…felt less meaningful.”
You enter a small room filled with people you might not know. You’re carrying a stack of documents that describe your learner with a series of numbers and jargon.
You see reports detailing your learner’s: medical & educational history; cognitive & information processing abilities; executive functioning skills; social, emotional, and behavioral functioning; adaptive skills; achievement abilities; articulation, expressive, receptive, and pragmatic language skills; fine motor, gross motor, & sensory processing abilities; and more…
You look up, trying to hide the uncomfortable feelings you’re experiencing from this overwhelming situation. While doing so, you’re registering about half of what is said as people introduce themselves and mention the many things they want to accomplish during this hour-long meeting. They ask if you read the reports.
You did your best, but it was a lot of information to digest, and it’s hard to understand how it will be used meaningfully to help your struggling learner.
You tell them you “tried, but it was a lot.”
Schedule your FREE conversation today to find meaning & lose that overwhelming feeling.
Out of necessity, they then do their best impression of a pharmaceutical drug commercial narrator and attempt to each review their lengthy assessment reports in five minutes (to leave a few minutes left to make extremely important decisions regarding your learner’s educational programming).
Meanwhile, they shuffle in-and-out trying to be everywhere at once due to limited resources and a student body with increasing support needs. To avoid an additional meeting (the meeting calendar is already bursting at the seams), they must focus mostly on what your learner can’t do. They ask if you have questions, but you know this would take more time, and could delay supports for your learner by weeks. You say “No.”
With the best of intentions, they start talking about eligibility, or FAPE, or other words defined in laws you don’t fully understand. You hear things like “not eligible for SLD,” and “there’s a 504 team that can schedule a different meeting to determine eligibility.”
You’re confused and you haven’t heard your learner’s name in a while. The meeting ends as the next family arrives for their meeting. You leave feeling unsure about how that stressful experience will be useful and meaningful for your learner.
If you can relate…we’ve got a solution for you! Our life-changing educational consulting and advocacy services will guide you from confusion to clarity.
GPS Education Consulting L.L.C. provides expertise, knowledge, resources, and guidance every step of the journey.
Before the meeting:
Our record review services will break the documents into manageable chunks - highlighting the strengths and concerns we see based on our distinguished training and experience.
We’ll review the reports together in a comfortable place and at a convenient time for you, discussing what it means for your learner, and ways schools might interpret them.
Ask all the questions you have in the privacy of your home until you feel ready for the big meeting!
During the meeting:
We’ll join you as a non-attorney advocate to:
Support your understanding and make sure your input is heard,
Ensure your learner’s rights are upheld, &
Serve as a liaison between you and the school team, helping to find shared understanding, and productively collaborating to develop a plan that’s meaningful and personalized to your learner.
Afterward:
We’ll be there for you to: answer questions, plan next steps, and ensure proper and accurate documentation.
Best,
Evan Gallena, Ed.S., NCSP
Founder & Lead-Consultant: GPS Education Consulting L.L.C.
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Together, as one… Navigating the path to school success!
Psychological Assessments: From Confusion to Clarity
Assessment obstacles blocking the path to school success? GPS Education Consulting helps you understand reports, and advocate effectively for your learner.
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Today we’re continuing our series exploring services that we use to help get your learner on a path to school success. When applied with the expertise and tact of GPS Education Consulting L.L.C., these tools work wonders!
Last week, we wrote about psychological assessment reports. We summarized (from our experience writing hundreds of reports over the years) some challenges and threats that are encountered when hardworking school professionals attempt to do the impossible within overburdened and under resourced school systems. We’re talking about: completing comprehensive assessments while effectively communicating the results to parents and staff, and collaboratively applying the findings to important decisions for a learner’s education.
This is a recipe for several obstacles. Today we’re tackling the first obstacle:
“Opportunities to collaborate with experts in various aspects of the learner’s life shrank.”
While this is often an unfortunate reality, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Today we’re sharing additional insights and ways we can help you move past obstacles to get your learner on the path to school success without wasting any more precious time in their educational career.
Unfortunately, when parents are advocating on their own it is often challenging to get all the people that are needed into the same room (or Zoom call) for a meeting, and even harder to get people to stay for the whole meeting.
There are many reasons for this, but usually, its because it’s not possible to find coverage for staff to attend the meetings, or because related service providers are split across multiple schools and have to choose between missing services for students and attending a meeting. It usually points back to the recurring theme of allocating limited resources to the system’s ever-growing needs.
This may sound like an inconvenience (and it is), but there can be more serious implications. Here are just a few:
Parents / Caregivers don’t have the opportunity to ask questions to fully understand and meaningfully participate in decisions because:
A staff member is absent,
There’s not enough time,
Parent/Caregiver is feeling pressured to proceed to avoid wasting time, etc.
Drafts of documents needed for the conversation are not sent home ahead of the meetings or are put together haphazardly.
Meeting minutes and follow-up documentation are hastily completed and may leave out key details needed by interested parties (e.g., attorneys, private psychologists, therapists, parent representatives, future IEP Teams, school district staff, etc.) to effectively advocate for your learner’s growth. Think:
Types and Frequency of services,
Testing and Instructional Accommodations,
Goal/Objectives,
Location of services (Inside or outside General Education),
Placement (what school/setting can implement the student’s educational program), etc.
Input is condensed into a few sentences, and there may be key pieces of the puzzle that are not shared due to time constraints.
Meetings require rescheduling or additional meetings because a school professional isn’t available to share their insight and expertise.
Professionals are pulled into meetings without advanced warning and opportunities to prepare, review data, and seek input from colleagues.
How we help:
Often times, when a parent informs the school that they have representation from a Non-Attorney Advocate, additional resources and meeting calendars tend to free-up quickly.
While we wish that this wasn’t the case, we’ve previously detailed the daily challenges that well-meaning school staff face when the school system is overburdened and under-resourced. As a result, resources (including time) are often triaged and allocated to the highest priorities.
So…the first way that GPS Education Consulting can help you move from confusion to clarity is simply by serving as the child’s educational advocate.
Hiring us is just the start though, we provide life-changing education consulting and non-attorney educational advocacy services every step of the journey.
Best,
Evan Gallena, Ed.S., NCSP
Founder & Lead-Consultant: GPS Education Consulting L.L.C.
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Together, as one… Navigating the path to school success!