Organizing IEPs

This is really a sub section of general organization suggestions, but I thought it deserved its own little header.

I was at one time head of a catering department. We followed a system which was pretty common for event planning departments. We organized our functions by calendar date, in so far as placing their files in order, by their date, up until a year in advance. The odd event which was further than that, we kept in regular alpha order and pulled their files into the calendar system as needed.

I was briefly in special education. A challenging career, not without its own rewards, but certainly not the direction for me. I survived on the strength of my organization skills, which though important for teaching overall, was critical for my job as a resource teacher. Losing a document, or not knowing the date of a conversation could be the point of contention in an IEP meeting with parents, advocates and lawyers.

Date Order
IEPs, or Individual Education Plans, are usually lengthy documents with a lot of support materials. They are kept in folders. I am responsible for annual reviews, so to speak, of the student's needs. When you are juggling forty or more students or "caseloads", it can be quite daunting in addition to the other duties of a resource teacher.

I based my system on an the old catering system. The folders should be labeled with the student's last name, and the date of the annual and/or triannual. Then these folders are filed according to date first. The files are further divided into months, with month labels clearly posted. In this manner you can see what is "due" three months from now, four months, etc. I showed my system to the other resource teachers I was working with, and they immediately adopted it.


Contact Log
On the left side of the folder is a running phone and contact log, much like a sales person's log. I put the information in this order

date phone number person msg or result


If I were to do this again in the future, I would add another contact sheet specifically for observing when and how the IEP objectives were met throughout the year. When it comes time for the IEP meeting, I would have been better prepared.