For many children with disabilities and issues that keep them from learning in a traditional school environment, an individual education program, or IEP, will be used. This can have a dramatic impact on your child’s education and how much they can learn. The IEP will seek to give them the best possible education, addressing their condition and finding unique and individualized ways to help them.
As a parent, it is easy to understand just how positive this development can be. Your child may have struggled to learn, and you may have been concerned about their future, but an IEP can turn everything around.
With that in mind, you may be worried that the IEP is going to expire in the future. If the program is working but the order expires, does that mean your child is going to start receiving an inadequate education?
IEPs typically do not expire
You generally do not have to worry about this because IEPs are not written in such a way that they expire. The order should stand and the program should be used as long as the child is enrolled at that school.
Instead of having the orders expire and needing to be reissued, the way they are addressed is with annual reviews. So every year, you may need to sit down and review your child’s progress, determine what has worked and what has not, and potentially adjust the standing IEP to make it even more beneficial. But you do not have to worry that it will simply expire without warning, taking this opportunity away from your child.
You can see how helpful IEPs are and why it is so important to understand the legal process of setting them up and ensuring that they work for your child. It can be helpful to meet with an experienced law firm at this time.