During Covid, your child may have missed sessions of related services. Perhaps they weren't provided with the special education instruction they needed in class. Your relief is limited to something called compensatory education. Basically, that means make-up services or instruction. But the award of compensatory hours is not necessarily one hour of instruction or service for each hour missed. Instead, the law permits an award for the amount of time it would take to get the child to where they would have been if the proper services or instruction had occurred. To figure that out, we looks at where the child was at when they stopped receiving services or instruction regularly. Then we look at where the child is skill-wise at the end of the gap and how long it is taking to get the child back to the baseline they were at when the gap began - like March of 2020. It's an estimate. This goes for private school students with IESPs as well as students with IEPs, by the way. So, make sure you do the following:
1) keep a calendar and mark off sessions of instruction or related services MISSED
2) make sure you have a record of your child's skill level from March of 2020, when the COVID interruptions began
3) keep track of achievement benchmarks on a monthly basis
Record keeping is essential!
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