Beyond the IEP
By Mati Sicherer, Ed.D. | March 2023
In the brightly lit room near the school counseling office, 10 high school students sit around a long table and carefully read through their individualized education program (IEP). They sometimes stop to ask questions, sometimes scribble notes on the margins of the documents. When everyone is finished, and after a brief reminder of the confidential nature of the group, I say, “Let’s talk...”
These students have been in the special education system for most of their educational lives. Their learning challenges including dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. All attend this weekly meeting voluntarily, to talk about everything from how to access disability services on a college campus to frank discussions about social skills. Over and over, these students engage in dialogues with each other and with me that they never had before. We talk about the disabilities and challenges most of them have spent their lives trying to pretend did not exist. Once a week, we not only acknowledge their existence, we spotlight them.
Why create a group for college-bound students with learning disabilities? And why should this fall on the school counselor instead of students’ case managers?
As school counselors, we help maximize student success, promote educational access and equity to all students, and work with our students to establish goals and develop their future plans – many centered around college. But recent data from the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) suggests high school students with disabilities enroll in postsecondary education programs at half the rate of all of their peers, and only a third of those who do enroll graduate within eight years.
Several other issues that seem to affect college attendance and completion rates of students with learning disabilities include difficulty with self-advocacy and self-regulatory skills, lack of knowledge about academic and social expectations in college, difficulty with perseverance, fears about stigma related to their disabilities and lack of knowledge about how to access disability services. According to NCLD, only 24 percent of all college students with disabilities informed their college about their disability. Of those who did not, a lack of understanding of the nature of their disability seems to be at the core of their decision not to disclose; 69 percent of those who did not disclose chose not to do so because they believed they no longer had a learning disability.
To help prepare students with an IEP for the transition from high school to postsecondary opportunities, school counselors can use our distinctive and expansive base of knowledge in conjunction with case managers, special education teachers and parents to create needed programming.
Beginning Stages
At Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, N.J., we created a skills-based group focused on key issues shown to have an impact on college success and retention. The most important of the steps prior to initializing contact with the students and their families was buy-in.
Wayne Hills High School has approximately 1,400 students and six school counselors. After explaining the group’s purpose to the other school counselors and getting positive feedback and support, I then approached our child study team for input. Between the school counselors and the case managers, we developed a sizeable list of potential group members.
I then presented the idea and outline to administration and got their support and permission. I sent an initial interest assessment email to the parents of the students on our list, describing the group’s purpose and the weekly topics. Ten of the parents we contacted were interested in the group for their child. We interviewed the 10 students to ensure they would be a good match for the group and ended up inviting all 10 of them to participate. To be eligible, students had to have an IEP or a 504, had to express interest in attending a two- or four-year college, had to be on track toward graduating high school and had to express interest in joining the group.
After getting signed consent from the parents – and asking them to discuss confidentiality among group members with their child – we began a six-week schedule on a rotating period basis to avoid pulling students from the same class each week.
Weekly Exploration
Week one began with a basic review of each participant’s IEP. In our high school, students and their school counselors routinely attend their IEP meetings. There is an underlying assumption that the meeting attendance translates into the student understanding the challenges and strengths being addressed through the IEP. The first time this group met, after a few quiet minutes of pages being turned while they read through their IEPs, one of the group members finally raised her hand and said, “I don’t get this. What is this, Dr. S?” The nine other group members were experiencing similar confusion.
Without fully understanding their learning issues, self-advocacy – an important aspect of college success – is not effective. I took the time at that point to sit with the students individually to review and discuss their IEP. More important, we discussed their challenges, how they dealt with them and what methods they had used to manage them. We followed up the IEP review with discussion and activities centered on discovering strengths and challenges and realistic goal setting. At the end of the session, I distributed an interest inventory and used the results to plan later discussion about finding the right college.
Week two focused on learning styles, stigma and acceptance of disability. Week three addressed self-advocacy, accessing services on campus and the difference between services in high school and college. Week four was about the use of assistive technology and study skills. Week five helped the students assess their own college readiness through executive functioning and reading self-assessments and discussion. Week six focused on finding the right school and assessing needs and different levels of support.
"This was good.”
At the end of our six-week group, we sat together and talked about colleges and careers and life and whatever else seemed to flow naturally through the time we spent together. We discussed roommates and eating alone in the dining hall and making mistakes and taking classes that were too hard. As the period wound down to its final 10 minutes, we reframed the discussion toward closure. We reflected on the program, including the most and least useful parts of the group and how to continue to implement what they had learned. Right before the bell rang, as they gathered their backpacks and notebooks, I asked, “Any final thoughts? “Well,” said one of my students, “I’ve never talked about this so openly until now. I’ve never even told my closest friends that I have an IEP because it was too embarrassing, but you know, I’m definitely not embarrassed anymore. I feel good. This was good.”
Mati Sicherer, Ed.D., is a school counselor at Wayne Hills High School, Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at msicherer@wayneschools.com.
These students have been in the special education system for most of their educational lives. Their learning challenges including dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. All attend this weekly meeting voluntarily, to talk about everything from how to access disability services on a college campus to frank discussions about social skills. Over and over, these students engage in dialogues with each other and with me that they never had before. We talk about the disabilities and challenges most of them have spent their lives trying to pretend did not exist. Once a week, we not only acknowledge their existence, we spotlight them.
Why create a group for college-bound students with learning disabilities? And why should this fall on the school counselor instead of students’ case managers?
As school counselors, we help maximize student success, promote educational access and equity to all students, and work with our students to establish goals and develop their future plans – many centered around college. But recent data from the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) suggests high school students with disabilities enroll in postsecondary education programs at half the rate of all of their peers, and only a third of those who do enroll graduate within eight years.
Several other issues that seem to affect college attendance and completion rates of students with learning disabilities include difficulty with self-advocacy and self-regulatory skills, lack of knowledge about academic and social expectations in college, difficulty with perseverance, fears about stigma related to their disabilities and lack of knowledge about how to access disability services. According to NCLD, only 24 percent of all college students with disabilities informed their college about their disability. Of those who did not, a lack of understanding of the nature of their disability seems to be at the core of their decision not to disclose; 69 percent of those who did not disclose chose not to do so because they believed they no longer had a learning disability.
To help prepare students with an IEP for the transition from high school to postsecondary opportunities, school counselors can use our distinctive and expansive base of knowledge in conjunction with case managers, special education teachers and parents to create needed programming.
Beginning Stages
At Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, N.J., we created a skills-based group focused on key issues shown to have an impact on college success and retention. The most important of the steps prior to initializing contact with the students and their families was buy-in.
Wayne Hills High School has approximately 1,400 students and six school counselors. After explaining the group’s purpose to the other school counselors and getting positive feedback and support, I then approached our child study team for input. Between the school counselors and the case managers, we developed a sizeable list of potential group members.
I then presented the idea and outline to administration and got their support and permission. I sent an initial interest assessment email to the parents of the students on our list, describing the group’s purpose and the weekly topics. Ten of the parents we contacted were interested in the group for their child. We interviewed the 10 students to ensure they would be a good match for the group and ended up inviting all 10 of them to participate. To be eligible, students had to have an IEP or a 504, had to express interest in attending a two- or four-year college, had to be on track toward graduating high school and had to express interest in joining the group.
After getting signed consent from the parents – and asking them to discuss confidentiality among group members with their child – we began a six-week schedule on a rotating period basis to avoid pulling students from the same class each week.
Weekly Exploration
Week one began with a basic review of each participant’s IEP. In our high school, students and their school counselors routinely attend their IEP meetings. There is an underlying assumption that the meeting attendance translates into the student understanding the challenges and strengths being addressed through the IEP. The first time this group met, after a few quiet minutes of pages being turned while they read through their IEPs, one of the group members finally raised her hand and said, “I don’t get this. What is this, Dr. S?” The nine other group members were experiencing similar confusion.
Without fully understanding their learning issues, self-advocacy – an important aspect of college success – is not effective. I took the time at that point to sit with the students individually to review and discuss their IEP. More important, we discussed their challenges, how they dealt with them and what methods they had used to manage them. We followed up the IEP review with discussion and activities centered on discovering strengths and challenges and realistic goal setting. At the end of the session, I distributed an interest inventory and used the results to plan later discussion about finding the right college.
Week two focused on learning styles, stigma and acceptance of disability. Week three addressed self-advocacy, accessing services on campus and the difference between services in high school and college. Week four was about the use of assistive technology and study skills. Week five helped the students assess their own college readiness through executive functioning and reading self-assessments and discussion. Week six focused on finding the right school and assessing needs and different levels of support.
"This was good.”
At the end of our six-week group, we sat together and talked about colleges and careers and life and whatever else seemed to flow naturally through the time we spent together. We discussed roommates and eating alone in the dining hall and making mistakes and taking classes that were too hard. As the period wound down to its final 10 minutes, we reframed the discussion toward closure. We reflected on the program, including the most and least useful parts of the group and how to continue to implement what they had learned. Right before the bell rang, as they gathered their backpacks and notebooks, I asked, “Any final thoughts? “Well,” said one of my students, “I’ve never talked about this so openly until now. I’ve never even told my closest friends that I have an IEP because it was too embarrassing, but you know, I’m definitely not embarrassed anymore. I feel good. This was good.”
Mati Sicherer, Ed.D., is a school counselor at Wayne Hills High School, Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at msicherer@wayneschools.com.