Monitoring and Reviewing the ISSP
Once implemented, the ISSP will require monitoring and reviewing. Twice annually, the ISSP Team is required to review the plan; however, mini-meetings can and should occur as necessary. For example, the social worker and parent may want to get together for brief informal meetings more frequently; the special education teacher and the classroom/subject teacher may schedule some planning time if behavior problems surface; the teacher, parent and Behavior Management Specialist may want to meet as necessary or the ISS Manager may want to liaise periodically with another agency in order to monitor progress and ensure that everything is going well. The initial team members may not be required to attend review meetings. Their input for review meetings can be obtained by the ISS Manager or other members of the team.
The ISSP is normally reviewed twice annually; therefore, often the ISSP will identify long-term goals and then identify only those short-term objectives that the team anticipates will take them up to the next review period. This could then mean identifying objectives for a four to six month period. You may wish to experiment with more frequent review meetings. This could mean that the objectives will be identified for shorter periods of time and thus there will be fewer of them. This may work well for a child who is expected to make quick progress, for a child whose physical condition is expected to change rapidly throughout the year, or for a child whose behavioral needs are such that there is a high degree of unpredictability to the result of the plan. In each of these cases, the ISSP will likely need to change over short intervals and the team may find it difficult to project beyond these shorter periods. A convenient arrangement for some schools is to schedule the ISSP review meetings to coincide with the normal parent-teacher interviews avoiding the need for parental travel to multiple meetings. The schedule of review meetings and the subsequent length of the ISSP should be flexible depending on the child and the circumstances, however the ISSP should not go longer than six months without some form of review.
During the review process, the team will need to determine whether or not the goals and/or the short-term (objectives)outcomes have been met. This will guide the team's decision-making.
If the goals and/or objectives (outcomes) have been met, the team
should explore the following questions:
Is the child now able to proceed without adaptations or
modifications? If so, the plan is terminated and a letter noting this is signed by the
ISSM and placed in the child's file.
If the goals and/or objective (outcomes) have not been
met, the team should explore the following questions:
Adapted from Individual Education Planning for Students With Special Needs A Draft Resource Guide to Support Teachers, Province of British Columbia, 1995.
When developing the ISSP, each member
of the team should keep in mind that the success of the implementation of the ISSP as a
whole rests with the whole team. Any lack of progress or failure of a particular strategy,
support or intervention to achieve the desired results should not be seen as the failure
of the personnel who had the most contact with the child. The team as a whole decides on
the support services plan and the team as a whole must accept responsibility for its
outcome. In an atmosphere of collaborative decision-making, there will usually be many
successes to celebrate.