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For a child with dyslexia who needs consistent, structured literacy instruction delivered by someone who knows what they're doing, these details are not minor. They are the whole thing. I'm Jenny Sherson, ex-special educator turned dyslexia interventionist.
It wasn't so long ago that I, too, was overwhelmed by balanced literacy versus structured literacy, education speak, and everything in between. Fast forward after many, many hours of self-driven education, and you'll see I've built a thriving dyslexia practice helping students from age 6 to 18. My specialties? Working with a quote-unquote difficult, almost always to read, student, and breaking down the complexities of dyslexia into everyday language strategies and action steps.
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You spent years getting the IEP right. Years of meetings, evaluations, pushing back, advocating, building relationships with teachers and specialists who finally, finally knew your child. Who understood how they learn, what they need, and how to get it to them.
You felt like you were in a good place. And then your child changes schools. Maybe it's the move from elementary to middle school.
Maybe you moved to a new neighborhood. Maybe the district reassigned your child's program. Whatever the reason, now you're sitting in a transition meeting with a new teen.
And somewhere in that meeting, someone says the word comparable. Your child's services will be comparable to what they had before. And you nod because it sounds reasonable, because everyone in the room seems cooperative, because you want to believe the hard part is behind you.
But here's what a lot of parents find out weeks or months later. Comparable doesn't mean the same. And by the time they realize something has shifted, their child has already lost ground.
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And that's what we're talking about today. So let's start with IBEA, the Individuals with Disability Education Act. It actually requires when a child with an IEP changes schools.
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The law says the new school must provide your child with a free appropriate public education. That's fake. Including services that are comparable to what was described in their previous IEP.
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Now that's the federal floor. You can't go anything below that. You can only go up.
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Comparable services in consultation with the parents. Until the new school either adopts the existing IEP or develops and implements a new one. And here's something important that a lot of parents don't know.
Your child's current IEP stays in effect until a new one is agreed upon and signed. You never walk out of a transition meeting with no IEP in place. The existing one is still the active document.
Which also means this. You should never feel pressure to sign a new IEP on the spot at a transition meeting. Take it home, read it, compare it to what you had.
You are allowed to take the time you need before you put your signature on anything ever. Now how this plays out in practice depends a lot upon the type of school change we're talking about. When a child moves from one school to another within the same district, like elementary to middle school, the transition tends to go a lot more smoothly.
Both schools are operating under the same district policies. The same service providers may even continue working with your child. And districts will often have special education staff from both schools at the transition meeting.
The new school can speak directly to how services will be delivered, what will stay the same, and how things will work in the new building. It's still not a guarantee that everything transfers perfectly or exactly the same, but the infrastructure is there to make it work. Moving to a different district is a new story.
The new district is not simply obligated to pick up your child's IEP exactly as it was written and run with it. They can review it, they can question it, they can develop a new IEP. And that new IEP may not look like the one you spent years getting perfect.
Different districts have different resources, different service delivery models, and different staff, and sometimes different opinions about what your child actually needs. This is where parents most often find that services change. The frequency or intensity drops, the delivery model shifts, and an accommodation might just quietly disappear.
And too many times it happens without a clear explanation of why. Now I want to be really clear here, not every new team is acting in bad faith. For most of the people sitting in the room, this is a procedure.
It's a process they move through regularly. And in the middle of a procedure, the individual child can get lost in the steps. And that's not intentional, but it is your job as the parent to make sure your child doesn't get lost in those steps.
Which means you need to know what to look for. So let's talk about that word again, comparable. IDA uses the word comparable, not identical.
That distinction matters more than most parents realize when they first hear it. Comparable leaves room for interpretation. And in that room, interpretation often goes in the direction of what is convenient for the new school rather than what is best for your child.
Comparable can mean your child was getting five sessions of reading intervention a week, and now they're getting three. It may mean they were being pulled out for specialized instruction with a trained interventionist, and now they're getting push-in support in the general education classroom. It can mean the extended time on test is still technically there, but applied differently.
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It can mean a service that was explicitly written into the IEP now is described as available as needed. Each one of those changes affects your child's progress. And for a child with dyslexia who needs consistent structured literacy instruction delivered by someone who knows what they're doing, these details are not minor.
They are the whole thing. Here's what I want you to do. When you receive a new or revised IEP after a school change, sit down with the old one next to it.
Go line by line, look at the services, the type, the frequency, the setting, and who's delivering them. Now look at the accommodations. Look at the goals.
If something looks different, you have every right to ask why. What changed? What was the reason for this change? And is there any data supporting this change? Now get it in writing. You do not have to accept comparable as an answer without understanding what comparable actually means for your specific child.
Now this brings me to something I want every parent to really hear. Listen carefully. Before any school change happens, you need to have your complete copy of your child's records in your hands.
That means current IEP, every evaluation report, every progress note, prior written notices, any correspondence you've ever had between you and the school. You need all of it. Here's why this matters so much.
If the new school questions your child's services, their eligibility classification, or the goals that were set, your records are your evidence. They're your data. You cannot advocate for something that you cannot document, right? You have to have your documentation.
And when you're sitting across from a new team who has never met your child, never seen them struggle, never watched them work through a difficult reading task, your records are what tells your child's story before that team has had the chance to write their own version of it. Request those records before the transition meeting, if at all possible. And once you have the new IEP in hand, do that side-by-side comparison before you sign anything.
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What stayed the same? What changed? What's missing? Those three questions can tell you a lot about whether the word comparable is actually being honored. Your child's IEP is a legal living document, but it doesn't automatically travel intact from one school to the next. And the word comparable, while it sounds reassuring in a meeting, is not the same as identical.
You have every right to question what comparable means for your child specifically, to take time before signing a new IEP, and to ask for clear written reasons if anything has changed. Now, whether you're heading into a same district transition or you're moving to a different district, get your records, do the comparison, and don't let the procedure move faster than your ability to understand what's happening to your child's services. And if you're already on the other side of a transition and something feels off, a service that seemed to disappear, a goal that got really vague, or a delivery model that just doesn't feel right, it's not too late to go back in and ask questions.
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And that's exactly what we work through together inside Together Through Dyslexia. All the information for that is in the show notes. You don't have to figure this out alone.
Until next time. Bye-bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Literacy Untangled.
If you loved this episode as much as I did, head on over and rate and subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you want to continue the conversation or share your takeaways, head on over to our Instagram at Literacy Untangled and comment on your favorite part. I can't wait to hang out with you again soon.
Bye!
