Summer Camp
As Extended School year
about the author
Mom2MissK is no education expert – just a mom who’s trying to get the best for her Little Miss. You can read more about their adventures at Beyond The Dryer Vent, beyondthedryervent.blogspot.com.
For the past two summers, Little Miss has attended day camps to fulfill her extended school year (ESY) requirement. When summer camp is used to fulfill ESY requirements, the duration of the camp deemed necessary by the IEP team is paid in full by your school district. But wait… what exactly does “the duration of the camp deemed necessary by the IEP team” mean? To explain that, let’s take a look at the legal requirements for ESY. There are six factors that can be used to determine whether your child qualifies for ESY:
1. Regression and recoupment - is the child likely to lose critical skills or fail to recover these skills within in a reasonable time
2. Degree of progress toward IEP goals and objectives
3. Emerging skills/breakthrough opportunities - Will a lengthy summer break cause significant problems for a child who is learning a key skill, like reading
4. Interfering Behavior - does the child’s behavior interfere with his or her ability to benefit from special education
5. Nature and/or severity of disability
6. Special circumstances that interfere with child’s ability to benefit from special education
(For detailed explanations of these factors, I recommend this article from Wright’s Law.)
Summer Camp as Extended School Year
For the past two summers, Little Miss has attended day camps to fulfill her extended school year (ESY) requirement. When summer camp is used to fulfill ESY requirements, the duration of the camp deemed necessary by the IEP team is paid in full by your school district. But wait… what exactly does “the duration of the camp deemed necessary by the IEP team” mean? To explain that, let’s take a look at the legal requirements for ESY. There are six factors that can be used to determine whether your child qualifies for ESY:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
(For detailed explanations of these factors, I recommend this article [link to http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/esy.standards.barlev.htm ] from Wright’s Law)
Keep in mind that a lot of districts never get past that first factor. If you child has not shown regression, s/he may still be a candidate for ESY under the other factors. Again, Wright’s Law has some great information on how to advocate for ESY [link to http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/esy.strategies.htm].
Once the IEP team has determined that a child does qualify for ESY services, it’s time to choose the IEP goals that will be tracked during the ESY session. In our most recent round of ESY, it was determined that Little Miss was showing regression with behavior and that a significant break in school routine would leave her unprepared to return to school in the fall and practice expected classroom behavior. Lucky for us, our district contracts with a special needs summer camp to practice just his type of thing in a classroom setting. We identified two goals on Little Miss’s IEP (one for attending in a small group setting and another for social play skills) and the district signed her up.
But what if your district doesn’t have a special needs summer camp already on the team? This is where a little leg work before your IEP meeting can come in handy.
In Little Miss’s first year of ESY, she wasn’t old enough to attend the school’s preferred partnered special needs camp. When the school shook their heads and handed me a brochure for a church camp 45 minutes away from my house, I asked for time to do a little research on my own. After checking with local autism support agencies, I found a great ABA-based camp that already worked with IEP students – and it was only 15 minutes from home. I called the camp director, got the details and pricing, and returned to my IEP team with the proposal. The school wrote up a purchase order for two weeks of camp and that was that.
Which leads me to the next point… the school will only pay for the amount of summer camp it feels is necessary to satisfy your child’s IEP. In year one of ESY, Little Miss was only 4 years old and had only been attending preschool for about two hours a day, five days a week. The district determined that two weeks of summer camp (one in July and one in August) would be more than enough for her. (We opted to pay out-of-pocket for an additional four weeks of camp – but that’s a story for another day.)
During the time your child is in camp under ESY, the camp must report on your child’s IEP goals – so, before you choose a camp to take back to your district, you’ll want to check whether the camp has personnel available to monitor your child’s progress on the IEP goals identified for work during ESY. The report is typically a narrative, although because we used an ABA camp, we had some data from them to back up the narrative too.
Conclusion
Ok… are you ready to boil that all down to the nuts and bolts? Here’s a handy little infographic for you:
About
Mom2MissK is no education expert – just a mom who’s trying to get the best for her Little Miss. You can read more about their adventures at Beyond The Dryer Vent (http://beyondthedryervent.blogspot.com/)