Penny Williams [00:00:03]: In the grand scheme of things, grades are only one measure of school success. We also have social emotional challenges. We have sensory challenges. We have executive functioning challenges. We have other academic struggles like learning disabilities. We have following the rules, and our kids could struggle in any or all of those aspects. So those matter just as much as grades do.

Penny Williams [00:00:32]: Welcome to the Beautifully Complex podcast, where I share insights and strategies on parenting neurodivergent kids straight from the trenches. I'm your host, Penny Williams. I'm a parenting coach, author, and mindset mama, honored to guide you on the journey of raising your atypical kid. Let's get started.

Penny Williams [00:00:54]: Welcome back to Beautifully Complex. Today, I want to help you to prepare for successful school meetings. I remember how anxiety provoking and difficult and unpleasant and scary, honestly, that a lot of school meetings were for me, especially when my kid was really little, and I didn't know yet how to navigate them and what to expect from them. And right now, I'm sure that so many of you have so much more fear and anxiety around the unpredictability of our kids' rights, their disability rights in The United States here in 2025 as I record this. There are states who are trying to do away with the five zero four laws and disability rights altogether, and the federal government is talking about doing away with the Department of Education. And for me, it's all just bonkers. And every time I see a headline about any of this, I think I can't imagine what parents are going through right now who still have kids in school. Because my kid is a young adult, and we don't deal with IEPs and five o fours and school meetings anymore.

Penny Williams [00:02:23]: And I can't imagine what it's like for you right now to be trying to navigate with such a moving target and so much of a lack of security and so much unpredictability. And we talk all the time about how unsettling unpredictability can be for our neurodivergent kids, but it can be really unsettling for us as well. So I thought one way that I might be able to have some impact in all of this when I really don't have much is to help you to really be able to prepare for successful school meetings. So I'm not going into what is an IEP and all of that. I'm not going into what is a five zero four plan. I have previous episodes that cover that that can give you that information, but I also just didn't want to give you any misinformation with everything changing so much. And a lot of it is state by state. So it's not even whether or not you live in The US as you're listening to this, but what state you're living in in The US if you are in The US.

Penny Williams [00:03:35]: And so what I can do is I can give you some strategies and some tips on making these meetings more successful, whatever the content of these meetings is. And so that's what I wanna outline for you here in this podcast episode. My goal is to really help you to feel confident and prepared for your school meetings, whether that's five zero four IEP, parent teacher conference, a meeting with the principal or the school psychologist or the school guidance counselor. Right? Any of the people that you might be meeting with about your child and their school experience. So let's dive into some of these key steps that will help you to have productive and collaborative conversations, which I have always found is absolutely the most successful. We are going to be talking about kind of three main things here, submitting your parent input ahead of time, understanding sort of meeting structure based on the meeting that you're having, and I'll tell you about that, and then approaching conversations as though you are all on the same team working toward the same goal, which you are, but it may not always feel like it. And sometimes, certain school personnel might not think that you're really on the same team either because there is so much misinformation and just not knowing about the law and the requirements and the rights of students. Teachers do not have to learn this to become a teacher.

Penny Williams [00:05:34]: They don't learn this in school. There's no requirement for it. And so most teachers just don't know. And you're kind of on this journey of figuring it out and navigating it together, which is completely unfortunate and not at all the way it should be. But in my experience and in the experience of most of the families that I've coached, we're all learning together. Teachers just aren't informed about this, and it's not their fault. It's not at all their fault. And, hopefully, they're open to learning so they can help your kid and all of the other students whose lives they will touch over the years by learning what the rights are and what will be helpful to their neurodivergent students.

Penny Williams [00:06:24]: Step one here is about submitting two letters. One is a parent present levels of performance, which we can call PLOP, which feels very apropos. Right? It feels like, yeah, plop. Present levels of performance. And then also the parent concerns letter. Here's why these two letters matter. Parents see aspects of their kid that the teachers and the staff at school may not. So your perspective is providing critical insights that the school personnel may not have.

Penny Williams [00:07:10]: They may not have the opportunity to see some of the things that you see and you experience with your kid. I learned to write these two letters, first, from a website called A Day in Our Shoes, which is a special education website that I always found really helpful in my own journey with school meetings and school rights and education. And what I figured out is that I really needed to submit these before every meeting because I wanted the people who were going to attend this meeting to understand where I'm coming from, what my perspective is, and what concerns I am going to want to speak about in this meeting. If I don't give that to them ahead of time, they get caught off guard with things that are on our radar as a parent, but aren't on their radar as the kid's teacher. And when we catch them off guard, often people's prickles sort of go up. Right? If you're caught really off guard and you haven't had time to really think about something, your nervous system might get a little reactive about that. And so when we give them this information about our perspective ahead of the meeting, We are providing the opportunity for them to gather their thoughts about it, gather their own perspective about it, and think about what they might be able to do at school to address these concerns that you're posing. And so they've already had time to think through some of their responses by putting it on their radar earlier.

Penny Williams [00:08:57]: You're going to include a few things in your PLOP, your parent present levels of performance. This is your parent PLOP. And I'm sure the schools feel like it sort of plops in their laps. Right? It's an interesting acronym. But, anyway, it will help you remember present levels of performance. And in that letter and I would recommend that you try to keep this to less than one page, and don't make it nine point type to cram it into less than one page. Be really intentional about keeping it short, very short, as short as you can to get your point across. Because our teachers are busy and they're overworked and they're very short on time.

Penny Williams [00:09:44]: So we wanna make it as simple as possible for them to take in our perspective and the information that we want them to have. So we're going to include in this hopefully less than one pager strengths and areas of growth. Always start with the positive. Always, always, always. So start by listing your kid's strengths and any areas where you have noticed growth around their school experience. So for me, a strength for my kid would have been his verbal fluency because then we can use that strength to help with a lot of the challenges. So I would point out that verbal fluency, and I would point out any areas that we've seen improvement in. Maybe there's been improvement with him being able to stay in the classroom longer without being triggered and needing a break, which did happen in the later years.

Penny Williams [00:10:42]: So make sure that you're listing strengths and areas of growth, but keep them relevant to school and keep them relevant to the last maybe few months, six months. You know? What is the time period since the last meeting or the last communication about accommodations or school performance or whatever you met about last? Include their present levels, not just in grades. Because in the grand scheme of things, grades are only one measure of school success. We also have social emotional challenges. We have sensory challenges. We have executive functioning challenges. We have other academic struggles like learning disabilities. We have following the rules.

Penny Williams [00:11:31]: Right? Behavior management as schools would call it. And our kids could struggle in any or all of those aspects. So those matter just as much as grades do. So what I always did was put the present grades, whatever showed up in the school online system at that time, which typically was not up to date, and then teachers or administrators will often get upset with me for thinking that that was the current grade. But what else was I supposed to do? I was using the information that I had. So I always put in there, it's this grade on this date in this platform. Every time I put all of those details in so they knew where I got that information and why I thought that information was accurate and why I was basing everything on that information. Attendance is another struggle that could be part of your present levels of concern.

Penny Williams [00:12:30]: So bullet those out, but, again, keep them short, simple, to the point. Zero accusations here. There is nothing about this was implemented, this wasn't implemented, you're not supporting my kid well enough, why can't you just do x, y, and z? None of that in the present levels of performance. This just needs to be your perspective on the facts of the matter. The last thing that you can put in your present levels of performance is any observations that you've made in the home environment or other environments outside of school that relate to school and education, homework struggles are a school problem too. They are not just a home problem. And so many schools wanna tell us that they don't have any influence on what happens at home. They're only concerned about what happens in the time that their kid is in their environment and their care.

Penny Williams [00:13:33]: That is not the case. It's not true. Their experience at school and with educational and academic challenges bleeds into home life and homework time. Their mood, how their day went at school, bleeds into home life and homework time. There are also things like emotional regulation needs. You might be seeing that before your kid sits down to homework. You're finding that putting a regulation activity in there, giving them a movement break and making sure they're getting that is really helpful for focus. If you're seeing that, add it to your parent present levels of performance.

Penny Williams [00:14:21]: Put it in the plop. It's going to help with discussions around strengths and weaknesses because we want to use what's going well at home to hopefully implement that at school to help that school experience. Then you're also going to draft a parent concerns letter. Again, very short, less than one page, decent font size. Don't make it tiny to squeeze it in, but outline what your concerns are. And this is where you can say, I am concerned about the fact that this accommodation isn't being implemented in this classroom. I am concerned about the kids picking on my kid on the playground at recess and not having enough oversight. I'm concerned about x, y, z.

Penny Williams [00:15:19]: You don't have to say I'm concerned about every time. I would give a heading, these are my current concerns as of 03/04/2025, and then bullet them underneath that. Include things like specific challenges that are impacting learning and also well-being. Not just learning, not just academics, not just grades. Specific challenges that are also impacting your child's well-being, their mental health, their emotional health, their social health, their sense of felt safety while they are at school. You can also add in your parent concerns letter a request for any additional evaluations, observations by professionals, or requesting additional supports. You can put all of that in this letter. What I would do is make it a separate document and list it as an addendum to the parent concerns letter.

Penny Williams [00:16:31]: So here's my formal request for an evaluation for occupational therapy or dysgraphia or dyscalculia or dyslexia, whatever your concern is, executive functioning. And then at the end of your parent concerns letter, list it as an addendum and keep it together with that. You're not always gonna have a request with your parent concerns letter like that. But if you do, you can include it there and definitely send it to them prior to a meeting so that they are aware that you're going to make that request. And then lastly, in your parent concerns letter, are any concerns about those current accommodations or lack of accommodations? Is there an area that you feel like your kid could really use more accommodation, more support? You can ask about that and let them know that you're wanting to discuss that in your parent concerns letter. Now I want you to do two things with these two letters, your parent concerns and your parent plop. You're going to email them in to your kid's case manager or whoever your point of contact is for special education at least three days before your scheduled meeting. The earlier, the better, but you don't always have a lot of time.

Penny Williams [00:18:01]: If you can send it in a week before the meeting, absolutely do that. But if the meeting is scheduled for a week from now, you're clearly not gonna be able to do that. Get it in as early as you possibly can, but definitely at least forty eight hours before the meeting because they need to be able to find the time to go through it before the meeting. Otherwise, it's kinda pointless at that point. I also want you to submit it in a way that that case manager can copy the text and paste it into an IEP document if you're having an IEP meeting. So I was always sending Word documents attached to the emails, and I let them know. I'm attaching it here. I'm attaching it in this format so that you can easily copy and paste it into that parent concerns form field while we're in the meeting or even before we get into the meeting.

Penny Williams [00:19:00]: Because here in my state of North Carolina, they would pull up that form online. They would project it on the screen, and we would walk through it and complete it as we were meeting. And if I had a big list of concerns, there was a time crunch, and typically, they would move me on before I really felt like I got all my concerns there. So this is a way to very easily have all of your concerns documented in that formal, official, legal document if it's an IEP. Step two is to ask for an agenda and a list of attendees. Here's why you're going to ask for a meeting agenda and a list of attendees. If you are worried about why the school called a meeting, then you're spending a lot of energy about that worry. Right? If you're worried about who's coming to the meeting, how many people are gonna be on the other side of the table from you, Is it going to be intimidating? You know, these are all certainly concerns that I had and that I worried about.

Penny Williams [00:20:13]: And what I learned to do was just to ask. Okay. Why are you calling this meeting? Can you please send me the agenda for the meeting? What are you wanting to talk about, and who's going to be there? It also helps you to get your mind wrapped around what they want to talk about that may not have been on your radar and prepare your viewpoint on that, how you want to address it, what your thoughts are, what accommodations or something like that that you might want to request. So just like when you are sending in those letters ahead of time and giving the school staff time to wrap their head around where you're at and what you're going to wanna talk about, you can ask them to do the same for you. Understanding who's present is also gonna allow you to tailor your questions and your concerns. So if there's an occupational therapist present, for instance, you'll be able to say, oh, okay. I can ask the OT about the handwriting issues or the hyperactivity or needing more movement. Right? So it just helps you to really create that plan of action and understand what might be coming up.

Penny Williams [00:21:30]: You can identify areas where you need more data or clarification once you get that information, and you can consider also requesting additional staff if you feel that is needed. So if you get that list back and it says one teacher of maybe four or five or six if they're in middle or high school and one special ed representative, and that's it, but you wanna talk about things around, you know, poor performance in reading or math or those sensory issues, you might request that someone else be in the meeting too, an OT, a speech therapist, a reading specialist, an autism behavior specialist. There are so many specialists that work in the school system and can help to educate everybody at the table about maybe the function of behavior, why it's happening, and what might be helpful. Whereas if you just have a couple people at the table who don't really have the knowledge or understanding of those specifics, then you may not get very far in that meeting. So, you know, make sure that everybody is coming who needs to be there, and then you will make the meeting as productive as possible. You will make the time that everybody is giving to that meeting as productive as possible to get the biggest outcome as you can from it. Step three is to approach the meeting with a collaborative mindset. And I mentioned this a little bit at the beginning.

Penny Williams [00:23:14]: It is so very, very important to be mindful of the language that you use and the way that you speak to the school team. Because we do get frustrated as parents. It is really difficult to watch your kids struggle in school. It is really difficult to wait for long, drawn out timelines. It is really frustrating when things aren't going as maybe they had been outlined to go during a meeting. So not sort of flying off the handle. Right? Not getting triggered yourself and being very emotionally reactive is going to serve you and your kid best. One thing that I did when things were super hard was to draft that email response where I wanted to clap back to something somebody had said and then delete it.

Penny Williams [00:24:18]: I would not send that email, but it helped me to get it out, to vent, to respond or react in the way that I wanted to, and then just take a step back from it and look at it more rationally after that emotional storm and decide, is this something that I should send? Is this something that I wanna send parts of, but I wanna write it differently? Is this something I should just delete and move on? And I did different things at different times. Right? But I was always going back before I sent anything and looking at, does this have a collaborative tone? Does this feel like I feel like we're all on the same team. Have I removed most of the emotion out of this? Because just going forward with emotion is not productive. It's not going to get you where you want to go. So you're shifting your mindset from confrontation to collaboration. You and the school team should be working toward the same goal, which is helping your kid succeed in whatever way that looks like for that kid. Not in the traditional path that society has decided we're going to educate our kids for centuries without changing, But what does success look like for your child? Getting everybody on the same page with that and working toward that goal as a team. I wanna give you a few strategies for effective communication too because it can be really hard, again, when that emotional brain has taken over.

Penny Williams [00:26:09]: It's so hard to access your thinking brain and to be mindful of how the other person is receiving what you're saying, the words you're using, the tone of voice, and how it feels to them. Use we language instead of you versus us. So we have come together to discuss my child's or this student's even struggles with turning in homework. We are going to come up with a strategy or a support solution to try to help student x have more success getting credit for assignments they have completed. State your concerns as observations, not accusations. No accusations. There is a time and a place for that. If things have really gone off the rails and you've done everything you can to be collaborative to work with them and you are not getting the same back, then accusations can come into play.

Penny Williams [00:27:21]: You have rights under the law to challenge the school's decisions. That's where accusations come in. They don't come in in our run of the mill school meetings. When you state your observations, then it feels collaborative to everyone in the room and seated at the table. Ask open ended questions too. For instance, what strategies have you found helpful in the classroom to address the need for movement between lessons? Or how can we work together to support student x's executive functioning challenges? Or at home, when student x has a problem getting started on the math worksheet, I have found that folding it up so they can only see a couple problems is super helpful. Do you think that might work in your classroom? And leave it at that. So stay settled, try to stay regulated, and be solutions focused because that is going to be the best possible outcomes for you, for your kid, for the school staff, for everyone.

Penny Williams [00:28:47]: But that's the way that you get to where you need to be for your kid, who is the purpose of these meetings. Right? A few additional tips I just wanna give you for a smooth meeting. Bring your documentation. Everything that you emailed in, bring a printed copy, maybe bring a second copy so that you can also hand it to them to ensure that they have it in front of them and that they will be able to read it if they did not prior to getting to the meeting. You can have reports, both private and school reports, report cards, emails, if there's something in an email you wanna discuss, samples of your kids' work, outside evaluations, internal school evaluations, anything and everything that can help with addressing struggles, help with your kids succeeding at school, you can insert into these conversations. You can have them applied to their school record. You know, I brought every outside evaluation. I handed them a copy of it, and they put it into his school file.

Penny Williams [00:30:03]: I also the first several years before I had an iPad and could have, you know, better portable referencing of documentation, I had, like, a three inch binder. And I put every school evaluation, every private evaluation, all the samples of work because we struggle with dysgraphia, so I needed those samples of the writing to be able to ask for accommodation. I put in there anything that my kid had said was a concern. I was making notes of that as well. I also, of course, had pen and paper to take notes and a highlighter so that I could highlight things maybe in a prior IEP or something like that. I typically had an IEP document that was marked up with what I felt like needed to be changed and modified so that the IEP would work better for my kid. And you can also bring a support person. You have a right to bring someone else to the meeting.

Penny Williams [00:31:08]: For our family, my spouse was paid hourly, and it didn't make sense financially for us for him to attend all the meetings with me. I had more flexibility in that regard, and so I was attending on my own. There were times where I asked our private therapist to attend a meeting, where I asked a private occupational therapist to attend a meeting. Once or twice, I brought a friend who also navigated IUP meetings with their own kid and knew how hard it was to be there alone and would offer to go along with me. So you have a right to that. Definitely let them know, though. Don't show up with an outside professional without notifying them that you're bringing an outside professional. They will feel like that is hostile.

Penny Williams [00:32:07]: It may not be intended that way, but it will come across that way to some people. So definitely let them know if you are bringing anyone to the meeting with you. And, of course, you can bring an educational advocate, which would be amazing. A lot of people don't have the financial means to have an educational advocate. But if you do, by all means, it is going to help you to navigate the system and to get the accommodations that your kid needs. I want you also to really clarify the next steps before you leave the meeting. Have a verbal wrap up or debrief right at the end. You could say, can we confirm what action items each of us is going to take and work on moving forward? I, the parent, am going to talk to my kid's therapist about his reactivity when he feels like another student has wronged him.

Penny Williams [00:33:07]: You, special ed coordinator, are going to help the teachers implement these two new accommodations. Right? You're just saying, reiterating, this is what I know I'm doing. This is what I know you're doing. And it gives the opportunity for someone to speak up and say, no. I understood that differently. And then I always followed this up with the same thing in writing via email, typically within one to two days after the meeting. Here's an email to just sort of wrap up the content of our meeting on 03/04/2025 regarding student name. I'm writing this email to make sure we're all on the same page and to help you by condensing it down into a step by step overview of something like that.

Penny Williams [00:34:05]: Right? And so okay. You, principal, said you were gonna do this. You, the special ed educator, said you were gonna do this. I said I'm gonna do this and this. You know? Then everybody has it in writing, and they then have the opportunity in writing to say, no. That's not what I understood. And you can sort of head off some of these miscommunications and misunderstandings before they take on a life of their own. If you have very different understanding of what's going to happen than some of the school staff who was in the meeting, and then it doesn't happen the way you thought it was, and then you get upset and you start going into it two weeks down the road.

Penny Williams [00:34:50]: Like, we could have prevented that by sending this quick follow-up email that says, here's what I understand we're all doing in response to this meeting we had about student x on this date. That's really going to help. And it's just sort of a professional way of doing it. It's not, I don't think you're gonna do x, y, and z, so I'm gonna email you and tell you what you have to do. It's not that. It's just a wrap up. It's a courtesy, honestly. When I worked corporate, I had a corporate job in my twenties.

Penny Williams [00:35:27]: This is standard practice. When you leave a meeting, you email everyone with the understanding of the outcome and the next steps. And so that's what you're doing here just to make sure that everyone is on the same page. So let's recap really quickly. You're going to submit your parent input ahead of the meeting at least two days. You're going to put it in a format that they can copy and paste it into their documentation, and that's going to include your parent concerns letter and your parent present levels of performance or PLOP. You're going to ask for the agenda and the attendees if it is a meeting that they called. If it is a meeting you requested, you can ask them if they have anything to add to the agenda and who will be attending representing the school.

Penny Williams [00:36:22]: And you're going to try your very darnedest because I know you're human and none of us are perfect, and we are all gonna lose it at a school meeting at some point as a parent. It's just gonna happen. But try really hard to approach the meeting collaboratively as though you're all on the same team because that's the goal. The goal is that you're all on your kid's team. You are the expert in your kid. You spend the most time with that kid. So your voice matters. Your perspective matters.

Penny Williams [00:36:58]: Even if a meeting doesn't go the way you planned or hoped, progress happens in little steps. Focus on one step forward. And this was a challenge for me. You know, when my son first got an IEP, he was in third grade, so I would say, gosh, fifteen years ago, probably. They were very structured about the way that they approached every kid who needed help. They started at the very bare minimum, zero technology, would try each thing for, like, a month and then switch. And it drove me nuts because I was trying to tell them that I had already tried those things. We knew they didn't work either in the prior school year or at home or in private therapies, and I felt like we were wasting time.

Penny Williams [00:37:50]: So try to focus on progress, but you can also keep not pushing because that doesn't sound collaborative, but keep trying to make sure everybody is still going forward and still focusing on the goal for your kid. So I hope that this really helps you with your school meetings. This gives you structure that you can follow to make sure everyone's on the same page, to keep yourself from worrying about who's gonna be there and what they're gonna talk about, and feel really prepared, and hopefully even confident about advocating for your kid. I will link up any references that I've talked about here, anything else that might help you at parentingADHDandautism.com/303 for episode three zero three. And I really hope this has been helpful for you. I would love for you to go there and comment on that post. Let me know what you've learned. What strategy did you try? How did it turn out? I would love to hear from you.

Penny Williams [00:39:00]: And of course, subscribe and leave a review for the podcast. It just helps me to be able to help more families like yours. I will see you on the next episode. Take good care.

Penny Williams [00:39:15]: Thanks for joining me on the Beautifully Complex podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share. And don't forget to check out my online courses and parent coaching at parentingADHDandautism.com and at thebehaviorrevolution.com.