Students with IEPs and Extended School Year Eligibility

If your child is currently with an Individual Education Plan (IEP), it’s time to request an IEP team meeting to ask about Extended School Year (ESY) tutoring to help your child be ready to return to school in the fall.  

Students with learning differences are likely to experience more summer learning loss, or regression, than other students.  They most often require more time to catch up, to re-learn or recoup the knowledge and skills lost.  That recoupment time puts them further behind in the class.  Summertime review and continued instruction helps to ensure that your child is ready to return to class in the fall.  

Those students receiving special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), such as with an IEP, may be eligible for ESY services at no cost to the parents.  These services includes summer tutoring, speech/language therapy, occupational therapy and more.  ESY services are not limited to summer vacation time, but it is during that long vacation that the students fall behind the most.   

The child’s need for ESY is determined by the IEP team which works with the student and parents at school.  

    The IEP team will consider the degree to which the student will experience critical skills regression during the vacation time as well as the amount of time that will be required for recoupment of those skills. 

    Also to be evaluated by the IEP team will be the student’s current progress toward his or her IEP goals and the effect that the summer break in education may have on achieving those goals. 

     Regression in the critical skill of reading may cause a significant setback in all learning recoupment as reading is at the base of studying all subjects. Reading well increases the student’s self-sufficiency.   

     The IDEA calls for the student to be educated in the least restrictive environment, which is ideally the general education classroom.  The IEP team will consider whether a summer learning regression may result in the student’s having to spend excessive time receiving intensive special instruction away from his classmates.  

Lear Educational Center provides tutoring designed to meet the individual needs of students. We accommodate and compensate for learning differences.  We interface with schools to help students meet IEP and remediation goals, the challenges of today and of tomorrow.