152. Is Your Child’s IEP Ready for Middle or High School? Do This NOW Before Fall
Ensure your child’s IEP is ready for the move to middle or high school. IEP Coach Tonya Wollum shares a 5-step checklist to secure services and smooth transitions before the school year ends.
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Show Notes:
Moving to a new school building doesn’t have to mean losing services; here is your 5-step advocacy plan.
If your child is heading to a new school building this fall, the decisions made now will determine whether they start the year with confidence or spend August scrambling for support. In this episode, IEP Coach Tonya Wollum breaks down why April and May are the most critical months for transition planning and provides a clear 5-step roadmap to protect your child’s services.
In This Episode:
- The Transition Timeline: Why waiting until the first week of school is often too late to fix service gaps.
- The “Transition Conversation”: How to request a specific meeting to discuss how accommodations will transfer to middle or high school.
- Accommodations that Survive: Why “Extended Time” isn’t enough when moving from one teacher to seven.
- The Highlighter Method: A simple trick to identify if your child’s IEP has a “Zombie PLAAFP” (stale data).
- The Advocacy File: Exactly which documents you need to gather before the school year ends to ensure your child is protected.
Free Resource: End-of-Year IEP Transition Checklist
Don’t let the “May-cember” chaos distract you from the paperwork that matters most. Download our free printable checklist to guide you through the next few weeks and ensure a smooth hand-off to your child’s new school team.
👉 Download the Checklist Here.
Work with Tonya as an IEP Coach: If you’re looking for personalized support, a trusted partner, and expert guidance through the IEP process, I would be honored to be part of your team. Find more information about my IEP coaching services here: https://waterprairie.com/iepcoach
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Music Used:
“LazyDay” by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artist: http://audionautix.com/
Tonya Wollum is an IEP Coach, podcast host, and disability advocate. She works one-on-one with parents to guide them to a peaceful partnership with their child’s IEP team, and she provides virtual mentors for special needs parents through the interviews she presents as the host of the Water Prairie Chronicles podcast. Tonya knows firsthand how difficult it is to know how to support your special needs child, and she seeks to provide knowledge to parents and caregivers as well as to those who support a family living life with a disability. She’s doing her part to help create a more inclusive world where we can celebrate what makes each person unique!
Episode #152: Is Your Child’s IEP Ready for Middle or High School? Do This NOW Before Fall
Moving to a new school building doesn’t have to mean losing services; here is your 5-step advocacy plan.
(Recorded April 16, 2026)
Full Transcript of Episode 152:
If your child is on an IEP and they’re heading to middle school or to high school this fall, I need you to stop what you’re doing and listen to this podcast right now. Because here’s what most parents don’t realize.
The decisions that get made between now and the end of this school year will either set your child up for a strong start or leave them scrambling in August and by August it’s often too late to fix it.
Welcome to the Water Prairie Chronicles. I’m your host Tonya Wollum, and I’m glad you’re here. One of the things that I do with Water Prairie is I coach families through the IEP process. I’ve also lived this as a parent, and today I’m going to walk you through exactly what you need to do right now in April to make sure your child’s IEP transition goes smoothly.
Let me explain why April is actually the most important time of the year for this. Most parents think transition planning is something that happens over the summer or maybe at the first meeting of the new school year. But here’s the truth. By the time your child walks through the school doors in August or September, all of the major decisions about their services and supports have already been made.
IEP teams are scheduling annual review meetings. Right now, teachers are finishing up progress reports. Case managers are already passing off files and the new school, the middle school or high school, is already putting together the schedule and service minutes for next year.
If you’re not part of that conversation, your child’s needs may not make it into the plan, so let’s fix that. Here are the five things I want you to do right now. Step one, get in front of your child’s IEP team before the school year ends, and specifically ask to have a transition conversation at that meeting.
If your child’s annual IEP review is coming up in May or June, that’s the perfect timing. But here’s what I want you to do differently than you might have done before. Don’t just show up to review goals and sign papers. Come with a purpose before the meeting. Send an email to the case manager and put this in writing. Asking that the agenda include a discussion about how your child’s services will transfer to the new building.
Ask specifically, how will the current accommodations carry over? Who will be the point of contact at the new school? Will there be a meeting with the receiving schools team before the end of the year? Those are reasonable questions. They are your legal right to ask and asking them now before school ends gives you time to respond if the answers aren’t what you hoped.
If the annual review isn’t until fall, request, a separate transition planning meeting, you can do that. You just need to ask in writing. So step two is about understanding what’s actually different in the new environment, because this transition is more than just a building change.
When your child moves from elementary to middle school, they go from one primary teacher or a small team of teachers who knows them well. They know their triggers, they know their needs, they know their whole story, and they’re moving to six or seven different teachers rotating periods, and a completely different expectation of independence.
They may be traveling across a large school building. At the high school level, you now have graduation requirements, course selection, and depending on your state mandatory transition planning goals that look toward life after school. So what does this mean for the IEP?
First: Check whether the accommodations listed are specific enough to survive a teacher change. “Extended time” is pretty standard, but what about “preferential seating away from the hallway door,” or “reduced homework load that matches the actual standard, not a modified version?” Those specifics matter more than ever when a new teacher is reading that document cold on day one.
Second, ask whether the service minutes will stay the same or change. Sometimes a school district will quietly reduce services during a transition. Ask the question directly: “Will the number of minutes of speech, ot, or resource support stay the same in the new building?” Get the answer in writing.
And if you’re moving into high school, find out which diploma track your child is on and make sure the team is aligned on that because that decision affects everything from class selection to post-secondary planning.
Step three, and this is something I teach in my coaching sessions, is what I call the highlighter method.
Pull out your child’s current, IEP. Get it out of the binder, off the portal, wherever it lives. You’re going to read through it with fresh eyes and ask yourself, does this document actually sound like my child? One of the biggest red flags I see in IEPs, especially ones that are about to transition to a new school, is what I call that zombie, P-L-A-A-F-P.
You’ve heard about this in past. Episodes that I’ve released. This is the present levels of academic achievement and functional performance. Whenever you see P-L-A-A-F-P, that’s what it stands for, and that’s the section of the IEP that I’m talking about. It’s supposed to describe where your child is right now today, but a zombie, P-L-A-A-F-P is one that uses the same generic language year after year after year.
Or it pulls phrases that sound like they could apply to any child, not specific for your child. Highlight the sections that are specific to your child, their name, their actual strengths, their actual struggles. If you can barely find anything to highlight that’s a problem before this school year ends, you want.
The P-L-A-A-F-P section to be current and accurate, because that document is the foundation, everything else is built on a new team. Reading a stale P-L-A-A-F-P will not know what your child actually needs, and they’ll make decisions based on bad information. Step four is one that I think is underestimated and it’s this, talk to your child.
I know that might sound obvious, but hear me out in my coaching work, I often ask parents, what does your child think is working in school right now? What do they think is hard? And sometimes the parent doesn’t know because we get so focused on the paperwork, the meetings, the fight for services, and we forget to ask the person most affected by this.
Now, I want you to do this with one thing in mind. I call this the can’t versus won’t framework. When your child says, school is hard or I hate this class, we want to ask. Is this hard because they can’t do it without support or because they won’t do it because the support isn’t right. This distinction matters when you’re going into a new building because if your child hasn’t been getting what they need this year and they’ve been struggling silently, the transition is actually a fresh start.
Opportunity to get it right. Let your child tell you what accommodation matters most to them. Let them start to build their own self-advocacy voice because in middle school and high school, they’re going to need it. And step five is the one that will save you so much stress later.
Build your advocacy file before school ends. Right now I want you to request in writing copies of the current IEP complete and signed the most recent evaluation report. All progress reports from the school year, any correspondence you’ve had with the school about your child’s needs. You may have these already, but gather them all together and if you don’t have them, ask the school for a copy.
Put these in a folder, a physical folder, digital folder, doesn’t really matter. You choose, label it clearly, and this file is going to go with you to every meeting at the new school next year. If you have old files that are similar to this, put them into another folder so that they’re not continuing to go with you.
You want everything to be fresh for your new year. Why does this matter? Because when you show up to a new team and you have documentation, you’re no longer just a parent telling a story. You’re an informed advocate with evidence. That changes the conversation, and if anything comes up over the summer, if you disagree with something, if your child regresses, if a service doesn’t transfer correctly, you have a paper trail, your child is protected.
I know it’s a lot to keep track of, and I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed, so I’ve put together something that might help you.
I have a free end-of-school-year, IEP checklist that walks you through everything we talked about today and a few more things to, it’s in a simple, printable format that you can check off as you go. The link to download it is in the show notes. It’s free.
It’s yours. Print it out. Stick it on your refrigerator and let it guide you through the next few weeks. This is the time of year where parents who are prepared get very different outcomes than parents who wait. I don’t want you to wait. If you have any questions about what you found in the IEP or if you want someone to walk through your child’s specific situation with you, I offer one-on-one IEP coaching, including draft audits, and I would love to support you.
The link for that is also in the description, and if this video was helpful to you, share it with another parent who needs it right now because this information shouldn’t be a secret. Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next time.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):
When should I start planning for my child’s move to a new school building? You should start now, ideally in April or May, before the current school year ends and schedules are finalized .
Can I request an IEP meeting even if my annual review isn’t due yet? Yes, you have the legal right to request a transition planning meeting in writing at any time .
What is a “Zombie PLAAFP”? This is a term for a “Present Levels” section that uses the same generic or outdated language year after year instead of reflecting the child’s current needs.
How do accommodations change in middle school? Since children move between multiple teachers, accommodations must be specific enough to be understood by staff who don’t know the child’s history .
What documents should I have in my advocacy file? You should gather the current signed IEP, the most recent evaluation, all progress reports, and any relevant correspondence .
Does my child stay on the same diploma track in high school? It depends on the IEP team’s decision; you should ask directly which track your child is on, as it affects all future class selections .
How can I help my child advocate for themselves? Start by asking them what supports they feel are working or making school hard, helping them find their voice before they reach high school .
