Back to School Night: No Time for Small Talk

At a Glance:

In the next week, calendars will be marked for Back to School Night — the annual "get to know you" occasion. Some schools do it in person, but many still do it virtually (most D75 schools still do it virtually).

"I really wish we had the option to go into the school, sit down with the teacher and therapists, and actually have that face-to-face conversation about our children," said Cathy Moss, a D75 parent and founder of a parent Facebook group.

Many non-public and private schools do an in-person group event, where teachers will share the curriculum, classroom program, and their approach to related services.

But whether it’s on-site or virtual, in a group setting or one-on-one, back to school night is an opportunity to get some questions answered. "For kids with IEPs, the conference should be about the goals," said Jenn Choi, a NYC parent advocate.

A D75 teacher told us that sometimes back to school night can feel like an IEP meeting, “rather than just a conference call to cover the basics.”

Still, it’s OK for parents to ask how goals get tracked, reported, and serviced. Save questions that require the teacher to reference your child's specific written goal for when you get one-on-one time in November.

What parents need to know: This is the night you start — or restart — your relationship with the person/people spending seven hours a day with your child. It most important for parents whose kids can't narrate their own day.

"With my boys being nonverbal, that communication is especially important because they can't come home and tell me what's happening at school," Moss said. For those families, the relationship with the teacher isn't a nice-to-have — it's the only channel there is.

In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. "It's the whole reason why we have an IEP in public schools," a Legal Aid attorney who has worked in special education for two decades told a recent parent workshop.

The law entitles a child to progress each year "despite any kind of disabilities," educated in the "least restrictive environment" — not the setting with the least support, but the setting where they can make progress alongside their neurotypical peers to the greatest extent appropriate.

Goals are not limited to academics: "It also is about social-emotional functioning," she said. So a goal can cover behavior or self-regulation just as legitimately as reading or math.

Most importantly for a PT conference and the IEP goals: Congress wrote parents into the law as decision-makers, not bystanders. "Parents are equal partners in that process," she said.

"Congress gave that right and that entitlement to parents to ensure that they weren't just forced to listen to what school districts had in mind for their child." The IDEA lists who sits on a school's Committee on Special Education — and parent is first on that list. "Who do you think is number one?" she asked the room. "Parent."

What parents need to know: You have a legal right to be an equal decision-maker at this table — not just an audience for what the school has already decided.

Being an equal partner cuts both ways. Some schools send families a questionnaire before the year starts, covering:

If yours didn't, bring that information — especially anything about your child's needs at home that a teacher, starting from a blank slate a few weeks into the year, wouldn't otherwise know.

If you have a clear sense of what you want the year's goals to prioritize, say so early. It's easier to shape a goal before it's written than to change it after.

What parents need to know: Some teachers email forms in advance about your child’s needs. Bring what the school needs to know about your child before the meeting starts, not after something goes wrong.

Cathy Moss says the first meeting deserves a slightly different approach than the ones that follow. "I want to know how their IEP goals are being tracked and whether there's anything we need to change or work on," she said.

"But I also think the first parent-teacher conference is a little different because school has only been in session for a couple of weeks. The teachers and therapists are still getting to know the child, especially with a new teacher or school. I want to hear what they're seeing so far, but I also understand they need time to really get to know my child before deciding something needs to be changed."

That balance is important for families like hers. "With my boys being nonverbal, that communication is especially important because they can't come home and tell me what's happening at school," she said.

Her own list stays fairly consistent regardless of how early in the year it is: "I'll ask how they're adjusting, if they're making progress toward their IEP goals, how they're doing with communication and behavior, and if there's anything they're noticing at school that we should also be working on at home," she said.

"I also like to hear how they're doing with their different therapies and if there are any concerns so far."

What parents need to know: A few weeks in, "I'm still figuring that out" is a fair answer from a teacher — not a red flag. Save judgment for the conferences that follow.

Every IEP contains a set of annual goals — specific, measurable targets a child is supposed to hit within 12 months. In theory, they're reviewed and updated every year. In practice, that's often not what happens.

"Last year I was actually suspecting that a lot of goals were written by ChatGPT, evidenced by brackets saying 'insert child name here' in goals," said the Legal Aid attorney. "It's absolutely depressing, but this is the reality, unfortunately."

Her co-presenter described a related problem: goals that never change. Take a nonverbal student who's never been assessed as capable of grade-level material — "each year the goal is just presented with grade-level text and able to synthesize what the topic sentence is."

The bar never moves, so the child never has a chance to clear it. "These children are capable with the right support," she said, "and so we should be expecting these goals to reflect that."

One parent at the workshop put the underlying anxiety plainly: "We rely on the teachers to tell us what the goals are, and after two years, if we haven't met the goals, it's like, is it the disability of my child [that's preventing those goals from being met], or are we just not doing something that should be done?"

That question — is it the disability, or the services? — doesn't have one answer. It's also, notably, a question about process and philosophy that a teacher could address to the whole room, not just one child.

Two related questions work the same way. First: what tools does the classroom use to track students' progress on an alternate curriculum track — in D75 classrooms, that might mean instruments like SANDI or FAST. That's a general question any parent can ask.

Second: how does the teacher track day-to-day progress on goals generally, and how does that get shared with parents? That's a process question, true for the whole class.

What parents need to know: A goal that hasn't changed in two years, or reads like a fill-in-the-blank template, is worth questioning directly — that's not how goals are supposed to work.

Dr. Katie Davis, a psychologist who specializes in reading disabilities, hears a version of that same question — what does success look like? — constantly from parents when she's writing IEP recommendations.

"I feel like people think that neuropsychs are fortune tellers," she said. "But that's not the question — it shouldn't be framed as a binary." The real question, she says, is: "What does success look like for this child?"

That's a framing question worth raising generally — what does the teacher consider a successful year, in reading or any skill, for a student working toward an IEP goal?

Once you have individual time, it becomes concrete for your own child: what text level, what degree of independence, what kind of support, by June — so there's something real to measure against later.

What parents need to know: Don't ask "will my child be able to read?" Ask what success looks like by June, in concrete, measurable terms.

IEP goals aren't only academic. Speech, OT, and PT services come with their own goals — and their own paper trail. Questions about process are legitimate: How often can parents request related-service session notes, and do they show progress toward goals, or is that tracked somewhere else entirely?

It's also worth understanding why a service sometimes isn't happening at all. One common reason, per the Legal Aid attorney: "There are a lot of young people that go into teaching and into related services, and a lot of them are women, and a lot of them get pregnant. And in the middle of the school year, they're taking a leave. The problem is, schools often will not find somebody to fill that spot so it can be a week, a month, or six months with no speech teacher in the building. Sometimes they don't have a speech teacher at all."

The fix has a name: a Related Service Authorization, or RSA. "The family should be given a related service authorization to get it outside of school," she said.

Worth asking:

A teacher who replied to Lighthouse's outreach for this piece described the flip side of that same gap: “I notice that some parents are more interested in speaking with service providers rather than the teacher, which I then feel like the middle man to relay their concerns.”

If speech, OT, or PT is what you actually need to discuss for your own child, that's the moment to ask for that provider directly, rather than routing it through the classroom teacher.

Keep in mind these conversations tend to run short. Cathy Moss, the D75 mom, said she gets 15 minutes. If you don’t have that much time, pick a few questions from the list below. If something bigger comes up, that's the sign to request a resolution meeting instead.

What parents need to know: If a service gets derailed, ask how to get a Related Service Authorization — it's the tool that gets your child the service outside of school.