The IEP promises minutes. Is anyone delivering them?

Somewhere in your child's IEP is a grid: reading, 225 minutes a week. Speech, 60. Those numbers were negotiated — maybe fought for — and they are written down, which makes them checkable. What almost no family has ever seen is the second number: what the school's own logs say was actually delivered, week by week. This page is about putting the two numbers next to each other before your next meeting.

The short version

Federal rules require that special education and related services be made available in accordance with the child's IEP (34 CFR 300.323(c)(2)). The IEP's service grid is the written promise; the school's delivery records are the measurement. A gap between them — measured from the school's own records, over a defined stretch of weeks — is a fact a family can put on the table. Whether a gap calls for any particular remedy is a determination this page does not make. Measuring it is something you can start tonight.

How to measure yours

1. Find the grid. In the IEP, locate the services page: each service, the minutes per week or session, and whether it's delivered individually, in a group, or in the classroom. Write the promised number for each service.
2. Get the delivery side. Ask the school — in writing — for the service delivery log for a defined period (eight school weeks is a useful window). Schools keep these logs; a written request creates a record of asking.
3. Keep your own log alongside. Your child's reports count too: sessions missed for assemblies, a specialist's absence, the weeks therapy "didn't happen." Note dates as they occur; a family's contemporaneous log is evidence, not a complaint.
4. Do the division. Delivered ÷ promised, per service, per week. A service delivered at two-thirds of its written amount for two months reads differently than a bad week — and the table shows which one you have.

Run the numbers now — free, in your browser

Bring the worksheet to the meeting. "Reading was delivered at 1,200 of 1,800 written minutes over eight weeks" opens a different conversation than "we feel like he's not getting his reading" — the first is a record question, and record questions get answered.

If the gap is real

Put it in writing either way. Ask the team how the missed time will be addressed, and keep the answer — or the absence of one — in your file. Families also have formal routes when a measured gap doesn't resolve: Ohio's options are laid out on our disagreement page, in informational terms. And one caution that belongs on every page of this site: if you are inside 30 days of a deadline that only a filing can preserve, call a special education attorney first.

The record around the numbers

RoomRecord is the software that builds the full record around measurements like these — services promised vs. delivered, what was said vs. what was written in meetings, whether the required notices are present, and your removal-day count — from your own uploads and logs, with the general rules cited beside your facts. Families in the founding cohort build their record free; the software does the organizing and the counting, and flags anything that may conflict with a cited rule in informational terms — never verdicts.

What this is not — please read before applying

Andrew Peal is not an attorney, RoomRecord is not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice or representation: it does not speak for you, file anything for you, or communicate with your district. Records you keep are not protected by attorney–client privilege. No outcome is promised or predicted.