During the reading of the interview transcript, comments made by the participant were coded, and patterns emerged which were noted and grouped into themes. The four main themes identified were; parent assumes new and additional roles to meet their child’s special education needs, parent’s feelings towards school’s management of their child’s special education needs, challenges facing the parent during the IPRC meeting, and the systems, processes and execution of the IPRC meeting. The participant provided thoughtful and in-depth responses throughout the interview.    

 

Parent Assumes New and Additional Roles to Meet Their Child’s Special Education Needs

     Throughout her son’s educational journey, *Camille took on additional roles, stepping into familiar ones and learning to fill new ones. Early on, she realized that there were no services in the French schools where Maurice started attending kindergarten and that prompted her to “decide to go back to school and then make sure that I was able to support him within the school system and I started to be a teacher of the deaf in his board for a few years after that”. This eventually led to her becoming his teacher of the deaf for a while. 

     Advocating was repeatedly discussed and woven throughout the interview as Camille was required to inform, educate, and remind the staff about her son’s needs and how best to meet them.  She was often in the position of reminding the staff about implementing the accommodations of his IEP. In many cases it was Camille who noticed errors or issues on the IEP. In one case, Camille noticed a reference to the IPRC as a source, when reading through a copy of Maurice’s IEP. She had to pursue this with the special education staff since there had not been an IPRC and the school was required to have organized one.

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Parent’s Feelings Towards School’s Management of Their Child’s Special Education Needs

       Several examples throughout the interview transcript highlighted a pattern of comments both positive and negative towards the overall management of Camille’s son’s educational needs. Each time there was a move to a new school board, it was preceded by a discontent with the board’s services or its ability to meet her son’s needs. All her comments centered around the lack of services or the school staff’s lack of knowledge related to her son’s exceptionalities and how to best accommodate or differentiate for his learning profile. The following comment highlights this point. 

I always remind them that because of everything and the autism, group work needs to be really monitored and then the hearing loss is something that cannot be missed because he always ask at home that he misunderstood something and it’s really funny when he could have just understood all.

       Camille never presented a sense that she felt a lack of willingness to help on the part of the staff. Even when she reflected on the time that her son was entering kindergarten and the school board brought a vision consultant (a consultant working with students who are blind or have low vision) to the IPRC, Camille still commented, “but they were willing to help, but no, they didn’t have much clue.”

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Challenges Facing the Parent During the IPRC Meeting

        The challenges faced by the participant in this study were perhaps not the average ones experienced by parents who attended initial IPRC meetings. Camille experienced the initial IPRC meetings three times and as previously mentioned, she had the perspective of parent and of a teacher. This did not lessen the challenges Camille experienced as was evident during her interview. In one meeting Camille shared her hesitation to speak up and participate because at that time she had just been hired by that same board and she was now sitting across from her boss and colleagues. She also shared an anecdote about when her husband walked into one of the IPRC meetings with her and saw the table surrounded by ten committee members. 

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Systems, Processes and Execution of the IPRC Meeting

        Having attended multiple IPRC meetings in multiple boards all within the same province, Camille was able to provide a glimpse into the variation between the processes. The documents shared from the three initial IPRC meetings and the one IPRC review provide some insight into the systems that Camille faced. One of the issues that was repeatedly mentioned in the interview was the documenting of her son’s exceptionality. As was outlined in table 4.6, at the time of Maurice’s first IPRC in kindergarten, he only had the diagnosis and subsequently the exceptionality of deaf/hard of hearing. Later on, additional diagnoses were received, however, Camille encountered difficulty adding the exceptionality at the IPRC meeting. Some boards were limited by the number of exceptionalities they were able to input on their Statement of Decision forms. Recounting an experience with a resource teacher leading up to the IPRC, Camille shared that she received an email asking which exceptionalities she wanted to see on the IEP and the IPRC? Prior to this experience Camille had been accustomed to having all of her son’s exceptionalities listed. The resource teacher explained that they were only able to list two and so they would need to select two from his list; hearing loss, autism, gifted, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disability, and ADHD. 

       The discussion of placement was frequently discussed and mentioned in many of the conversations during the interview. Overall, a sense that there was a lack of options available was frequently felt. During the meetings, the topic of placements was not a discussion but rather a statement. Camille never felt that her voice was heard in the decision-making process. During one meeting Camille presented options to the team that had not been presented to her, “and this is me asking, can he go to the gifted class?” 

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     The study sought to answer the following research questions discussed previously: 1) What placement and outcome were parents hoping for during the IPRC process and were their preferences satisfied? Sub-question 1 – How much consideration did the parents feel their input and preferences were given during the IPRC process? 2) In what way did the parent feel the school was able to meet their child’s complex educational needs? Results and analysis from the quantitative and qualitative data measures provided clear responses. The Likert-scale survey on its own did not reveal clear responses to the research questions. With regard to the first question, the survey did not directly address whether or not the parent’s preferences were satisfied. The survey revealed that the parent had positive feelings about the placement being appropriate. This would suggest that they were satisfied with the placement. Results from the interview suggested otherwise. Based on the participant’s response of ‘strongly disagree’ in reaction to the statement of feeling comfortable in asking questions during the meeting, the sub-question required additional data from the interview to properly provide an answer.  

     The qualitative data resulting from the interview were the primary source for answering the research questions. The survey data as well as the documents supplemented the information. The four themes which emerged all demonstrated an overall message of dissatisfaction by the parent and inability on the part of the school to appropriately meet the child’s needs. 

     The research question specific to the pilot study focused on information and feedback collected from the participant in order to lead to changes in the interview instrument. An example of specific feedback which will be resulting in change to the protocol relates to the multiple initial IPRC meetings. The participant attended three initial IPRC meetings, which was not something anticipated by the researcher when developing the protocol. The interview protocol, including the survey, will have to be updated to reflect the possibility of having more than one initial IPRC meeting. 

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