{FREEBIE} The Little List that Changed my Life ;)

Special education teachers!  Raise your hand if you are knee deep in paperwork and can feel the piles falling in!  I see your hands!  I'm right there with ya!
Meetings, IEPS, progress monitoring...oh my!  It's a vicious cycle that never ends, but I have a little freebie for you today that may just make your life a teensy bit easier.

One thing that I always struggled with was keeping up with the meetings.  It's hard to keep straight all of the attendees, the date (after you have to change it 3 time to accommodate schedules), whether or not parent can come, and on and on.  It seems like this task should be so easy... you invite everyone that works with the student, send the notice, wait to hear from the parent, probably reschedule :), and put it on your calendar to remember.  My problem would come mostly from the fact that I would send a notice and put another notice in the due process file and then I couldn't remember who all was invited and if I had heard back from everyone and then when I needed to see what the meeting is about or who/if I invited a certain person I would have to go dig out that notice from a gigantic file.  Not effective, people.  So, this year I came up with this handy little checklist that has immensely helped to keep me organized.

In the picture on the left you see the checklist includes: Student name, date, time, purpose of the meeting, and blanks for the of the first and second notice.  Then you see check boxes for each person that could (potentially) be invited to the meeting and a blank for the name.  

In the picture on the right you see how I use the checklist.  When I have a meeting notice to send, I fill in the information in the top section and write the names in the blanks for the people that need to be invited.  I put the checklist on a small clipboard that I keep on my desk.  Notice the post-its?

Blue=notice sent, waiting to hear from everyone

Green=Good to go!  All attendees have responded and the meeting is ready to go

As each person responds to whether or not they can attend the meeting, I check off in the check box that the person can attend.  

You can see at this time, I had three meetings getting ready to take place.  I kept the checklists in chronological order from the meeting scheduled soonest to latest.  This also helps me to prioritize what I need to work on, such as writing a new IEP or updating progress monitoring.

I am including a link to my TpT store so you can go download this for free!  MEETING INVITE CHECKLIST

 Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!  Helpful?  Suggestions?  I'd love to hear how you use this!

I hope this helps bring a little more sanity to your day! :)