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Indicator 8: Parent Involvement — Students with IEPs

What Is Indicator 8?

Indicator 8 reports the percentage of parents with a child receiving special education services who report that schools facilitated parent involvement as a means of improving services and results for children with disabilities.

What Does "parent" Mean for Indicator 8?

For Indicator 8, the term "parent" includes father, mother, legal guardian, any person acting as a parent of the child, foster parent, or an educational surrogate parent.

Why Is Indicator 8 Important?

• Parent involvement impacts a child's:
  • social-emotional and physical health
  • school readiness
  • success in school
  • success in life
• Parent involvement can help educators see new ways to build safe, welcoming, and trusting environments.

How Does Massachusetts Collect Parent Feedback?

• The Department asks school districts to share emails of parents with students who receive special education services, so they can contact parents.
• A Parent Survey is shared with parents as part of the district review process. This is also called the Tiered Focused Monitoring process.

*This is true for all districts except for Boston. Every year, Boston shares the Parent Survey with parents in some of their schools. The survey answers are used to find the agreement rate for Indicator 8.

Targets:

Every year, we have a target that we hope to reach for the agreement rate. The targets are set after hearing from parents, advocates, and educators. The Department is required to set targets at least every 5 years. These targets must show improvement over time.

The targets and results are for each Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) which is from October 1 to September 30 each year. The chart below shows the targets that were set and the actual agreement rate for each year from FFY 13 through FFY 19.

The agreement rate has been close to the target every year. This means that most parents of children who receive special education services think that schools involve parents in a way that improves services and results for children with disabilities.

Massachusetts Targets:

In FFY18, the agreement rate was 89%. 89% is the baseline. The baseline is a starting place. It is used to measure progress in future years.

New targets will need to improve over time.

Learn More about Indicator # 8:

• Indicator 8 PowerPoint

Last Updated: March 21, 2023