Open almost any IEP and the accommodations page is the longest one in the document. Fourteen, sixteen, sometimes twenty items, and most of them were copied forward from last year's IEP, which copied them from the year before.
Then walk into the student's general education classes and count how many are actually happening. Three, maybe four. The rest are not refused, exactly. They are just written in a way no busy teacher can act on, so they quietly die.
An accommodation that does not happen is worse than one that was never written. It sits in a legal document promising a support the student is not getting. Here is how I write them so they survive contact with a real school day.
Start from the need, not the list
Every accommodation should trace back to a need in the present levels, the same way every goal does. If present levels say he reads at 62 words correct per minute on fourth-grade passages, the accommodation answers that fact: text above his independent reading level gets read aloud, or provided as audio, so a slow decoding speed does not block him from the science content.
If you cannot point at the need, the accommodation is probably there because it was there last year. That is the most common way these lists grow. Each annual review adds one or two, nobody removes any, and by middle school the page reads like it was written for three different students. Because it was.
The one-sentence test
Here is the test I use for every line before it goes in: can the teacher who has to do it explain it back to me in one sentence? Not the name of the accommodation. The action.
"Preferential seating" fails this test. Preferential how, near what, away from what? Two teachers read that line and do two different things, and a third does nothing because she is not sure what it asks. "Sits within six feet of direct instruction, away from the classroom door" passes. There is nothing to interpret.
A few more, the way they usually get written and the way I rewrite them:
- Extended time becomes: 1.5 times the class time on tests and quizzes, arranged with the teacher the day before, not requested the morning of.
- Breaks as needed becomes: one five-minute break per class period, he shows the break card and starts the timer on his desk, no questions asked by the adult.
- Check for understanding becomes: before he starts, the teacher asks him to say the directions back in his own words. Every assignment, not when she remembers.
- Small group setting becomes: tests taken in the resource room with no more than six students, scheduled on the shared calendar at the start of each unit.
Notice what the rewrites add: a number, a place, or a trigger for when it happens. If an accommodation has none of those, it is a wish.
Fewer, written well, beats the full menu
Teams write long lists because it feels safer. More supports, more protection. In practice it works the other way. A general education teacher with six classes and four IEP students in each is holding a hundred accommodations in her head. She will do the ones that are clear and forget the ones that are not, and she will not tell you which ones she forgot.
So cut. For each student, ask which four or five accommodations change what an adult actually does during the day. Those are the IEP. The rest can come off, and taking them off is not taking support away from the kid. A support that never happened was never support.
This is also why I hand general education teachers a one-page version: just the accommodations that change what they do, in the plain words, nothing else from the document. One page per kid. If it cannot fit on one page, it is not a cheat sheet, it is a second IEP.
Accommodation or modification: the line that matters
One distinction is worth getting right in the meeting, because the words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.
An accommodation changes how a student learns or shows learning. The content and the expectations stay the same. A modification changes what the student is expected to learn: fewer standards, a lower reading level as the assigned text, a different grading scale.
Modifications are sometimes the right call. But at the secondary level they can affect diploma pathways, and a team should say that out loud and document it as a decision, not let it slide in dressed as an accommodation. "Modified assignments" on an accommodations page, with no further explanation, is the line I questioned most in meetings. Modified how, by whom, decided when?
The testing trap
One practical rule that catches teams every spring: in most states, an accommodation on the state test has to be one the student uses in regular instruction. You cannot hand a student a read-aloud on test day if text has never been read aloud to him in class.
So work backward. If the team believes he will need it in April, it belongs in his classroom accommodations in October, in the specific one-sentence form, and the general education teachers need to know it is there. The state test should be the least surprising day of his year.
Quick checklist before you finalize
- Does every accommodation trace to a need in present levels?
- Can each one be explained back in one sentence, with a number, a place, or a trigger?
- Is the list short enough that a teacher could actually hold it in her head?
- Does anything on the list require a room, a person, or a schedule that nobody has arranged yet?
- Are modifications named as modifications, with the decision documented?
- Does the state testing list match what he uses in class every week?
- Have last year's unused accommodations been removed, not just carried forward?
A note on the writing itself
Accommodations look like the fast part of the IEP, and they are, until you write them this way: tracing each one to a need, putting it in words another adult can act on, and cutting the ones that stopped being true two years ago. That is judgment work, and it does not scale across a caseload of twenty students at annual review season.
That is why I built IEP Architect. You paste the evaluation or last year's IEP, and it drafts the complete IEP, present levels, measurable goals, accommodations and services, in about 90 seconds, shaped to your state's rules. The accommodations come out tied to the needs in the present levels, because that is where it starts. It is a draft for your professional review, not a replacement for your judgment: you stay the expert, it does the typing.
Your first IEP is free, no credit card. And the free tools library has an accommodations-at-a-glance maker and more, no account needed.