The Case Manager's Field Guide: Resource & Co-Taught Settings

The Case Manager's Field Guide: Resource & Co-Taught Settings

Illinois Special Education Compliance & Best Practice

For the case manager in the resource and co-taught classroom — the teacher carrying a caseload of students working toward grade-level standards with support, and responsible for the data, the meetings, and the paper trail that hold it all together.

This is the companion edition to The Case Manager's Field Guide: Functional & Life Skills Settings. The two share one spine — an eight-step case management system, the legal timelines, the craft of building relationships and running defensible meetings — because the law and the craft don't change with the setting. What changes is the measurement heart of the work: this edition runs on benchmark-and-rate data — curriculum-based measurement, progress monitoring against goals, and the decision rules that tell you when a student is on track and when the instruction has to change.

Inside:

• The complete eight-step case management system for the resource and co-taught setting — from first contact with families through post-meeting legal obligations
• The progress monitoring system: curriculum-based measurement, baselines and goal-setting, and the decision rules that separate real progress from noise — with a complete suite of data-tracking forms
• Present levels and IEP goals that connect the data to defensible, measurable goals, with a sample goals bank ready to adapt
• A full transition layer: the Illinois 14½ standard, Indicator 13 compliance, postsecondary goals, agency linkage, and the exit sequence — built to survive a compliance review
• Illinois-specific legal deadlines built in throughout
• Ready-to-copy forms, present-level samples, IEP goals, and a meeting agenda template

Written by a practicing Illinois special education case manager and team lead with 20 years in the field.

Two editions, one system. This edition serves the resource and co-taught setting; the functional edition serves the life-skills and functional classroom. Each is complete on its own — nothing in this one requires the other.