"Will be considered": the four-word IEP red flag every parent should know

I read many IEPs every year. There are good ones and bad ones, but the bad ones almost always share one tell. A specific phrase that shows up in the services section, in the accommodations section, sometimes in the goals.

The phrase is “will be considered.”

“Sensory breaks will be considered as needed.”

“Extended time on tests will be considered for [child].”

“Speech-language services will be considered by the team at the annual review.”

It sounds reasonable. It sounds like the school is leaving room to be flexible. It sounds like a normal way to phrase something on an official document.

It is none of those things. It is, in almost every case, the school giving itself permission to not provide the service.

What “will be considered” actually means

“Will be considered” creates no obligation. The team has agreed to consider the service. That’s it. They have not agreed to provide it.

Compare:

• “Sensory breaks will be considered as needed.” The teacher considers whether your child needs a break. The teacher decides no. No break.
• “Sensory breaks will be available every 45 minutes during academic instruction.” The teacher must provide a break every 45 minutes. Whether your child uses it is their choice.

These two sentences look similar. They are legally not the same.

When the school is on the hook for a service, the verb is will provide, will deliver, will administer, will make available. When the school is not on the hook, the verb is will consider, may receive, as needed, as appropriate.

Once you start seeing this distinction, you can read an IEP much faster.

A short tour of the soft language

There are about a dozen phrases I now scan for in any IEP. Each one is a flag that the service is conditional in a way that benefits the school, not the child.

“Will be considered”: as discussed above. No obligation.

“As needed”: who decides what’s needed? In practice, the teacher decides. If your child rarely or never gets the service, the school can say “they didn’t need it” and they’re technically correct.

“As appropriate”: same problem. Who decides what’s appropriate?

“Available to the student”: the service exists, somewhere, in the building. Whether your child actually receives it depends on a separate decision.

“May receive”: same problem. Conditional on something unstated.

“At the team’s discretion”: the team decides each instance. Not provided by default.

“Will be provided when the student is unable to…”: this is sometimes appropriate (for example, a movement break when a child is over-stimulated), but it places the trigger on the child, not on a schedule. If your child can’t recognize their own dysregulation, the trigger never fires.

Every one of these is fixable. The fix is to ask, in the meeting, “Can we change that to specify when and how often?”

How the fix sounds in practice

I want to give you the exact language to bring to the meeting, because most parents struggle to find the right words in real time.

The script:

You read the line aloud: “Sensory breaks will be considered as needed.”

Then you ask: “I’d like to understand what that means in practice. Who decides when a break is needed? And approximately how often would my child actually receive one in a typical school day?”

The team has to answer this question, because you’ve asked it. The answer will reveal whether they intend to deliver breaks every day or whether they’re hoping nobody asks.

If their answer is reasonable: “Then let’s put that in the document. If breaks would be roughly every 45 minutes during academic instruction, let’s say that.”

If their answer is vague: “I’m not comfortable signing language this open-ended. Can we propose something more specific? For instance: ‘Sensory breaks of 3-5 minutes will be made available every 45 minutes during academic instruction.’ Then the team can adjust the frequency at the next IEP if needed.”

Notice what this does. You’re not asking for more services. You’re asking for the existing service to be written more specifically. School teams generally agree to this, because they’re not really objecting to providing breaks. They’re objecting to being pinned down. Specifically pinning them down (with reasonable, attainable language) is fair, and they usually concede.

If they refuse, you have a separate problem. Ask why, get it in writing.

A real example from my caseload

Last year, a family in Milton came to me with a freshly drafted IEP for their second grader. Speech-language services were listed as: “Speech-language consultation services will be considered at 30 minutes per month.”

Read that twice. Consultation services that will be considered at 30 minutes per month.

The evaluation had recommended direct services at 60 minutes per week.

That’s the gap. The recommended service was 240 minutes per month of direct intervention. The IEP offered “consideration of” 30 minutes per month of consultation. The two are not in the same conversation.

We brought this to the next meeting. The fix was a single sentence change: “Direct speech-language services will be provided 60 minutes per week in a small-group setting, delivered by a licensed SLP.”

The team agreed. The service is now being delivered. The child is making progress. The whole change took 10 minutes of meeting time and one focused parent willing to ask.

What to do this week

Open your child’s current IEP. Search the document for these phrases:

• “will be considered”
• “as needed”
• “as appropriate”
• “available to the student”
• “may receive”
• “at the team’s discretion”

Highlight every instance. Then ask yourself, for each one: what would it look like if this service was being delivered consistently? If you can’t picture it, the language is too soft.

Bring the highlighted document to your next IEP meeting. Ask the question I gave you above for each instance. (“Will be considered” is one of eight red flags I see most often in Pensacola-area IEPs. Worth scanning for the others while you’re at it.)

If you’d rather have someone read the document for you and pre-mark every red flag, that’s exactly what a Red Flag Audit does. You send me the IEP. I send back a written audit that flags every instance of soft language, every gap between the evaluation and the IEP, and every service that’s vaguer than it should be. Plus a 60-minute call to walk through it together.

You can also book a Coaching Session if you’d rather just talk through one or two specific concerns. Sometimes the question is “is this normal?” and the answer doesn’t need a full audit.

But whatever you do, don’t sign a document with “will be considered” in it without asking what it means. The four words are the four most expensive ones in special education.