Work out how many IEP minutes the school still owes your child
Put in what the IEP promised and what actually happened. The shortfall appears as you type, along with the sentence you can paste straight into an email. Nothing to sign up for, nothing leaves your browser.
One line per service
Speech, OT, counselling, reading support — whatever the IEP names separately, count separately. The school owes each one on its own.
The sentence, already written
This is the hard part to write when you are angry, so here it is written flat. Fill in the two dates, check it against your own records, send it to the case manager and copy the special education director.
Where the four numbers actually come from
You need two figures per service: what was promised, and what was delivered. The first is easy and already in your possession. The second is the one schools are slowest to hand over, which is itself worth noticing.
- The IEP itself
The services page lists each service with its frequency and duration, written as something like “60 minutes per week” or “2 x 30 minutes weekly”. That is the minutes-owed number, and it is the only one that counts. What anyone said in a meeting does not change it. - The service logs
Providers record each session they deliver. You are entitled to ask for them in writing, and the request is short: every session, with the date, the length in minutes, the provider, whether it was individual or group, and the reason for any session that did not happen. - Progress reports
These arrive on the same schedule as report cards and often mention sessions missed, staff absences or a vacant post. Useful corroboration when the logs are late. - Your own record
What your child tells you, what a teacher mentioned at pickup, the weeks you know the therapist was out. Not proof on its own, but it tells you which weeks to ask about.
Why anyone should bother counting
Missed services almost never arrive as a decision. Nobody writes to say your child will be getting less this year. A therapist leaves and the post takes a term to fill, sessions get pulled for assemblies and testing weeks, a group of two quietly becomes a group of six. Each one is small, forgettable and completely reasonable on the day it happens, which is why a year can pass before anyone adds them up.
Counting changes the conversation from a feeling into a figure. “I don't think she's getting enough speech” is a thing a school can absorb and move past. “540 of the 840 minutes in her IEP were not delivered between September and December” is a thing that has to be answered, and it is answered in writing, which is how it stops happening again.
Questions people actually ask
What is a service minute?
It is the unit an IEP is written in. Every related service — speech therapy, occupational therapy, counselling, specialised reading instruction — is promised as a number of minutes over a period, like 60 minutes a week or 240 minutes a month. Those minutes are not a target or an aspiration. They are the service the school has committed in writing to deliver.
The school says they made the sessions up later. Does that count?
Yes, if it actually happened. A session moved to Thursday is still a session delivered. Count it in the delivered column. What does not count is a session that was cancelled and never rescheduled, or one where your child sat in a group of eight when the IEP says individual. If you are unsure whether something was made up, that is exactly the question to put in writing, because the answer either closes the gap or confirms it.
Does a shortfall automatically mean we get compensatory services?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling it. Compensatory education is meant to put a child back where they would have been if the IEP had been delivered, so it is not always calculated minute for minute. What the shortfall gives you is the thing every one of those conversations starts from: a specific number, from your own records, that the district has to either match or correct.
What about days school was closed?
Snow days, holidays and closures are not usually a shortfall, because the service was never scheduled for a day the school was shut. Count only the weeks school was actually in session. This calculator asks for weeks so far rather than calendar weeks for that reason — put in the number of school weeks, not the number on the calendar.
Is this legal advice?
No. This is arithmetic and a record-keeping habit, nothing more. It does not diagnose a denial of a free appropriate public education, it does not tell you whether to file anything, and it is not a substitute for an advocate or an attorney. If the number is large or the school stops responding, your state's federally funded Parent Training and Information Center is free and is the right next call.
Does anything I type here get sent anywhere?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and saves to that browser's own storage. There is no account, no server and no analytics on what you enter. That also means it will not follow you to another device, so copy the summary somewhere safe if you need to keep it.
