Too MANY IEPs?

A new 6th grade student at our school arrived earlier this year with a massive IEP. He had been an enormous behavior problem at his previous schools - charter and public alike. He had trouble with attentional issues and got in a lot of trouble. One of the goals on his IEP was that he should be able to spend 15 mintues in a classroom without disturbing his peers. Then, we found out that he was reading on a 2nd grade reading level. Not good signs.

Here's the amazing part. The 6th grade team put in place a number of supports, especially around reading. He began getting daily phonics support and started reading "just right books" that were on his reading level. As a result of this attention, he's made massive improvement, improving more than 2 whole grade levels in reading in half of a year. What's more, he hasn't been a behavior problem in the least. It seems to me that many of his behavior problems were the result of being in chaotic schools and having never learned to really be a reader.

My question is this: Did this student really need an IEP? If he had been at our school or a school like it in the earliest days of his education, would he have been on an IEP? I don't know him well enough to know the full story, but you have to wonder.

Charter schools are often critiqued for not having as many IEP students. But maybe, just maybe, district schools have too many -not because of schools choice, but because sometimes kids just need a more structured environment or a little more support than a teacher can provide with 25 kids in a class. I wonder if sometimes students who get labeled in district schools wouldn't really need those labels in a different envirnoment. Not all of them, of course. But maybe enough to make the percentages a little more equitable between district and charter schools.