Anything that's included in the IEP should have a goal attached to it as well as clear steps to measure progress toward meeting the goal.
This is what I'd suggest: (and, as always, I suspect you already know this because you are an awesome advocate for your ds!):
1) Ask whoever actually is in charge of working with the group what skills your ds is working on and how the group functions during the pullout - what activities do they do etc.
2) Call an IEP meeting to discuss the social skills pull-out. Do this via email, and include within the body of the email a statement that you want to amend the IEP to drop the social skills group. Include whatever reasons you feel are relevant.
3) At the meeting, if you get push-back and the team wants to keep it as part of the IEP, ask specifically *what* the goal is for your ds, and then if a goal is offered, ask what data they have showing he needs to work toward that goal. If they have no data, request that they acquire the data, and that your ds be pulled out until the data has been acquired and the team can reconvene to review the data. If they pull data out of an "old" report - request a new set of data, given that your ds has had (fill in the blanks) ___ months to progress from the previous set of data. You can also mention any strengths or abilities he has that you've seen that the team is claiming he needs to work on.
I also have a comment re - if he's in there as a role model. Role models play an important part in social skills groups, but there is a different way to approach it rather than having one student who happens to have something he could work on at the same time be in the group simply because he is a good role model. The way our elementary school tackled this problem was to rotate the nt kids out of class one or two at a time to work with the students who were working on social skills, one pull-out at a time. The work was fun for the nt kids - they got to play games and miss class and go to the cool therapy room and all that cool stuff. My dds *loved* this - as did most of the kids in their classes. When you rotate through the full class, it takes some of the stigma out of the pull-out for the kid who is there all the time, because it helps the kids understand what he's working on and also see that it's not really some bizarre odd out-there thing. Plus it's fun. And when you're rotating through the kids, that means in a typical-sized classroom any one child is only going to get picked to be a part of the pull-out as the role model maybe once per quarter or semester (depending on how frequent the number of pull-outs is). Irena, if your IEP team even *hints* that your ds is in their as a role model, insist that it end and suggest this (or some other) alternative.
OK, off my role model soapbox!
Good luck!
polarbear
