Source: Bob Cotter via Flickr

All too often in special education, those of us who have been working at it professionally for more than a few years have increased our vocabularies to include terms of art, acronyms, and legally significant phrases that mean a whole lot to us, but not a whole lot to professionals new to the field and parents. I find that a lot of my job as a lay advocate is translating SpEd-Speak into plain language.

It was actually during a case I’ve been working with a family that moved to the U.S. from Thailand that brought this point home for me. I found that by simplifying my language for the benefit of the translator, who knew nothing of special education, I made it lot easier for everyone else in the room to follow the logic of what I was saying. The meeting was also attended by the school district’s lawyer, who was actually pretty awesome once she realized what was going on. It was one of the most amicable and constructive IEP meetings in which I’ve participated in a while.

What I found worked best was to use simple language to communicate with most of the IEP team members, then sum up my point to counsel for the district in language she would appreciate in light of the regulations and the applicable science, if needed. In the end, what we figured out was that our 9th grade client qualified for special education as having autistic-like behaviors pursuant to 5 CCR Sec. 3030(g) and that his speech-language impairments for which he had originally been found eligible were features of his autistic-like tendencies as well as bilingualism coming from an Eastern tonal language to English.

I already knew from experience that throwing a bunch of jargon at people during a meeting where you’re trying to make things happen is not particularly constructive if any of them are unfamiliar with the lingo. Having non-English speaking clients only made the point more vivid. But, then I ran across an article in an old issue of Entrepreneur magazine that drove the point home even more, and, combined with my prior knowledge, inspired this blog post and corresponding podcast.

Click to Tweet: Throwing jargon around in IEP meetings is not constructive if the other people are unfamiliar with the lingo. #kps4parents

In an effort to inform my decisions and recommendations to our board of directors here at KPS4Parents, I subscribed to several magazines that are written for audiences other than special education lay advocates and leaders of non-profit organizations, but which still have content that can be applied to our organization. Among these magazines are those that cater to business, industry, and entrepreneurship. They are full of awesome ideas for using social media, apps, and other tools for keeping our organization, well, organized. But, once in a while, I run across something else helpful that isn’t technology-related but can still be generalized to our field. Such is the case with the recent article I found in the September 2011 issue of Entrepreneur.

First, I have to clarify that I only now saw this article because I don’t actually have time to read magazines during the school year and they pile up until I can get to them. (At least now Fast Company is piling up on my smartphone instead of my bedroom, which eliminated a significant tripping hazard.) I’ve had to since cancel my subscriptions for several other magazines until I can get caught up on the back issues, so my summer reading is already well-planned for me.

In spite of its age, the advice given in the article I found is timeless. Titled, “Big think, small movement,” the article focuses on eliminating buzzwords from business communications and focusing on the real points. The essence of this article is about rendering conversation down to the points we’re trying to make – keeping the language as true to our communicative intent as possible – without encumbering it with unnecessary language, which is entirely relevant to the IEP process.

In business and industry, it’s buzzwords like “paradigm shift,” “synergistic,” and “out of the box” that detract from our actual communicative intent. In education, it’s clinical and/or legal terms like “perseveration,” “MLU,” and “IEE at public expense” that lose general education teachers, guidance counselors, most principals, and parents during the course of an IEP meeting.

What initially caught my eye was the following statement: “Once you understand that the reason we all have careers is because other people’s problems need fixing, the next step is to get to fixing those problems.” This language applies to every professional sitting in any IEP meeting, anywhere.

The article’s author, Erika Napoletano of Redhead Writing, then goes on to list four key qualities to consider when attempting to communicate with people so that you’re focused on actual problem-solving and not sounding like you’re trying to impress people with all the big words you know (which I’ve reframed to fit the context of an IEP meeting):

• Simplicity – If you want people to buy in to what you’re saying, don’t make them learn a new language. When people feel like they aren’t smart enough to understand your proposed solution, they feel they’re not smart enough to work with you to make it happen. In business, this means lost sales; in special education, it can mean lost educational benefit to the student. Many times, parents agree to things they don’t understand – meaning their consent was not informed – because they don’t want to look dumb at the IEP meeting. Or, they refuse to agree to things that are appropriate because they don’t understand that to which they are being asked to agree. I’ve had parents hire us to listen to the audio recordings of their IEP meetings and review the documents just so they understand what was discussed and offered to their children; some think the jargon is used on purpose by school personnel to deliberately keep the parents in the dark, which does nothing to build a healthy collaborative relationship between parents and educators.
• Brilliance – The point here is not that whoever is proposing a solution get all the credit for having a brilliant idea. The point here is to help the people you’re trying to convince look brilliant to the people to whom they answer. For the professionals in the room, this is often the superintendent, school board, or someone else higher up in the food chain who signs the checks. For parents, the people they ultimately answer to are their children, who also have to buy into whatever the IEP team develops. Either way, facilitating a way for IEP team members to be recognized for the brilliance of using smart solutions (regardless of who proposed them) goes a long way in getting their buy-in.
• Time – As Napoletano states, wasting people’s time is “the mother of all sins” in a meeting. I can’t agree with this more. As much as some school personnel may want to crank out IEP meetings every 20 to 30 minutes during the last week of the school year, this does not generally afford parents the opportunity to meaningfully participate. In fact, it’s a waste of the parents’ time to make them take off from work and drive to the school just to get them to rubber stamp an IEP document that they didn’t really participate in crafting or even understand. It’s equally a waste of time for IEP meetings to run for hours without any real decisions being made. The more SpEd-Speak that goes on in these meetings, the less parents and others not familiar with the terms get out of them. It becomes a waste of time because they cannot equally participate in the discussions and/or delays are introduced when those who know the jargon have to keep going back and explain in plain language what they actually meant. Wasting parents’ time and making it so that they can’t keep taking off from work to resolve special ed issues is seen by many parents and their representatives as a deliberate tactic on the part of the public school system to undermine meaningful parent participation in the IEP process. Meaningful parent participation is an absolute right that parents have under the IDEA and denying it opens up a whole can of litigation worms for public education agencies.
• Usability – While Napoletano argues that asking business people to change their day-to-day routines to accommodate a new solution is a bad idea, in special education where each student’s program must be individualized, the idea of allowing teachers to fall into a rut and not break them out of it is unacceptable, so my application of this piece of advice is adapted for the special education context. Those of us trained in best practices and who are capable of rendering the peer-reviewed research into actual tools that can be used in the classroom may find the resources we rely on to be  usable, but most of our colleagues, and certainly most parents, wouldn’t even know where to begin. This is where those of us blessed with these gifts have a responsibility to aid our fellow brothers and sisters by simplifying what we’ve come to know and presenting our knowledge in a form that can be used by everyone else. While it’s true that parents should be able to trust the public education system to make sense of the peer-reviewed research to develop appropriate teaching methodologies and keep accurate data, the reality is that these skills are generally not taught to educators when they go for their degrees and credentials (even if they go on to master’s level programs). That means that the people who do understand these things have to render them down into simple how-to instructions for educators to use in the classroom rather than get upset when they don’t already know them. As a taxpayer, I find it frustrating that so many people in public education lack adequate training in how to understand the research and apply best practices in instruction, but sitting and complaining about it doesn’t get the kids I represent any closer to a proper education, so it’s one of those things I just have to suck up and do what I can to overcome.

In sales and marketing, this kind of approach is often referred to as a “consultative sale.” Rather than focusing on the features of a product (selling the specs), the sales person focuses on the benefits that the product will realize for the client (selling the solved problems).

When I worked in the IT industry a lifetime ago, I remember our software developer going to great lengths to create a help menu in the solution we were building for an assisted living facility that was putting in its first local area network (yes, I know this dates me). The problem was that the nurses at each networked station had little computer experience and many didn’t even know how to turn on their computers and get into the network where the spectacular help menu could be found.

My additional solution was to type up simple 1-page instructions on how to turn on the computer, log into the network, and access the necessary programs, including their respective help menus; print them on pretty pink papers with roses along their borders; then laminate them and stick them next to each computer. My solution took about 20 minutes to prepare and another half hour to print and laminate. My colleague’s solution took weeks of meticulous programming. In the end, the solution the nurses preferred was mine. Accessing a help menu made total sense to a 20-something-year-old software developer, but not to middle-aged nurses with no computer experience who didn’t know what a help menu was.

And, this kind of simplification is what is needed in special education when it comes to communicating important points. Meeting participants need to be less invested in the form that the communication takes and more invested in making sure that the other members of the meeting truly understand their communicative intent. This means accommodating the other team members’ limitations, as it were, by using plain language and keeping the jargon at a bare minimum. When jargon becomes necessary, those who understand it should stop and make sure that the other meeting participants understand how the key terms are defined and used within the given context so that they can keep up with the conversation, as well.

Napoletano concludes her piece rightly when she says: “We don’t get points for using big words – we get points for results. The best solutions never need dressing up with words, they just need a team who can effectively communicate their worth and put them into action.” If that doesn’t describe how the IEP process should work, nothing does.

Click here to listen to the podcast version of this post.

Photo Source: Joe Gratz via Flickr

In November 2012, a decision was issued by a California appellate court that requires disclosure of a public agency’s attorney fees and costs when those records are requested pursuant to a written California Public Records Act (“CPRA”) request, even while litigation is pending in which the public agency is one of the parties. The County of Los Angeles brought the matter up on appeal after it lost on this issue in a lower court, only to lose on the issue again. This can be good news for families and their attorneys who find themselves engaged in litigation on behalf of their special education students in California.

Here’s the scenario in a nutshell: CPRA requests can be submitted for public information any old time a citizen wants and a public agency can only refuse to disclose requested documents for a very limited number of reasons. A document may not be provided in response to a PRA request if it contains information that is subject to attorney-client privilege or is otherwise attorney work product. Documents specifically prepared for the pending litigation are excluded, presumably because they are covered under the attorney work product exclusion.

The problem, here, was that LA County evidently asserted the position that any documents relating to the litigation were excluded from disclosure, such as their legal expenses for the pending litigation, which the Courts failed to support. Because the public’s right to know what the government is doing with the tax dollars we give it carries so much weight, CRPA is to be interpreted broadly and its exclusions are to be interpreted narrowly. In other words, the law is more in favor of disclosure than not.

In the case reflected in the November 2012 appeal decision, the issue was that the parties had been embroiled in ongoing litigation for about 10 years over a matter that wasn’t spelled out in detail in the November 2012 decision. Evidently, the case involved a child with disabilities and his parents that resulted in a civil rights suit against LA County. The issue was that the firm representing the family submitted requests for opposing counsel’s billing in the pending civil rights lawsuit and LA County didn’t want to disclose how much it had paid and continued to pay its lawyers to fight the civil rights claims.

Some public agency representatives squander public monies on unnecessary litigation costs just because they want to win an argument, not because they are providing sound stewardship. It’s not coming out of their own pockets so they don’t care; their six- and seven-figure budgets seem big enough for them to throw public money at lawyers rather than the programs their public agencies are mandated to administer and they can get cocky knowing that their constituents usually don’t have access to the same caliber of resources.

The problem is that these situations can turn into fiscal boondoggles for public education agencies really quickly. Spending $75K in litigation costs to fight with parents over a one-time expenditure for an educationally necessary remedial reading program that would have cost only $16K by comparison is just asinine. I have a specific case in mind from about 13 years ago in which these were the facts; the school district lost but the remedy requested by the parents was reduced, so their child only got about $4K worth of remedial reading programming at the district’s expense.

While the district was blowing its horn for getting the remedy cut down to a quarter of what was requested by the parents, it spent nearly 5 times more than the cost of the parents’ requested remedy on legal expenses to achieve that outcome. This does not take into account: the costs of pulling teaching staff out of their classrooms to testify, paying them for their time to participate in a hearing rather than teach students,  and hiring subs to cover these teachers while they participate in hearing; facilities costs to host the due process hearing; or any of the other various expenses other than attorney’s fees and costs associated with litigation.

The truth about this case only came to light when the director of the Special Education Local Plan Area (“SELPA”) to which the involved school district belonged testified at an Informational Hearing conducted by the California Senate Select Committee on Government Oversight in December 2000. After the SELPA director bragged about how much litigation the SELPA and its member Districts had avoided by settling most cases with parents, he cited this case as an example of where litigation allegedly saved money, citing the fact that the hearing officer had reduced the remedy awarded to the student from $16K to $4K worth of remedial reading programming. But, when asked how much it cost to litigate the case, he responded that it was around $75K and promptly had his rear-end handed to him on a platter by the panel of outraged State senators conducting the proceeding.

This example illustrates why the November 2012 appellate court case is so important. If citizens can see the legal bills for an ongoing case against a public education agency, the public can evaluate whether its money is being spent on the right thing or not. And, that’s what LA County and its attorneys tried to prevent. They didn’t want to disclose the legal bills requested and tried everything they could think of to try and prevent the disclosure until after the pending litigation was over to which the requested billing records pertained.

It’s always a bad when you have public officials who make reckless, irresponsible decisions that hurt our kids and waste our taxpayer investment into the system in combination with profit-motivated law firms that take advantage of that reckless, irresponsible behavior for its own financial gain. The public has a right to be able to catch that kind of situation before it gets out of control and put a stop to it. Frankly, the earlier situations like that can be caught, the better.

Sigmund Freud (Source: Flickr)

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (“ASDs”), including Asperger’s Syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (“PDD-NOS”), are often challenged by anxiety, which is an emotional health need. Many school districts contract with county mental health agencies or other providers for forms of individual psychotherapy services that may not be appropriate for some students with ASDs. Further, they may have no other service to offer to address ASD-related anxiety issues.

To add to the confusion, many county mental health agencies have recently re-identified themselves as county behavioral health agencies, yet they do not provide Applied Behavioral Analysis (“ABA”) or any other type of peer-reviewed behavioral intervention. ABA is supported by research to be effective in not only contending with undesired behaviors among persons with ASDs but also in providing explicit instruction to teach the skills these individuals lack.

Explicit instruction in social skills such as greetings, farewells, maintaining a topic of conversation chosen by another person, initiating conversations, and other aspects of human interaction have to taught to many children with ASDs as explicit, scripted procedures. Those procedures can then be generalized into real life by reinforcing them when they occur in natural settings and pointing out to the individual, in vivo, when he/she has engaged in the steps of the procedure so that he/she learns to recognize social contexts in which each script is to be applied.  Eventually, it becomes a learned, rehearsed strategy to deal with specific types of situations.

The degree to which persons with ASDs can master various scripted procedures, or even need this level of support, varies from individual to individual. The same for the degree to which someone with an ASD can generalize knowledge from one context to another, such as from the instructional setting to real life.  It’s called a spectrum disorder for a reason. The range of severity between mild and severe is quite broad and anyone can fall anywhere along it.

Traditional “talk therapy” that promotes developing one’s insight and insight into other people’s perspectives to sort out one’s issues is not necessarily appropriate for some individuals with ASDs. Because there are so many differences among people with ASDs, it’s not fair to say that no one with an ASD can benefit from traditional talk therapy. But, it is safe to say that there are a significant number of students with ASDs who truly cannot benefit from traditional talk therapy but still have emotional health needs that require mental health services as part of their special education programs.

The matter comes down to, “What form of mental health services are appropriate for students in special education who have ASDs and require mental health services in order to benefit from their IEPs?” Well, as with anything in special education, you can’t take a cookie-cutter approach and say one specific type of program will fix everything for everybody. For one thing, no such statement will ever be true; learners with disabilities, even within a population impacted by the same condition, are too diverse for one-size-fits-all programming. Federal law requires individualized programming for this very reason.

That said, there are certain approaches that are generally known to be more effective with students who have ASDs than others. These may work with many students with ASDs, but whether or not they will be effective with an individual student really depends on that student.  The following are possible methods by which effective mental health services can be delivered to some persons challenged by anxiety associated with ASDs.

For students who are verbal and can orient to others, therapists can teach students social scripts and strategies in therapy using social stories, social games, and role-plays to rehearse the appropriate strategies and scripts. The therapist then confers with the speech-language specialist, behaviorist, and school psychologist members of the IEP team to inform them regarding the strategies taught in the therapy sessions. Then the specialists work with the teachers and any aide staff to teach them the strategies the student is mastering in therapy so he/she can be prompted to use the strategies in natural settings and reinforced for their appropriate use, thus generalizing the skills.

For many high-functioning students with ASDs, their anxiety arises around social situations and the lack of predictability in their day-to-day lives. Because many students with ASDs miss the subtle nuances of social communication, they are unable to identify the relevant variables in complex social environments (like classrooms, playgrounds, and cafeterias) that must be monitored in order to reasonably predict social outcomes with sufficiently reliable accuracy. It is the difference between what makes someone functional within an environment or not.

An impaired ability to predict outcomes in day-to-day life can make each experience seem novel. Think of what it feels like to be in a novel environment where you aren’t sure of how you’re supposed to act or who you can ask for help (or, worse, thinking that there is no one who can be asked for help or having it never occur to you that you could ask for help). For some students with ASDs, feelings like these are very anxiety-provoking.

Providing these students with scripted routines, procedures, schedules, and strategies provides them with the tools to regain some control over their situations and create predictability for themselves. The hard part is equipping them with enough scripts to cover a diverse-enough range of issues that will leave them functionally equipped for as many real-life challenges as possible. You can’t write a script for every possible scenario in life.

The trick is to write scripts that are general enough to fit a number of common contexts and then teach the student how to adapt each script to fit unique situations during the in vivo support that is provided to help the student generalize the skills from the therapy sessions to real life. That can often require the expertise of a behaviorist, if not a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (“BCBA”), to work with the mental health therapist to help tailor the approach to fit the individual student.

During the course of therapy, the student could also be assisted to the degree necessary with learning how to identify and label his/her emotions. There are curricula that target this very need and speech-language pathologists use them all the time. I’m not going to get into specific products; just suffice it to say that whatever product is chosen needs to be based on its fit to the student’s actual needs and not just on the basis of that’s what was already in the supply closet or installed on the computer in the speech room.

It seems to me that a possible model of service delivery that could prove effective would be one in which a county behavioral health agency creates a treatment team for students with the kinds of needs I’ve been describing here that includes a mental health therapist, a BCBA for assessment and on-going consult, and a behavioral aide who is trained to support the student in the school setting according to a cohesive mental and behavioral health treatment plan that includes a behavior intervention plan of some kind.

This would not be for the purpose of positive behavioral interventions to remediate maladaptive behaviors; it would be for the purpose of ameliorating anxiety, which is a mental health treatment need. The issue here is simply that the student at issue requires a behavioral approach to a mental health need. That’s something a county behavioral health agency should be able to handle.

The thing is, this is just an idea I’ve had. I’ve yet to see it in action so I can’t say for a fact that it would work out as I envision. I’d love to build a clinical trial around it, but I don’t have the time for something like that right now. (If anybody wants to take the idea and run with it, please let me know!)

For students with more severe presentations of ASDs, any approach that relies too heavily on verbal conversation may be inappropriate. There may be a greater need to use prompting and extrinsic reinforcement of desired behaviors throughout the execution of a scripted process in order to rehearse it successfully with these students. And, it may take a significant amount of rehearsal before the skill is mastered. It is very high-maintenance at first, and sometimes for a long time, but the payoff is totally worth it once a student develops increased independence from mastering the skill.

Even if you have to start with the most basic, foundational skills, you can get the process in motion for a lengthy, involved, intensive level of instruction that will gradually increase the student’s independence over a period of several years. It may seem like you’re building a castle out of grains of sand at first, but eventually the process can pick up momentum and the next thing you know, part of a wall is built. Anything you do to decrease the student’s need for adult assistance is both liberating for the student and minimizing of the costs of his/her intervention.

Rendering effective mental health services to students in special education who have ASDs and need mental health services in order to benefit from their IEPs can be done cost-effectively. It requires that the right combination of expertise and skill assembled for each student’s treatment team. It also requires well-designed mental and behavioral health treatment plans that include detailed descriptions of how the skills taught in therapy will be generalized to natural settings such as the classroom, playground, cafeteria, or school bus. The treatment team would need to function like a well-oiled machine, each complementing the work of the other.

The savings to society of doing it right would far exceed the costs of delivering a successful program. More importantly, there are just some aspects of independence upon which no dollar value can be placed. To be supported in becoming as independent as possible by one’s fellow citizens affords some of our most compromised citizens access to their Constitutional liberties, and that’s something of which one can be proud to be a part.

Click here to listen to the podcast version of this post.

Thanks to Andréa Marcus, attorney at law, for sharing this link with us.

When I initially heard the news, it was over brunch with a colleague and our mutual client. My colleague saw the news on his smart phone and let out an audible, emotional gasp. When he told us what had happened, I didn’t feel anything at all; it was just information and wasn’t real to me, yet.

I was still trying to assimilate everything that had happened in the IEP meeting we’d all been in earlier that morning on the tail of a grueling week that had left me already emotionally exhausted. A mass murder on top of that was evidently more than what my nervous system could handle at the time. Since then, however, I’ve been following the news and the weight of the situation has sunk in quite deeply, now. I can’t read about the victims without tearing up.

An event like this hits me from every side because I have devoted my career to protecting children’s educational and civil rights. Among those is certainly the right to attend a safe learning environment that fosters their development and growth.

On the other hand, the evidence that has been publicized thus far reveals that Adam Lanza was disabled, possibly with a personality disorder, possibly with an autism spectrum disorder. The latter sounds more likely based on the descriptions given of him, though unless someone who has actually diagnosed him is permitted to disclose his confidential patient information, we’ll never really know.

What the reports from those who encountered Adam confirm was that he was socially awkward and withdrawn and that he evidently didn’t process physical pain the ways other people do, which put him at risk of unwittingly hurting himself during high-risk activities, such as soldering electronics. That sounds a lot like a sensory integration problem to me, which is not uncommon among those challenged by autism, along with the social skills deficits he was also reported to suffer.

Regardless of his diagnoses, it was clear to the outside observers who encountered him that he was impaired. And, while none of the lay people interviewed by the media thus far can point to anything that would have tipped them off that this atrocity was going to happen, we are not privy to what any therapists or others who interacted with him on a professional level may have had reason to fear from him.

Even if no one saw this coming, the fact that Adam remained socially impaired into adulthood reflects a lack of adequate intervention when he was younger, particularly given the peer-reviewed research regarding what works with children challenged by autism. The reports from those who encountered him in high school describe a young man who couldn’t relate to other people, would engage in elopement, and experienced meltdowns at school that “required” his mother to come to school and help calm him back down. The Associated Press described these latter experiences as “… crises only a mother could solve …” which reflects an utter failure with respect to school-based behavioral interventions and a gross lack of understanding regarding parental ability versus the mandated duties of the public education system.

I’ve lost count of the number of students I’ve represented whose schools have chosen to call parents away from their jobs in the middle of the day – and parents who have lost their jobs as a result – because it was less costly to the local education agencies to call the parents to come intervene than to staff these students’ programs with expert personnel. Unless the parent has a BCBA, the parent is not the person to call when behavioral problems occur and it is unethical and unlawful for school districts to shift that burden onto parents.

The special education advocate in me finds this outrageous and?inexcusable. Just because no one necessarily saw Adam’s potential for murder when he was a public education?student with special needs is no excuse for having failed to serve him when the opportunity presented itself to do so. When given the opportunity to prevent this from happening, nothing appropriately effective was done. The burden was shifted to his mother, who ultimately became his first murder victim. Clearly, this was not a crisis that only a non-expert, gun-collecting mother could solve.

While I’ve yet to see evidence that Adam was on an IEP while in public school, based on the descriptions given of him in the media by those who knew him at the time, if he wasn’t on an IEP, it was the world’s biggest child find violation. I have to believe he was on an IEP when he was a public school student.

Presuming that, the snapshot rule prevents the failure of a special education program from being judged with the benefit of hindsight when it comes to evaluating the denial of a FAPE. An IEP offer has to be judged according to what was known or should have been known at the time it was offered.

But, we’re not taking Adam’s case to due process, here. There may be a due process case on Adam’s behalf in all of this, but I can’t think of anything it would resolve, now. At this point, we’re left examining a situation that was long in the making to understand what should have been known but apparently wasn’t so we can better anticipate these kinds of things and prevent them from recurring.

We can’t turn back time and reclaim the lives Adam took. It would be an enormous disservice to all those who died to not examine this situation for every kind of clue we can find that will help us prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again. And, that includes the special education element.

As I have said repeatedly, special education failures have far-reaching consequences and sometimes it’s many years after those failures have occurred for the consequences to come to fruition. Nothing happens in a vacuum and special education failures impact all of us, not just the individual students who fail to receive appropriate benefit or the families that struggle to help them function in life. I take no pleasure or comfort in being proven right about this, now.

The importance of providing students with social skills deficits and emotional health needs with effective intervention isn’t a bunch of liberal, touchy-feely,?kumbaya, mumbo-jumbo. Teaching students how to successfully interact with other people is just as much a part of preparing them for adulthood as the core academics and school is the setting most conducive to that kind of instruction.

There are old-school purists who still advocate that the only thing the public schools should be responsible for teaching are the core academics, but that denies the reality of human life.?School is a social environment, just as the workplace is a social environment. You can’t compartmentalize the human experience. Education has to be holistic in approach or you end up with fragmented people who learned some of what they need but not everything.

It’s not enough that we pass kids with special needs through the system on the basis of academics alone. Adam Lanza is sufficient evidence of that, as are the countless individuals with special needs who, with appropriate intervention, would be taxpayers rather than tax-dependents right now.

Had Adam not taken his own life and had been arrested, tried, and convicted, the costs of his incarceration or, were he to have been found mentally incompetent, institutionalization?would have quickly outstripped what an appropriate special education program would have cost back when he was in school. I shudder at the thought of certain conservatives believing that Adam’s suicide at the end of his killing spree was the solution to expending public funds on his behalf either way.

For those people who can only look at special education issues from the perspective of dollars and cents, it still doesn’t add up.?The additional loss of 27 other lives, some of whom were taxpayers and most of whom the rest would have become, does not cost-justify denying Adam a FAPE when he was eligible for one even if Adam took his own costs of life-long tax-dependency out of the picture by killing himself at the young age of 20.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight at any IEPs Adam had doesn’t change anything, now. The lesson we need to take from this is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We’re not always going to see the long-term consequences of failing to serve a student with special needs until it’s way too late, which means we need to do right by all our special needs kids all the time in order to plug the holes that make things like the Newtown shootings possible.

Rendering a FAPE to all eligible students is simply the right thing to do, not only for the students with special needs, but also for their families and communities. The students and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary School did not deserve to suffer the consequences of Adam’s prior lack of adequate intervention. And, frankly, neither did Adam. We, as a society, failed them all. And, we, as a society, have to clean up the mess that we’ve made and prevent it from happening again.

November 27, 2012 is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, this year. The folks at #GivingTuesday want to make it an official event the same way Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become modern holiday traditions, only with #GivingTuesday devoted to giving ?back to the community.

The idea is that?#GivingTuesday?will become a national event every year where people volunteer, make charitable donations, and engage in online slacktivism that benefits charitable programs and those they help. Non-profit organizations like ours sign up at the?#GivingTuesday?website and tell the world what they will be doing as their #GivingTuesday?activity.

You can see on our #GivingTuesday page that KPS4Parents is providing free IEP reviews during the holidays to special education students served by homeless programs in Ventura County. ?We have now mailed out letters and flyers to homeless programs throughout the County advising of our #GivingTuesday?commitment.

While?#GivingTuesday?is supposed to be a day devoted to giving, the kind of work we do isn’t anything that can be finished in a day. ?So, we’re committing ourselves to supporting this project during the holiday season beginning on November 27, 2012 through the end of the year.

We’ll be scheduling days throughout the holiday season where I and our volunteers will be stationed at an agreed-to location for each participating program for its clients who are parents of kids with IEPs to come in and let us take a look at their documents and answer any questions they may have. If you are in Ventura County, know a thing or two about IEPs, and want to help, please email us at volunteers@kps4parents.org to let us know.

If you aren’t in a position to volunteer but want to help us cover our costs of serving special education students from families with low SES, please make a charitable donation to KPS4Parents using the PayPal button below. Poverty increases the chances of a child having a disability as well as lacking adequate developmentally appropriate learning opportunities.

A solid educational foundation is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty and we can’t do it without your help. Thank you for your support of our?#GivingTuesday?activities!

I attended an IEP meeting recently that really brought home for me the complex nuances of determining what placement, or blend of placement options, represents the Least Restrictive Environment (“LRE”) for an individual student with an IEP. Not only are there the academic factors, there are the social/emotional factors of a particular configuration of services and placement to consider as well.

But, it goes beyond that. A truly honest evaluation of LRE also looks at the culture of the school, if not the entire school district, where the placement is to occur. What constitutes the LRE for a child according to best practices is not necessarily what’s realistically achievable in a school district that does not consistently apply best practices throughout its general education settings.

Many times, for example, a full inclusion program doesn’t fail because the child was unable to respond to appropriate pushed-in support in the general education setting. Full inclusion often fails because of weaknesses in how a school district has set up its general education programs in the first place, into which students with IEPs – who have all kinds of legal rights and protections that the general education students don’t have – then?try to integrate. The failure can be just as much because the general education setting is inappropriate for the general education students, much less a student with special needs.

Personally, I think every child should receive an individualized education. You shouldn’t have to have something “wrong” with you to be taught in a manner most consistent with how you are most likely to experience educational success.

However, our public education system was developed 100 years ago during the Industrial Revolution and emulates the assembly line. Trying to achieve individualization in a setting configured for mass production is an exercise in futility. Full inclusion, therefore, can fail because the effort to individualize for a fully included special education student in the general education setting runs counter to the mass production mentality of general ed.

So, what can happen is that parents will successfully advocate, they think, for full inclusion – or at least increased mainstreaming opportunities – only for the whole thing to go horribly awry once implemented. Afterwards, smug school district personnel will sit in IEP meetings throwing I-told-you-so’s into the parents’ faces, as though it was an outrageous mistake to push for full inclusion and?the parents should have known better.

In this example, this is not an accurate reflection of what the student could have achieved in an appropriate fully included program; this is a reflection of the general education environment being 100 years out of date and operating in a manner inconsistent with best practices. It also smacks of a deliberate effort on the part of the “educators” to undermine the student’s success in order to win an argument, which, unfortunately, does happen.

The flip side of this issue is a decision by the IEP team to place a student in a more restrictive setting for seemingly legitimate reasons only for the placement to turn into a warehousing facility that renders no more educational benefit to the student than what he/she received in general ed. The only function served by the placement is to unburden the general education teacher who had no idea what to do with the floundering student.

Done properly, each gradation of restrictiveness serves a legitimate purpose. It’s called the “continuum of placement” for a reason. The idea is that what represents the LRE for a given student depends on a myriad of learning needs unique to that child?that have to be satisfied by balancing the right to not be automatically segregated on the basis of handicapping condition with the right to receive meaningful educational benefit from the instruction.

For many kids with IEPs, the LRE is mostly general education placement with some pull-out for specialized academic instruction in key core areas and/or therapeutic intervention (such as speech-language services, OT, counseling, etc.). In theory, this shouldn’t be that big of a deal. In reality, it can be an emotional powder keg for parents and educators.

Parents can become too emotionally invested in either sheltering their children too much and keeping them in a far too restrictive environment to protect them from the inappropriate conduct of others or swinging to the opposite extreme and pushing for full inclusion when it’s just not going to support their child’s needs because they’re hung up on labels.

In the latter scenario, sometimes one or both parents are more worried about being judged for having a kid in special ed than whether their child is benefiting from the instruction. It’s been my experience – and I’m being really, really general here, so please don’t send me hate email if this doesn’t apply to you – that fathers have a harder time accepting a special education placement than mothers. I suspect, though it would be interesting to see peer-reviewed research on this, that this is socialized behavior based on cultural norms, but that’s a whole different conversation for a future post.

Then there are a jillion situations between the extremes of over-protection and throwing kids to the wolves where legitimate parent concerns become muddled with misinformed fears and anxieties over “what-ifs” as well as social and cultural perceptions of what special education is and isn’t and what it means to be the parent of a child in special education. Another contributor is a parent’s own locus of control – the degree to which the parent has the sense that life is something that?just?happens to people (external locus of control) or that life is something that people actively shape and direct for themselves (internal locus of control).

So, suffice it to say that determining what represents the LRE for an individual child is often a difficult thing to do well even in the most ideal circumstances. To try and figure it out in the midst of internal school district politics, entrenched cultures at specific school sites, the cronyism inherent in any school situation that promotes teachers banding together for right or wrong whenever questioned by parents about anything, … well, you can imagine if you already don’t know first hand. It’s next to impossible.

So, as a parent, what do you do? It’s our position here at KPS4Parents that the real solution here goes back to rendering a data-driven special education program regardless of the placement so the IEP team can make fact-based decisions about what constitutes the LRE for an individual child.

The District wants to place the kid in a more restrictive setting? What data supports this recommendation? What data will be taken once the placement is changed to determine if it’s working or not?

Using Response to Intervention (“RtI”) methodologies in the implementation of special education is best practices. This means taking data on all of the areas of need being targeted in a child’s IEP. If placement is changed to address a unique student need, then data should be taken on the factors of that need to inform the placement change as well as to determine the efficacy of the placement change as a strategic intervention.

There should also be fidelity checking built into the IEP and there’s an absolute dearth of fidelity checking in IEP development practices, nationwide. Fidelity checking is a system of checks and balances that helps everyone make sure that a child’s IEP is being implemented as written. That way, if the child isn’t benefiting from his/her education, as part of the examination as to why, whether or not the IEP is actually being implemented as intended by the IEP team can be ruled out if the fidelity checks show that it has been followed as written.

Fidelity checking is particularly important with IEP content that targets behavior modification. This is even more important if the proposed change in placement is being made due to behavioral concerns.

Getting school districts to employ best practices with data collection can be exceptionally difficult. For one, they don’t want to document their mistakes in the event that a dispute arises that ends up going to hearing. As a preemptive legal defense strategy, no data means no evidence. Understand that this is a huge contributing factor in school districts’ objections to data-driven programming.

The other objection commonly heard from school districts about doing data-driven programming is that it creates additional personnel costs and/or over-burdens staff with data collection and analysis tasks that they don’t have time to deal with. The fact that it’s difficult is unfortunate, but it shouldn’t be your kid’s problem.

We already know teaching kids with exceptional needs is hard; that’s why people get specialized advanced degrees and credentials to do it. To then put these people in the field and say, “Well, we know you trained and signed up to do this really hard work, but we’re not going to expect you to actually do it because it’s, you know, really hard,” is outrageous.

Staffing issues like this go back to how our public schools are antiquated in design and accommodating the design rather than amending the design to fit the present needs of society is a typical government response but is nonetheless wholly inappropriate and should not be acceptable to any parent.?Forfeiting a child’s educational and civil rights to accommodate the convenience of a cumbersome dinosaur of an entrenched bureaucracy is not the right answer to anything.

Developing a proper system of data collection to inform placement decisions and engage in fidelity checking is not an easy thing to do, but there are plenty of research-based methodologies that can be used and any educator who understands best practices and desires to help improve the public education system rather than subsist off of it should be able to help create something appropriate for a given child. That said, I think examples may be in order here because I suspect, for many of you, all of this sounds like a foreign language. So, I’m going to invent an imaginary student and situation then use him to illustrate my points, here.

Our hypothetical student – let’s call him Stan – is in 4th grade and has fallen significantly behind his classmates in reading comprehension. This impacts him globally because, by the 4th grade, students are no longer learning to read; they’re reading to learn. Reading is now a tool they must use to independently acquire new information across all subject areas. A reading comprehension problem is a train wreck at this point in his educational career.

Efforts have been made to use accommodations and different teaching strategies in his general education 4th grade class, but they aren’t working. There are 34 other kids in the class, one teacher, and no aide.

Stan is already on an IEP for learning disabilities and the reading comprehension issue doesn’t come as a surprise as he’s always been below grade level in this area, but now it’s really kicking his butt because of how reading is meant to be used starting in 4th grade as a learning vehicle, which Stan can’t do. At this point, if Stan doesn’t learn how to overcome the reading comprehension issue, he’s pretty much hosed academically all the way around.

The District recommends pulling Stan out of his general education language arts program and giving him more specialized academic instruction in reading skills in a resource class. There are only eight other students in the resource class during that time and there is not only the resource teacher, who is specifically trained to help kids with these kinds of needs, but also an aide who helps the resource teacher provide more individualized support to the students in the resource class.

Here’s the part where the rubber meets the road, though: Stan’s IEP goals need to target all of the areas of need regarding reading comprehension that this change in placement is meant to address. This isn’t just a strategy for parents to use to increase accountability on the part of the school district; it is a procedural requirement under the law. Services are driven by goals.

If a service, such as resource specialist services, is provided to a student, it’s with an intended outcome in mind. IEP goals describe the outcomes intended by special education intervention.

First you have to describe what you want to make happen and then you figure out what services are needed in order to make it all come together. You don’t pick a service and then say, “Okay, how can I use this to help?” (though this happens all the time).

So, when the school district rep tells Stan’s parents about this idea to give him extra support in resource to help him stay on top of his work that depends on intact reading comprehension skills as well as help him actually increase his reading comprehension abilities, right there you have some intended outcomes described. Write goals to these outcomes and make sure that how progress towards the goals is measured requires data to be collected; then you’ve got a system to measure whether the placement change is working or not.

The measure of success of the placement is Stan’s progress towards the goals that were written for the needs that drove the placement change in the first place. Possible goals – and, again, this is all hypothetical so please don’t copy and paste these into an email to your kid’s teacher insisting that these goals be added to your kid’s IEP unless they truly apply and the IEP team has had a chance to talk about them – may include:

• 1st Possible Baseline & Goal:
  • Baseline: ?Stan is falling behind in his classroom assignments that involve reading for knowledge. This is impacting him in all core subjects. At this time, he has completed only 3 out of the 20 assignments made this school year so far that require analysis of written material and none of them received passing marks due to incorrect answers and questions that were not answered. When asked, Stan indicates that he doesn’t understand what he’s reading and can’t find the information to complete the assignments. Stan’s passage comprehension score on the WJ-III administered last year placed him at the 12th percentile.
  • Annual Goal: When given general education assignments involving independent reading and analysis of written material, with resource specialist support, Stan will master the content as demonstrated by passing grades recorded in teachers’ grade books and work samples on at least 80% of the work assigned.
• 2nd Possible Baseline & Goal:
  • Baseline: Stan’s reading comprehension as measured on the passage comprehension subtest of the WJ-III last year fell at the 12th percentile.?Anecdotally, he reports struggling with reading comprehension, particularly in assignments that require him to draw information from written passages to produce work. Pre-intervention baseline data indicates that Stan can read a beginning second grade passage of 3-5 paragraphs and verbally answer at least 4 of 5 comprehension questions accurately.
  • Annual Goal: When given a written passage of 3-5 paragraphs written at the mid-third grade level, Stan will accurately verbally answer at least 4 of 5 comprehension questions about the passage, one passage per trial in 5 consecutive trials as measured by data collection.

Under no circumstances should you ever, as a parent, consent to an IEP goal that is measured via “observation.” Observation is the passive act of looking at something. It is not a method of measurement. Measurement means taking down numerical information – counting something, timing how long something takes, scoring something according to a rubric, etc.

If there aren’t actual numbers being written down somewhere, something is wrong. Nothing infuriates me more than a goal that targets 80% accuracy and I get into the IEP meeting where the teacher or therapist says, “Oh, I’d say he’s at about a 75%” without any data to support such an assertion. And, when you ask how they know, it comes out that they are estimating based on their memory and haven’t measured a thing. It’s a shameful, unprofessional practice that passes as standard operating procedure in way too many school districts.

So, now we have an example with respect to using IEP goals to measure the efficacy of a placement. With respect to fidelity checking, this often again comes back to the goals. Notice in my example above that the first possible goal states it will be measured by both teacher grade book records and work samples. This is to keep people honest. It’s way too tempting and easy for a teacher to write down a grade that will keep parents off his/her back than to do true data collection and analysis.

Even if the teacher isn’t looking to cut corners, the school district may be worried that the goal is not being met and then the placement recommendation won’t look like it was really the help they promised it would be. If that’s the case, the district may actually pressure the teacher to engage in “modified grades” so that the grade book doesn’t really tell the true story. Using work samples keeps things real; they speak for themselves.

Other systems of checking for fidelity include actual procedures such as case managers checking to make sure that aides are taking data correctly and timely, monthly implementation team meetings with parents to discuss progress towards the goals and any bumps in the road that have been encountered, or automated data tracking (like Goalbook) kept in real time where parents can log in and see progress as it occurs.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. All of this kind of planning is, like any other part of an IEP, individualized to the student, so the best I can do here is give examples to help explain the concepts and hope you can generalize the concepts to your child’s unique situation. If you have suggestions to add to my examples, by all means, please post them below as a comment.

Click here to listen to the podcast version of this post.

I’ll get them out and they’ll be awesome once I do. For now, I just wanted to update our followers as to what has been happening with KPS4Parents and ask for your support in whatever forms it may take for our charitable endeavors.

This post is probably going to seem more like Jack Kerouac wrote it, but that’s because I’m not controlling for my ADHD tendencies all that much right now. Frankly, I just don’t have it in me to control for them at the moment. This is more of a stream of consciousness than what I usually write, so for those of you who have trouble navigating the rabbit holes into which I can easily dive, I apologize in advance.

This school year has been characterized for me by an?unprecedented?amount of litigation. Until this past June, I hadn’t been in front of a judge since 2008. Partly, that was by choice because I really hate litigation. But, mainly it was because I didn’t have to. School districts were mostly cooperating with me, or at least trying to even if they had no idea what they were doing.

But, I had several cases that I’d been working on for a long time that, despite all of the goodwill and seemingly positive attitudes of all involved, the kids still weren’t benefiting from their programs and it was clear that all the good intentions on the part of school district staff were doing nothing more than paving the road to Hell. So, we had nothing left we could do but file for due process.

Two of them are within the same district and another is in a district within the same county. All of these cases are in relatively rural areas where resources are limited and no effort is being made by the public agencies to develop a richer array of appropriate resources.

At the same time, things started to blow up in a certain school district in a certain community where one of the attorneys under whom I paralegal lives. The district in her community recently changed law firms to a certain firm that was sanctioned by the federal courts in 2005 for “vexatiously multiplying proceedings” and attempting to “stand special education law on its head.” All of its attorneys (approximately 250 of them state-wide, at the time) were also ordered to participate in mandatory additional ethics training.

Fast forward 7 years later and here we are going to hearing over issues that should have settled against attorneys that have absolutely no interest in the welfare of students and administrators who are more concerned about losing their positions and getting into trouble than anything else. As one of the more ethical special ed directors I know put it, “It’s a sign of the times.”

California has been in so much financial hot water that people are panicking and cutting off resources for programs that will ultimately cost everyone more in the long run than anything we’re saving now. School boards are pressuring administrators to save money at the expense of serving their districts’ purpose for existing.

Money is being taken out of the classroom to wage these wars by administrators being paid six-figure incomes to pay to attorneys with annual contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars per year, if not $100K+, depending on the size of the district, very often with hourly overage charges once they’ve used up the bank of hours in their annual contracts. The system is set up to financially motivate people like this to take from our kids to line their own pockets.

People opposed to government spending on social programs seem to be supporting this as being fiscally conservative public policy, which I don’t understand at all. There’s nothing fiscally conservative about it.

I think we’re passing through a phase right now, but the students of California’s public schools are paying the price and this situation is causing?irreparable?harm to many of them. So, that’s bumming me out.

Not only am I getting more experience in administrative hearings than I’d like, because the administrative hearings are run by the State of California to determine if compensatory education is owed to students of the State at public expense, these hearings are an abysmal joke. It’s totally a case of the fox guarding the hen house.

School districts can pretty much get away with anything these days. In the first quarter of FY2012-13, only 9% of the cases were found by OAH in favor of students and 17% of the cases were split decisions in which students partially prevailed; districts prevailed in 74% of the cases.

To an unfamiliar observer, it might seem that perhaps the cases being brought by students are without merit or that logical arguments are not being made in hearing by their representatives that shed light on the truth. I assure you that’s not the case, at least not in my experience and not based on the feedback I’m hearing from my colleagues.

While the administrative process is supposed to be informal and easy enough that parents can represent themselves, this hasn’t been the case in California since OAH took over trying these cases in 2005. Unrepresented parents tend to do worse in hearing than those represented by lawyers, and the statistics reveal that having a lawyer who understands the process doesn’t increase a student’s odds of prevailing by that much; the value of having an attorney has become having the case presented in a way that makes it viable for appeal.

The Administrative Law Judges (“ALJs”) trying these cases appear more interested in technical legal?finagling, which most unrepresented parents don’t understand, than the facts of a case or a child’s welfare. Even then, by all appearances, they are inventing rules that don’t exist on the books, misconstruing the regulations, and/or ignoring the regulations altogether – sometimes all of the above in the same decision or order.

Further, the ALJs don’t appear to have a working understanding of educating children, much less those with disabilities. It is also disturbing the number of orders and notices that get sent out by OAH that are only received by school districts and their representatives and not students and their representatives.

In the first quarter of the current fiscal year, 82% of the cases brought by students were with the help of attorneys, a significant number of them working on contingency.?Those of us working these cases are having to take them through the administrative hearing process as an unavoidable formality in order to make the record for these cases to be tried for real in federal court on appeal.

We can have no expectation of competent adjudication at the administrative level and all administrative remedies must be exhausted before proceeding to a real court of law. If we actually prevail at the administrative level, it is an unexpected surprise. From where I sit, the ALJs in California are little more than gatekeepers of the HMO variety.

This only drives the costs up more, and, win or lose, the school districts’ lawyers get paid, so they have every incentive to push things into litigation. Conversely, attorneys representing students on contingency only get paid if they win and often have to front the costs of these cases until they are resolved. That brings up another nasty aspect of this whole thing – school districts taking everything to hearing in an effort to drive students’ attorneys out of business so they can’t afford to represent students anymore.

This makes representing students from all walks of life difficult for most attorneys practicing in this area of law. There is a risk of things evolving to the point that only the families that can afford to pay fees upfront will get adequate representation and low-income families will get nothing. Poverty increases the likelihood of disability and failing to address the challenges caused by disabilities in childhood results in a whole new generation of adults who will likely end up living in poverty.

Where representing students with disabilities from low-income households stands to help break the cycle of poverty, the way the system is currently configured is undermining that intent. For the same reasons, it is also contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline. So, again, this is bumming me out.

The nastiness I have been dealing with this school year in my lay advocacy casework is also unprecedented. My case far up north, which may result in its own social media advocacy site before all is said and done, has been fraught with contentious behavior on the part of the District.

You may recall our effort not too long ago to raise funds for travel expenses for me to attend an IEP meeting for “D.J.” Well, the funds were raised and I traveled up north, but the District cancelled the IEP meeting at the last minute.

In truth, we suspect that one of its reasons for cancelling was the parent rights and responsibilities training I was scheduled to present while I was in the area through a local parent support group. It’s one thing to go in and advocate for one child and his parents; it’s quite another to empower 35 other parents in the same district, which is how many parents showed up for the event.

The high turn-out we had for the event relative to how tiny the rural town was in which it was given was particularly revealing, as was the fact that the district sent one of its administrators to the event. Not that I’m opposed to school district administrators showing up for my speaking engagements, but I found it curious that the district was able to participate in an event where I was educating parents about their rights and not an IEP meeting that had been scheduled for weeks.

One of the silver linings that has come out of that experience, though, is that I was able to meet and speak with another advocate in this rural community who is quite brilliant and who I hope to have write guest blogger articles for us in the not-too-distant future. He has an amazing capacity for understanding the nuances of special education, both from an intervention standpoint as well as the regulatory framework. So, that’s been a recent plus.

Another exciting development has been a case I’ve been working on with the aforementioned attorney involving the aforementioned school district in which I have two due process cases right now. She took this same district to hearing in the summer of 2011, lost at the administrative level, and appealed to the Central District Court. She brought me on to help her with the Central District appeal.

The Central District Court rendered a two-paragraph decision denying all relief with absolutely no analysis of the case after we both put in many, many hours of culling through the administrative record for uncontroverted facts and briefing the appeal. So, she appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In preparing for the 9th Circuit, another law firm has come on board to help with working the case should it go to trial, COPAA is on board to write an Amicus brief, and we’ve been getting technical assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice, which may also write an Amicus brief for us if this thing goes forward.

Neither of us have done a 9th Circuit appeal before, so this has been a huge learning experience. I’ve had the opportunity to explain some of the technical arguments of our case to an attorney from USDOJ during a telephonic conference so she can decide whether to recommend that the United States write a brief in support of our case and have her say, “Oh, I get it. That makes sense,” to the explanations I’ve given. That’s pretty cool.

I’ve participated in telephonic conferences with a mediator from the 9th Circuit who has also given due consideration to my input regarding an upcoming mediation we’re going to have regarding this case. That’s pretty awesome, as well, particularly since, until I said something, there was a good chance the key decision-makers from the District were going to send people who weren’t actually empowered to commit the District to a settlement to the mediation and not participate in person, themselves.

As much as I would love a 9th Circuit Decision that makes excellent case law for students, our client is languishing in an inappropriate placement and a proper mediation agreement will give him quicker relief. If we go forward to trial, it could be two years before we get a Decision from the 9th Circuit, which means we would probably have to file a whole new due process case to address his current situation.

On top of all of this, I have end-of-year fundraising to do for KPS4Parents and two term papers to write before the end of the semester. I’m writing this post instead of working on one of my term papers, which is what I’d scheduled myself to do today, but this is important, too.

The Santa Ana Winds blew a huge tree branch down in my backyard last week and I’ve been waiting ever since for the guys to come and chop it up so it can be hauled out; the delay in getting this resolved is pissing me off. My cat had to be put to sleep yesterday afternoon after fighting a horrible condition that caused all the soft tissue in her mouth and throat to become inflamed and ulcerated, which totally broke my heart (RIP Danni, 2004-2012).

But, I also met with students from our local university yesterday who are going to help me put on a public speaking event and fundraiser later this semester. (Which reminds me: I still need to send them a revised PowerPoint??presentation this weekend.) I’m pretty stoked about that. The topic is going to focus on protections available to public school staff who stick up for kids with disabilities.

So, my plate is really full and it’s not always easy, but some good things are coming from all the work I’m doing, even as I fight uphill battles against some particularly nasty opponents. The opportunities that are being created to make a positive difference will have made all the suffering worth it in the end.

As for whatever support you can give, your thoughts and prayers are always appreciated. Not just for us, but for the families we serve. As the end of the year approaches, your opportunity to write things off on this year’s taxes is growing shorter, so this is a good time to make your charitable financial contributions, which are also very much appreciated. You can donate through our PayPal button below or on any page of our site.

Given that I’m now going to have to travel back up north to attend another IEP meeting for D.J., we need to be able to cover these additional travel expenses and anything you can donate would be appreciated. I’m disgusted that the district in his case cancelled the IEP meeting knowing that we’d raised funds to cover the costs of my travel this last time.

Presumably it did so in the hopes that we wouldn’t be able to afford to send me back up again and would cancel this last trip and, thus, the parent training, and/or to once again undermine the parents’ participation in the IEP process, including their right to representation by advocates. But, it’s represented by the same vexatious law firm that likes to stand special ed law on its head, so I can’t say I’m surprised.

Like I said before, I think this was an effort to stop our parent training as much quash advocate participation in D.J.’s IEP meeting, but we weren’t about to give the district the satisfaction of undermining either effort. We know that our supporters will help us advocate for this child and educate the other families in his community who are also unclear as to what they can do to protect their children’s educational and civil rights.

To that end, we are asking for your continued financial support, your well wishes, and any other help you think might help. (Donations of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, etc. are also appreciated though we’ll have to figure out how they can be transferred; I’m sure there’s a way.) If you have other ideas as to how you can help, post a comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

 

We are very excited to share that Teach.com?has put?Making Special Education Actually Work at the top of its list of 5 Special Ed blogs it follows. We’ve been in communication with the folks at Teach.com and are looking forward to finding ways we can work together.

Teach.com is a website developed and maintained by the University of Southern California (“USC”) Rossier Masters of Arts in Teaching, which is an online masters program. The program is otherwise known as MAT@USC.

We are quite honored to receive such positive feedback from the folks at Teach.com. For people looking for an online masters in teaching program, MAT@USC?may be a viable option.