Making Special Education Actually Work

Pursuing remedy to special education violations is an emotionally draining task for any parent.  It’s easy for some parents to go on the warpath, leaving nothing but scorched earth after everything is said and done, and that’s a terrible way to try and solve a problem of any kind.  It’s an incredibly harmful approach to use in a situation involving children, handicapped or not.

But, not all parents go to the extreme of scorching the earth.  At the opposite extreme, some parents are over-accommodating, compromising on things just to keep the peace at the expense of their children’s educational needs.

I don’t run into this too often, but once in a while I find myself in an IEP meeting or conference with a parent and a special education director where the parent practically gives away the farm and I don’t know whether to smack myself on the forehead in disbelief or smack the parent for being such a doormat.  Being that I’m in a meeting, I can’t do either and have to sit there quietly, running through damage control scenarios in my head.

Everybody brings their personal baggage into whatever situation they go into.  That’s life.  Some people are plagued by the notion that if they ever need to ask anyone for anything, they are terrible, shameful people.  Often, they won’t even ask.  It isn’t until something awful has happened or they’ve tried to take care of things themselves only to have their well-intended but poorly informed plans blow up in their faces that they’ll finally reach out to someone else for help.

But, then their guilt gets the best of them when it comes time to negotiate for appropriate remedy and they start compromising without thinking about how what they are doing is just putting their children right back in the same boat they were trying to climb out of.  In other words, their desire to alleviate their short-term discomfort with asking for anything overrides their long-term obligation to look out for their kids.  Later, they kick themselves even harder for having screwed everything up.  It’s an ugly, damaging dynamic.

What kills me is when I have navigated the sharky waters of their local school district, asserted their claims, and requested remedy only to have these over-accommodating parents rip the carpet out from under their own feet and those of their children, undoing everything I have done to get them there.  They held all the cards.  Their school districts totally blew it.  And, yet, they felt guilty for asking for the situation to be rectified because they didn’t want to place demands on anyone.

After coming to me for help to fix a very messed up situation, in the end they want me to change course and enable their self-destructive behaviors.  In situations like these, I remind the parents that, ultimately, it’s totally their decision because it’s their child, not mine. All I can do is educate and advise them, not tell them what to do, though I really make sure they understand what they are doing when the consequences of caving in are incredibly significant.  Even then, all I can do is point out the facts and tell them what will likely happen if they choose capitulation over standing their ground.

Other times, it’s not that it’s the ideal outcome, but the fight just isn’t worth it and they’d rather spend their money on appropriate services than an acrimonious dispute over appropriate services that are supposed to be at no expense to them.  I have to respect their decisions in any event because, in the end, it is their decision because it is their child.

My purpose in writing and podcasting about this subject today is to preempt any future unnecessary capitulating in which such a guilt-ridden parent may potentially engage.  Call it tough love, but I’m calling all of you over-accommodating parents on the carpet.

Now, I’m not talking about reasonable negotiation where you compromise on some things so long as they are within reason.  I’m talking about parents with legitimate claims who walk away from a negotiation with less than that to which they are entitled to such an extreme that none of it was worth the effort and their child will still not be made whole after everything that has happened.  I’m talking about parents who throw in the towel at the last minute because once they find themselves being glared at by the meanest administrator in their district across a conference room table, whatever stones they had going in just dissolve on the spot and they cave.

Standing up for your child isn’t easy.  As a parent, you are a protector and it’s that instinct to protect your child that causes your fight or flight mechanism to engage whenever somebody within the school system does something that harms your child.  When you attempt to resolve it, even through the most amicable means, you are nonetheless engaged in the fight mode because you are proactively taking steps to protect your child.  When you chicken out at the negotiating table, it’s your instincts telling you that the enemy is too big and powerful and the only way you can protect your child is to scoop him/her up and run.  That’s the flight mode.

If you have competent representation, whether an advocate or an attorney, it’s supposed to level the playing field so that you have someone on your side who knows what the rules are that the other side is supposed to be playing by and what your options are if the other side fails to play by those rules.  If you lack confidence in your representative, then it’s time to find a new one.  If you lack confidence in yourself but you trust your advocate or attorney, you need to suck it up and hang in there unless what is to be gained is so minor and trivial that you can’t justify the trouble you’re going to in order to get it.

For example, let’s say that your child was supposed to receive Occupational Therapy (“OT”) once a week for 20 minutes per session as part of his/her IEP.  But, the Occupational Therapist broke her leg and was out of work for a couple of weeks, thereby causing your child to miss two OT sessions.

This is not worth the acrimony of a lawsuit and you probably wouldn’t win if you pursued it.  At most, you could simply write a letter to your district asking for the missed sessions to be made up.  If the district refuses, you could file a compliance complaint with your state’s department of education alleging a failure to implement the IEP as written for the OT and the state will probably order the district to provide a couple of make-up sessions.

If your child doesn’t seem to be any worse for having missed a couple of session, you might want to just let it go.  It’s not right, it’s not just, and it’s not fair that your child missed two 20-minute sessions of OT, but in the grand scheme of the cosmos, it’s usually not a big enough of a deal to make a big fuss over it.

But, if your child is supposed to get 120 minutes a week of intensive OT for severe fine motor and/or sensory issues and misses two weeks of OT, that’s another issue.  Missing 40 total minutes of OT is not the same as missing 240 total minutes of OT, particularly if your child is significantly impaired and needs a lot of OT in order to receive educational benefit.  Missing 240 minutes of service is worth making a fuss over.

And, by “making a fuss” I don’t mean being a belligerent pain in the butt.  I mean calling attention to the situation and asking for remedy in a dignified manner.  The point is that it’s not something you should let slide.  It’s a problem that has to be corrected.  Your child will suffer lost educational benefit if those sessions aren’t made up.

But, when you get to the point of hammering out where and when these make-up sessions will occur, do not be pressured into reducing the amount of time to be provided, permitting the make-up sessions to be provided by removing your child from some other desperately needed service or academic instruction, or provided at a remote location without appropriate transportation arrangements.

I worked with a family that was offered make-up speech/language therapy sessions at a clinic that was 30 miles from their home with no transportation offered and they were a one-car family.  There was no way they could avail themselves of the therapy because the dad had to take the car to go to work in the morning with just enough time to drop the kids off at school along the way and his job was 20 miles from their home in the opposite direction from the therapy clinic.  The bus brought the kids home at the end of the day and the family car wasn’t available until he got home.

It was impractical for the mom to take the car for the day just to get their child to his make-up therapy sessions.  The biggest obstacle was the cost of the gas to drive all over Hell’s half-acre to accommodate where everybody needed to be.  The district hadn’t even offered mileage reimbursement, which is a perfectly viable option for special education transportation – especially when you’re talking about make-up sessions for services called for in a child’s IEP that weren’t provided as they should have been.

Where the dad usually drove 40 miles a day for work, the mom would have had to drive 140 miles per day (40 miles round-trip twice a day to take her husband to work and pick him up again at the end of the day for a total of 80 miles, plus 60 miles round-trip to and from the therapy sessions).  It had been a completely inequitable arrangement that failed to achieve the outcome of the child receiving the appropriate amount of services that he so desperately needed.  But, the parents had felt lucky to get the make-up sessions at all.

They felt like they were being demanding – and their school district acted like they were being demanding – by asking for transportation, so they compromised on that only to later realize that the lack of transportation support prevented them from actually accessing the remedy they’d been given.  They realized that they hadn’t really accomplished anything at all.  (I was able to get mileage reimbursement for them after I became involved, so this story does have a happy ending.  Their little boy got his make-up therapy in the end.)

Sometimes, the cave-in doesn’t happen because the district administrator negotiating with the parents comes across as mean or as though the parents are making unreasonable demands.  Sometimes administrators sit across the table with doe eyes and apologize profusely, which makes those certain parents who go through life feeling guilty for even being alive just fall apart at the seams.  They’ll take an apology over remedy and walk away with their tails between their legs.

The only way to know that the administrator is insincere is when he/she seems pleased or even thankful that the parents have accepted the apology and compromised on the remedy.  If the administrator is truly sincere about doing the right thing, he/she insists on providing the remedy in addition to the apology.

Hostile administrators will act indignant over the idea that they should have to provide any kind of remedy at all and never, ever admit fault much less offer an apology.  Insincere “kill them with kindness” administrators will apologize, acknowledge parents’ feelings, and then lay a guilt trip about limited resources, cost to the taxpaying public, or whatever will get guilt-plagued parents to feel bad about asking for a resolution to the district’s denial of a FAPE to their child.  Sincere, ethical administrators will apologize and tell you how they’re going to fix the problem and then actually follow through on their promises.

Regardless of the types of administrators they have to deal with, it’s up to each child’s parents to stand their ground when it’s the right thing to do and only make reasonable compromises when negotiating remedy.  If you decide to compromise on something, make sure you understand what the consequences of that decision will be and know that you can live with them because your child will have to live with them for the rest of his/her life.

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