Making Special Education Actually Work

As I posted earlier today, I’ve gone through the search terms used by visitors to our site in June 2010 and selected the ones for which we don’t have specific content.   These were the burning questions that people were seeking answers to that led them to our blog but didn’t necessarily lead them to content that gave them what they were looking for.

This blog article takes some of the search terms for which there are relatively short and to-the-point answers that I can give, which I have then given as best as I can:

Search Term:  “grandparents who shun grandchildren adhd”

You know, in this day and age, it’s hard to believe that there are still people out there who will shun their own family members because of their differences.  It’s one thing to decide as a family not to put an assaultive child around a frail, elderly grandparent just because of the safety concerns.  It’s another thing for a child to be rejected by his/her own family over circumstances beyond his/her control.

This really isn’t a technical special education issue, but it broke my heart to see that someone felt compelled to search for answers to this specific problem and I just couldn’t leave it off of the list.  All I can say is that it is the grandparents who are missing out, not the children, if this is the kind of attitude they have.

Kids with ADHD can have behavior problems.  They tend to have a difficult time learning from their mistakes because their attention cuts in and out while life is trying to teach them a lesson and they tend to fail to make the cause-and-effect connections between their behaviors and the consequences they end up suffering.  At its most extreme, this can result in very unsafe, if not life-threatening, behavior.  Mostly it just irritates the hell out of people who don’t understand it and think that these children are always being disrespectful.

That isn’t to say that children with ADHD can’t “milk it.”  ADHD by itself does not decrease intelligence and it’s human nature to try and get something for nothing.  Throw impulsivity in the mix and you’ve got some seriously poor decision-making going on with a lot of ADHD kids with a clever component that can totally throw you for a loop.  It’s fairly common for kids with ADHD who legitimately frequently fail to realize that someone is speaking to them to pretend not to hear things they really did hear if what they heard was “Eat your vegetables!” or “Clean your room!”  Being able to distinguish between the manifestation of a symptom and willful misconduct is sometimes very hard for even the most well-trained eyes.

For older adults who don’t understand what ADHD, learning disabilities, and other “hidden” handicapping conditions are, it can all sounds like a bunch of excuse-making.  It’s all willful misconduct and parents are just enabling it by giving it a name and treating it like a disability, as far as they are concerned.  They have absolutely no understanding of the neurological underpinnings of real ADHD, and they may not care to.  Just because someone is a grandparent doesn’t mean that he or she is a sweet person.  As far as I’m concerned, respect is earned, not arbitrarily due to someone because of age.

I say, “Pick your battles.”  Parents have an obligation to their children first and foremost, above all else.  When you are a parent and your own parents betray that obligation to you and your children, it hurts, but as an adult you have to keep moving forward and be there for your kids in spite of it.  Being hurt does not relieve you of your obligations to your own children and you certainly don’t want to repeat your own parents’ mistakes.   Anyway, that’s my two cents on the topic.

Search Term:  “what does rr mean in iep”

I have no idea.  It could be something that is short-hand for a local resource, but it isn’t part of the normal special education jargon that I’m aware of and I’ve been doing this for 19 years, now.  If anyone knows what this is or if whoever used this search term can provide clarification about how it was used, we might be able to answer this one.

Search Term:  “can i dispute things in the iep after i signed it?”

Yes.  You can revoke consent to the parts of the IEP you don’t agree with, but it will not retroactively un-do anything that has already been done during the time when consent was given.  I strongly advise against revoking consent to the entire IEP because then your child has nothing at all or is back to the last consented-to IEP, which was the one that came before it.  It would have to be a really extreme circumstance to justify revoking consent to the entire IEP.  Most often, when parents revoke consent it’s to a particular service or placement, in my experience.

You also have to bear in mind that your signature to any special education document is meant to indicate that your consent was informed.  That means that you understood what you were agreeing to at the time you consented to it.  If it turns out later that what you thought you were agreeing to is different from what the school thought you were agreeing to and actually meant by what they wrote in the IEP, then your consent wasn’t informed and you may have perfectly reasonable grounds for withdrawing your consent to that part of the IEP.  You just need to say so when you revoke your consent.

Another thing to consider is that most IEPs are signed by parents who don’t really understand them.  They just trust that the “experts” at the school know what they’re doing.  It’s only later when something goes horribly wrong that they hire lawyers and file for due process.

Many if not most of the IEPs that were disputed in the cases I’ve worked on that went on to due process were consented-to by the parents at the time of hearing.  And the first thing the lawyer for the districts always said was, “But you consented to this IEP at the time?  Why are you disputing its appropriateness now?”  And almost always the answer has been, “Because I didn’t understand it and didn’t think I had a choice.  I thought my child wouldn’t get any help at all if I didn’t sign the IEP.”

Search Term:  “what are the ways teachers inadvertently get into legal trouble regarding issues of special education?”

This is a really good question!  I’d have to say that most of the time, it’s from failing to implement the IEP as written and/or failing to collect the data necessary to monitor the child’s progress.  With general education teachers, the biggest problems I’ve seen have been failing to implement accommodations.  Either they don’t understand what they’re supposed to do, forget because they have 8 million other things going on at once, or think the accommodations are stupid and they shouldn’t have to do them.

In special education, particularly separate special ed classes, even though the IEPs are supposed to be individualized, some teachers will do whole-class instruction and ignore the individualized components of each child’s IEP.  And, they’re usually clueless that they’re doing anything wrong.  So, when an IEP for a severely handicapped child describes a particular outcome as a short-term objective, but it wasn’t met, and when asked why, the teacher says, “We haven’t gotten to that subject in class, yet,” I find myself on the verge of rupturing a blood vessel.

In both cases, it’s a failure to implement the IEP as written.  See also our article, “Does the Education Rendered Comport with the IEP?”

Search Term:  “how much money can someone sue for a school district adding on to a students iep without the notice of a parent”

Generally speaking, zero.  The administrative hearing mechanism provided for under the IDEA does not bestow special education hearing officers with the authority to award damages.  They can only award assessments, services, reimbursements for assessments and/or services already paid for by parents out-of-pocket that should have been paid for by the schools, or payments for assessments and/or services to be prospectively provided.  They can’t even award attorney’s fees and costs.  If it becomes necessary to litigate over attorney’s fees and costs upon a parent prevailing in due process, that’s a civil matter to be tried in state or federal court.

504 claims are another matter.  If you can demonstrate that the changes made to the IEP resulted in a significant civil rights violation, then you could conceivably file a civil rights suit in federal court, but then you’re probably going to have to prove that harm was done such that money is the only way to make up for what happened and there’s not any situation I can think of resulting from content being added to an IEP after the parent has already signed that would justify monetary damages.

It certainly is a denial of meaningful parent participation.  It’s definitely procedurally non-compliant.  If I couldn’t get the school district to take out what they added without permission and voluntarily go through the proper procedures to request the parent’s consent to its inclusion in the IEP, I’d most likely file a compliance complaint with the state department of education for failure to follow the proper procedures for amending the IEP.  See also our article, “Legal Loophole in the IEP Process.”

That’s as much as I’m going to cover in this article.  Definitely keep your eyes peeled for future postings on topics taken from our users’ search terms.

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