Making Special Education Actually Work

There’s a lot of momentum behind Facebook with over 400 million users, over 100 million of whom access their accounts at least monthly.  For-profit and non-profit entities alike are being encouraged to use Facebook to further their organization’s purposes and it seems like there are a million “gurus” crawling out of the woodwork to tell organizations how to use Facebook to get more business, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their websites … yada, yada, yada.

Most people turn to Facebook for entertainment, but many use it to network as well.  Earlier this year, I participated in a Facebook-based effort coordinated through a private discussion group to “out” a con man who was representing himself to families of special needs children as both a lay advocate and a lawyer (among other things), preying mostly upon single moms in terrible situations involving their children’s school districts in particular.

There was nothing entertaining about any of our uses of Facebook in that situation.  Advocates from all over the world collaborated on gathering evidence that was then used to expose this guy.  (See our article, “Parents In Crisis Can be Vulnerable to Predators.”)

I can’t argue that Facebook fails to present a unique set of tools; it presents a tremendous collection of tools and my challenge has been to figure out what of it is useful to KPS4Parents and the families it serves and what of it I can ignore.  Trying to use everything is impractical.  Not all of it serves a useful purpose and none of us here have the time to invest in activities that don’t serve a useful purpose.

So, basically, here’s what we’re going to do with Facebook, for those of you who are Facebook users:

My Profile: This is my personal profile, which you can link to next to my photo on the right-hand side of our blog.  All of our blog posts automatically get posted to my profile as it is.  But, this is my personal profile, so you’re also going to see things there that have nothing to do with KPS4Parents. Unless you just really want to see Halloween pictures of my daughter’s Girl Scout troop singing to senior citizens while looking for a blog posting, there’s probably a better way for you to get our information on Facebook.

Posting the links to our blog articles on my Facebook profile is meant to help people find their way back to our blog.  It’s also reflective of a limitation of Hootsuite, which only posts to personal profile pages rather than cause, group, or fan pages.  It’s a compromise I made to save time by automating the distribution of new article announcements via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it’s time to use Facebook in a more constructive manner, which means going back to manual updating on non-profile pages.

Our Group Page: I set this up a long time ago, before fan pages even existed (which aren’t even called fan pages anymore).  When Facebook said it was going to replace groups with fan pages, I started a fan page thinking our group page would automatically get deleted.  But, I guess some well-established groups threw fits or something because then groups were never deleted.  So, we’ve still got a group page that I haven’t done anything with in like two years and I think it can still serve a practical purpose.  And, really, the primary group that our organization serves is parents of children with disabilities.

So, what we’re doing with our group page is dedicating it to parent training.  We will be coordinating online training webinars for parents on a variety of special education-related topics regarding the federal procedural requirements that apply everywhere in the US.  We will use the “Events” feature on our group page to calendar these events.  Any local, in-person events we schedule will also be listed in “Events” on our group page.

The group page also has a discussion forum.  I already do a fair amount of blogging, so I really don’t expect to initiate a whole lot of new discussions on our group page, though I could change my mind on that if it turns out to be constructive to use it.  I actually almost thought of turning it off.  However, I reconsidered and decided it would be better if group members can use it as much as they want so long as they’re appropriate in their use of it.

We haven’t scheduled any parent webinars yet, but we will soon.  If you’re interested in being part of these trainings, please go ahead and join the group now and you’ll get announcements when new webinars are scheduled.  You can join our Facebook group by clicking here.

Our Cause Page: I’m really excited about getting this content finally up-to-date.  We had a big mess with an incorrect date being put on some paperwork by the IRS and it took over a year of going back and forth between the IRS and the State of California for me to get it fixed.  The trickle-down impact of that error was ridiculous.

It’s all straightened out now, but one of the problems it caused was that our organization wasn’t properly registered with Guidestar, a registry used by charitable foundations and donors to make sure that an organization really is a true non-profit.  So, even though we had our 501(c)(3) non-profit status, we weren’t being verified by Guidestar and we had to be verified by Guidestar before the donations part of the cause page would work.

In the meantime, Facebook changed the bells and whistles on its cause pages, not that I’d gotten the chance to really figure out what was there before.  I was tied up dealing with the Guidestar debacle at the time.  What is there now is a lot more user friendly, I have to say.  So, now it’s a matter of how to use our cause page in as constructive of a manner as possible.

Really, our cause is resolving the problems inherent in the special education process and fostering collaborative relationships between parents and the public schools to see children with disabilities receive appropriate educational outcomes.  Therefore, our cause page is going to be focused on public policy issues and systemic problems, such as the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and seclusion and restraint, to help raise public awareness on the problems that need to be solved in order for special education to actually work for every child who needs it.

Our cause page will also become part of our fundraising efforts now that we can accept donations through it.  However, you don’t need to go to our cause page from here just to make a donation to KPS4Parents.  We have PayPal donation buttons at the top of every page of our website, including this blog. You can donate from here without having to go over to Facebook.  If you’re already here on our site, the real reason to link over and join our cause on Facebook is to help us convey the magnitude of the problems we’re trying to solve to everybody else who still doesn’t get it.

A colleague of mine was once told by a California state assemblyperson that the entire disabled population of California was not big enough to count as a constituency.  But if you added in all their family members and the people being paid to serve them, well now you’ve got yourself a constituency.

This is the mindset we’re dealing with.  We need our numbers to reflect the entire constituency as much as possible.  You can access our cause page by clicking here.

Our Fan Page: It’s not called a fan page anymore by Facebook, but I don’t know what else to call it.  They just call it a page now, but Facebook is a website full of millions of pages – profile pages, group pages, cause pages, etc., and – I’m sorry – but that’s just dumb.  How do you have what is essentially a product you’re making available to people and not give it a distinct name?  Anyway, there goes my common sense raining on somebody else’s parade, again, so I’ll move on.

Our fan page has people following it who are not also my Facebook friends, though some of them are, and the “Find Us on Facebook” box on our Sister Sites & Social Media blog page (with pictures of those who are interestingly still being referred to as “fans” by Facebook) actually links back to our fan page.  My friends are the ones getting the automatic updates alerting them to new blog articles from my profile page and that information really should be going to our fan page, too.  Actually, I’d rather have it go there first and then get shared to my profile page from there, to be honest.

So, my assistant is going to help me out with that since it still has to be done manually and we’re going to use the fan page to alert our fans of new blog articles,  special deals, and important announcements from our cause and group pages.  To become a fan on our Facebook fan page, click here and then click the little “like” thumbs-up icon.

So, basically, what you’re seeing here in this blog article is our Facebook policy.  For those of you who use Facebook, it’s meant to give you a clear understanding of how we’re going to use it as a tool in an effort to give you more ways to access the information you need and for us to spread the word about the issues we’re confronting and the solutions we’re seeking.

Please make use of whatever of these tools seem beneficial to you.  And, if you have any questions, be sure to let us know.  You can post a comment below or on the wall of any of our pages on Facebook.