Making Special Education Actually Work

KPS4Parents has been following the issue of Student Attendance Review Board (“SARB”) proceedings involving special education students in Ventura County for several years, now. In the past, we’ve seen some pretty serious abuses of authority by at least one Ventura County school district where the SARB process was used to retaliate against parents or otherwise quash their efforts to advocate for their children with disabilities. In these cases, their children’s disabilities contributed to frequent absences, whether due to medical or psychological reasons.

We have been in contact with the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office regarding these concerns, recently, and hope that what we’ve seen in the past are no longer on-going concerns. The DA’s office has stated that parents are not telling its staff that they are being retaliated against or otherwise being criminally prosecuted for attendance issues related to their children’s disabilities, but that’s their side of the story. KPS4Parents is looking to determine if families of children with disabilities who are being subjected to SARB proceedings see things the same way.

To that end, we’ve created the following survey. If you are the parent of a child with disabilities who is involved with SARB right now, particularly if your child’s attendance problems are related to his/her disability, please complete this survey. The DA’s office has assured us that they will take this information seriously if we uncover this is still an ongoing concern.

We’re going to leave this survey active throughout the 2012-13 school year. What we’re looking to prevent is any instance in which a student is missing school for disability-related reasons but is being punished for it rather than served. Examples of disability-related attendance problems include, but are not limited to, frequent illnesses or chronic medical conditions, school-related phobias, significant social anxiety, and low self-esteem arising from repeated failures in academic work resulting in school avoidance behaviors.