The newest catalog for Oxnard Park & Rec just came out with the ad for our upcoming event of June 23, 2012 right near the front.  For more information about the event, click here.

KPS4Parents board member, Braden Sanborn, equipped incoming participants with bags and coupons donated by Lakeshore Learning so that they would have something into which they could put all the literature they collected from all the event participants as they moved around the room.

From there, participants went to the photo ID station being operated by Josh Steinfeld and Morgan Ware, independent agents with New York Life, where the children had their pictures taken and their thumb prints digitally scanned and made into emergency photo IDs. If it weren’t for Josh and Morgan, this event would have never happened. It was they who first approached KPS4Parents to put together a joint event and they are now forever dear to our hearts.

As it turned out, printing and laminating the cards took a few minutes each, during which time the children participated in play activities at the table run by Tristen Vance, MFT, the coloring table jointly run by the City of Oxnard’s Recreation and Community Services Department and KPS4Parents, and our sensory/calm-down area out on the patio overlooking the hillsides and the Pacific Ocean under the supervision of behavioral specialists from Hayden Consultation Services, including a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and KPS4Parents volunteers.

While the kids enjoyed various activities waiting for their ID cards to print and get laminated, their parents circulated around the room talking to the various experts.  The experts included:

• The behavioral support team from Hayden Consultation Services (many thanks to Monique who responded with lightening speed to an incident of elopement that happened so fast that she had redirected the child to an appropriate activity within the event area before anyone else’s brain even had the chance to register what was happening, and to Dena Kocher, BCBA and credentialed special ed teacher, for coordinating Hayden Consultation’s participation in the event);
• Marcia Hamilton, CCC-SLP, who was brilliant in her delivery of the social stories and coaching the kids through the role plays of presenting their ID cards to a community helper, which was a critical component of our program;
• Tristen Vance, MFT, who not only ran an amazing table of positive activities for the kids but was also a tremendous help with the social stories and role plays;
• The City of Oxnard’s Recreation and Community Services Department, which provided information about the various community-based programs and classes that benefit children with disabilities, operated our coloring station, and handed out free gifts from our event sponsors (many, many thanks to Diane La Douceur and her team for not only running their tables at the event, but also helping out with finding donors to sponsor the event and get our safety skills booklet printed);
• The Kiwanis Club of Camarillo, which provided information about its Pediatric Trauma Prevention program, including its infant car seat and bicycle helmet program to prevent childhood trauma (a great many thanks to Cecilia Rexford, this year’s president of the club, who fit it into her incredibly busy schedule to run the Kiwanis table at the event); and
• KPS4Parents, with our informational booklet on adding appropriate content to IEPs to address community safety skills instruction as part of an effective special education program.

While turn-out wasn’t as high as we thought it would be, as it turned out, that wasn’t a bad thing. The lesson learned from putting on this event this first time was that the time it takes for the ID cards to be produced means that we can’t move everyone through the process that quickly. It sort of worked out on its own that by the time we had three ID cards made and pinned on their owner’s clothes, we could do the social story and role play with those three children while the next three cards were being made, which kept things manageable.

Many, many thanks to Nathan Orlina, a KPS4Parents volunteer and junior member of the Civil Air Patrol, for being there to role play, in uniform, with the children. Having someone there in uniform to go through the process of asking for help using an emergency ID card made the whole thing solid. Nathan made all of us so proud by assuming a responsibility that we had originally expected to be assumed by professional community helpers and doing it incredibly well.

We were totally bummed that local law enforcement, fire department, and other emergency service personnel could not be made available to help us out, though we definitely asked as many agencies as we could for their support and involvement. Apparently, due to budget cuts, participation in community programs like ours is no longer possible as departments are struggling to just keep officers and other community helpers out in the field protecting and serving.

The concern we still have, though, is that our event would have provided a valuable training opportunity for professional community helpers as well as the children participating in it and if any of the children we prepared yesterday actually attempt to use their new community safety skills with an unfamiliar community helper, they may not be responded to appropriately by the community helper. So, we still have some work ahead of us to educate the community helpers out there to respond appropriately to these children.

Nonetheless, we all concluded the event with the belief that we had done something very positive and constructive for the children who attended and their families. KPS4Parents cannot thank enough the professionals who spent their better part of their Saturday, yesterday, participating in this event and the beautiful families who traveled in from all over Central Coast California to participate in this event.

If you are part of a parent support group, membership organization, or any other group of concerned parents and/or professionals of children with special needs and would like to collaborate with KPS4Parents to put on a community safety event, even if on a much smaller scale just for your members, please email us at workshops@kps4parents.org with your inquiry. We are also willing to coordinate a similar program with local education agencies and/or their PTA organizations to be held at individual school sites. Emergency photo ID services, social stories, and role plays are not limited to children with disabilities and this can be made into an effective program for many children.

If you participated in yesterday’s event and would like to share your feedback, please post a comment below.

If you made it to today’s event, please post your feedback below or on our Facebook event page and let us know what you thought.

As we discussed, assessment is conducted for the purpose of determining eligibility (at initial and triennial assessments); present levels of performance (that is, what the child is capable of right now); and, presuming he/she is eligible, the content of his/her IEP or 504 plan.  If the assessment phase of the process is compromised, the rest of the special education process from that point forward is compromised.

You don’t know what to do if you don’t even really know what you’re dealing with.  The purpose of assessment is to figure out what is going on with your kid so you can do some informed planning as an IEP team to adapt his/her education so it results in meaningful educational benefit.  Your planning is faulty when you don’t have valid, reliable assessment data about your child.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), assessment must be done in all areas of suspected disability.  The school district carries an affirmative duty to ensure that the IEP team has accurate, thorough-enough information upon which to base its decisions.  So, while parents may bring in reports from the outside that indicate the need for certain interventions, the district has the responsibility to conduct its own assessments in order to confirm or refute the outside recommendations, with Congress’ intent being for this process to prevent parents from bringing in unsound recommendations from outside assessors and the public schools being bound by those unsound recommendations.

Unfortunately, this system can be exploited or otherwise implemented poorly such that a child fails to be properly identified or served.  This can result in assessments being conducted by districts in such a way as to build a case against the use of a costly service that the district doesn’t want to pay but for which valid data would reveal the need.  It can result in a body of data that looks like Swiss cheese because there are still so many unanswered questions left that the data is full of holes.

We discussed that due to fiscal considerations, many school districts buy a limited number of standardized tests in bulk, thereby compelling their assessors to use those materials rather than order single sets of specific tests chosen to fit the child (as required by law) at a higher cost.  Some school districts even create complex, lengthy purchasing procedures on special purchase assessment tools in order to deter their use; in California, the assessments must be conducted within a 60-day timeline (calendar days, excluding breaks of 5 days or more).  If the purchasing process for a specific assessment tool takes too long, the timeline will be exceeded, so assessors are discouraged from ordering more appropriate tests than those immediately available to them from the district’s inventory.

As with any aspect of special education, assessment is supposed to be individualized based on the student’s unique needs and, therefore, the assessments used should be chosen based on what is necessary to collect accurate data.  Sometimes that means choosing tests that aren’t already in the special education department’s store room.

However, it is often the case that a standard “cookie cutter” approach is taken by many school districts when it comes to assessment, resulting in the same assessment tools being used for many different children with very diverse needs.  In California, it seems that the standard cookie cutter assessment is the WISC-IV for cognition, the WJ-III Tests of Achievement for academics, and maybe the visual-motor subtest of the VMI.

We discussed that the core of a comprehensive special education assessment is the psycho-educational component.  These tests usually look at cognition, adaptive functioning, academics, processing, memory, and social/emotional functioning.  Areas of specialized assessment can include speech-language, motor functioning, auditory processing, visual processing, assistive technology, and behavior.

We discussed IEEs at public expense, what they are and when parents can get them.  Independent Educational Evaluations (IEEs) can be conducted at parent expense and the district must consider the results of an IEE when parents provide them with copies of the reports.  However, districts are not bound by the findings of IEEs brought in by parents.

School districts have an affirmative duty to identify and serve its students who are eligible for special education or 504 supports.  That means that districts must ensure proper assessment.  If school districts act on outside assessments brought in by the parents, they are legally on the hook for any outcomes arising from having followed the advice of those outside assessments should something go wrong.  Additionally, when districts accept the parents’ outside assessment reports and act on them in lieu of conducting their own testing, they become financially responsible for the costs of the assessments the parents had done.

Children eligible for special education and 504 plans are entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).  The “free” in FAPE means “at no charge to the parents.”  If parents pay for assessments that are used to make special education decisions, then a FAPE is denied because they are bearing an expense that is the district’s to bear.  As such, if parents bring in outside assessments that are then used as the basis for finding their children eligible for special education and are used to determine any of the content of their children’s IEPs, then the parents can be due reimbursement by the district for the costs of their outside assessments.

So, because school districts are legally accountable if something goes wrong when they follow the advice of outside assessors, and would have to reimburse the parents for the costs of outside assessments (which usually cost more than the ones done in-house by the district), school districts have incentive to conduct their own testing rather than rely on the findings of outside assessments brought in by parents.  In such cases, they will consider these outside reports but not necessarily agree with them and will usually insist on conducting their own assessments.

IEEs at public expense are those that are funded by school districts.  IEEs at public expense can only be granted when parents disagree with the assessments conducted by the district and want second opinions.  The only way that a school district can refuse to fund an IEE is to take the parents to due process and prove in hearing that the district’s assessments were adequate.

While the law does not require parents to explain why they want IEEs, it is often wise to do so.  Making the record regarding the flaws you see in the district’s assessment puts the district on notice regarding its procedural and substantive failings and also establishes that you have credible reasons for disagreeing.

It is a perception among many school district administrators that parents only ask for IEEs to harass school districts – in other words, parents only ask for IEEs because they can.  Not that there probably aren’t people like that out there, but most parents do not want to live through the hell of putting their kids through round after round of assessment.

When you itemize the problems with an assessment and show that you have legitimate grounds to disagree with it, it helps the district know whether it’s really in a position to fight you on the matter or not.  If you point out legitimate problems that the district can’t defend, it would be foolish for it to take you to due process.  If it did, your letter explaining what all the problems are with the district’s assessment is going to end up in evidence.   The district would have to explain to the judge its position and justifications with respect to every flaw you pointed out.  If it doesn’t have a good excuse for every flaw you pointed out, it’s not going to win.

Most school districts realize that funding an IEE at public expense is less costly than due process.  If the parents really are crazy and the district’s findings were accurate and sufficient all along, then the results of the IEE will only corroborate what the district has been saying all along.  Otherwise, the IEE will provide the IEP team with the information it lacked so that a proper IEP can be written.

We also briefly discussed the Diagnostic Centers operated by the California Department of Education.  There are three Diagnostic Centers in California:  Bay Area, Fresno, Los Angeles.

We discussed behavioral assessments, including the differences between an FBA and an FAA.  I referred participants to our blog article about the differences between an FBA and an FAA.

Everyone had great questions at today’s workshop.  Parents drove in from as far away as San Luis Obispo County.  Pastries were donated by Panera Bread in Thousand Oaks.  Facilities for this event were donated by Channel Islands Social Services.  Many thanks to our volunteer, Gina Giambi-Peters, for arranging the facilities and refreshments.

Now is the chance for this morning’s workshop participants to provide feedback and additional comments.  Some of you had links and names of books to share with the rest of the group.  Please post comments to this article to provide your feedback, comments, and resources to share.

If you are interested in a tool that will help you organize your child’s special education matters, please click here to learn more about our parent resource, The Special Education Parent Data Book.

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