Category: “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

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Behaviors that Interfere with Learning

Federal and state laws provide guidance to educators regarding their responses to children with disabilities who exhibit behaviors at school that interfere with their own learning or that of others. But, how do you determine whether a behavior meets the regulatory standard for triggering these provisions of the law?

 

I worked on a case just over a year ago in which the student had been found eligible for special education as only OHI (see our new acronym glossary) on the basis of her ADHD even though she was also clinically depressed and receiving psychiatric treatment outside of the special education process. We’d first attempted to get the District to also find her eligible as ED, but the District created an offer of services and placement that seemed at the time to be legitimately intended to address all of her issues regardless of her eligibility category, so we didn’t make a big deal about the secondary eligibility category after a while, which we later regretted.

 

The services offered to the student included on-site counseling with the school psychologist assigned to our student’s campus. The problem was, as nice and well-intended as the school psychologist was, she was grossly under-qualified to provide adequate mental health support to a tenacious young lady with a psychiatric disorder. Without making a single effort to coordinate push-in mental health services by qualified psychologists and therapists so that she could remain in the LRE, the school district kept pushing a COE-operated special day school for students with emotional problems, even though it wouldn’t find our student ED.

 

The parents refused to consent to the COE placement on a number of grounds, not the least of which was that their 13-year-old daughter who engaged in loud, over-sexualized dialogues with whomever would listen would have been the only girl in her class of 13 emotional disturbed teenagers. Those poor boys wouldn’t have stood a chance. She would have stood that class on its ear in the first five minutes.? No one would have benefitted from that arrangement.

 

We thought we had things worked out. The IEP seemed like a step in the right direction once we got it all wrapped up. The goals were measurable. Everyone had a game plan and people were assigned to contend with specific issues. But, our student had needs that were too severe and demanding for the staff assigned to her case, as it turns out, and entirely beyond her control. Her biochemistry was a train wreck. Her psychiatrist was challenged to find a blend of medications that worked properly. She was experiencing side effects from some of the medications. She was far more difficult and mouthy than usual for several months while the attempts to develop the proper medication regimen were being made.

 

At some point, she said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and got sent to the office to talk.  While sitting in the office waiting to be seen, she loudly announced that she and her boyfriend should just come to the school with guns and blow everybody away.? She was immediately sent home and school site taff instantly initiated expulsion proceedings.

 

In accordance with federal law, a Manifestation Determination IEP meeting was called to ascertain whether or not the student’s behavior was a result of, or was significantly impacted by, her disability. Her parents and I thought it was pretty self-evident. The girl’s various handicapping conditions, including those for which she was being treated outside of the special education system, were documented in various reports and letters from her treating doctors and therapists over the years as well as the district’s own assessment reports.

 

 

However, when we got into the meeting, it very quickly became clear that the meeting already had a pre-determined outcome. It was a total sham. The principal had collected letters from this child’s teachers vilifying her for the record, many of which described her as “disturbed” and “irrationally angry,” which, of course, were the untreated symptoms of her mental health disorders. Combine this state of mind with the poor impulse control that come part and parcel with many cases of ADHD and a smart mouth, and you’ve got one of the most difficult children in special education to serve.

 

 

She was too much for the school psychologist, who really was not qualified to serve her needs, as it turned out. In California, where this case took place, school psychologists are not, by default, real psychologists. The title is a misnomer.

 

All that is required to be a school psychologist in California is a Master’s degree in school psychology and a special credential, much like a teaching credential, issued by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. There is no license from the California Board of Psychology, which licenses holders of PhDs and PsyDs as clinical psychologists, or the Board of Behavioral Sciences, which licenses holders of Master’s degrees and PhDs in Educational Psychology to practice as educational psychologists.

 

As a result, California law, specifically 5 CCR  3030, fails to require any kind of clinical diagnoses by school psychologists and, instead, provides non-clinical criteria by which children are found eligible for special education. This is the case even when the school psychologist involved also happens to be a licensed clinical or educational psychologist.

 

Because most school psychologists in California are not qualified to render DSM-IV diagnoses, such diagnoses are not used in the special education process at all unless conducted under the auspices of a mental health evaluation by a licensed psychologist acting in that capacity and not in the capacity of a school psychologist. Mental health evaluations are done through interagency agreements between local school districts and county mental health agencies.

 

 

The problem with our student’s situation was that the school psychologist who was supposed to be providing her with in-school counseling support was not a mental health professional and as much as she tried to do the best she could, she simply wasn’t trained or equipped to contend with needs as severe as our student’s. And, she was more than willing to admit it. She was a good person. However, the district chose to stand behind the principal of the school who clearly hated our student and simply wanted her off the campus forever.

 

 

I’m not going to take the position that this child’s behavior should have somehow been tolerated. It was atrocious and had no place in a learning environment. The point that kept getting lost on the district, though, was that her behavior was being influenced by her medication changes and her defective processing. Her judgment was impaired by her biology plus a cocktail of psychotropic drugs that weren’t quite working out. 

 

 

She was crawling inside her own skin most of the day. This made her agitated and easily set off, which still didn’t make the behavior okay; but knowledge of what she was going through should have led the adults involved to come up with an appropriate offering of supports and services that would help her overcome these feelings and function more successfully at school. These could have included the district consulting with her treating psychiatrist to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, as well as everyone involved working collaboratively towards common outcomes and responding consistently across all settings to her behaviors.

 

 

That’s not what happened, though. What happened was that the district decided to limit its examination of whether the behavior resulted from, or was impacted by, her disability to only her ADHD. The district argued that she had only been found eligible for special education as OHI on the basis of her diagnosed ADHD and, therefore, the examination was limited to that disorder only. We argued that the IDEA requires that once a child is found eligible under any category, all of the child’s educational needs must be met even if they are not normally associated with the disability for which the child has been found eligible.

 

 

Even if, arguendo, she really hadn’t met the eligibility criteria of ED, she nonetheless carried a clinical diagnosis of depression for which she was receiving medication in addition to her severe ADHD. Looking at the language of the statute, it seemed pretty straightforward to us: we had to determine whether the behaviors were the result of, or were impacted by, her disabilities, not her eligibility category(ies). And, her disabilities included ADHD, depression, and possibly bi-polar disorder, for which she had a provisional diagnosis.

 

 

It was never our intent to suggest that her placement remain unchanged or that everyone should pretend like what she did never happened. We simply believed that expelling her for something that wasn’t entirely within her control, being that it was, at least in part, a manifestation of her disability and depriving her of intervention, was counter-intuitive to what the situation required. We needed to beef up her programming, not kick her out of school and place the burden on her parents to figure out how to remediate her educational delays themselves. The school was just sick and tired of dealing with her and simply wanted her gone.

 

 

The whole thing ultimately got resolved in a confidential settlement agreement that achieved a more appropriate placement without expulsion. She also got her meds straightened out shortly afterwards, which made a huge difference in the success of her program.

 

My point here is that we got burned by accepting the earlier argument that “Once she’s in, she’s in and we have to serve all her needs regardless of her eligibility category; you don’t need us to find her ED to give her what she needs.” We didn’t push for the ED eligibility category back when we first realized that she qualified for it because we believed the district was nonetheless making a good faith effort to address all of her needs, including her behavior.

 

 

It wasn’t until later that we realized that our trust had been abused. The reason the district didn’t want to find her eligible as ED on the basis of her diagnosed depression was to leave itself what it thought would be a loophole it could exploit to get rid of her down the line and force the COE placement on her parents, which it again tried to do at the manifestation determination meeting.

 

 

On the record, the district vehemently denied that it had done any such thing, though it still couldn’t reconcile its story against the evidence otherwise also available on the record. Assessment reports, the hate letters collected by the principal from the student’s teachers, incident reports, comments on her report cards, IEP meeting notes and indications of teachers’ and parents’ concerns, audio recordings of IEP meetings – all of it captured the symptomology of the very things with which she had been diagnosed as well as our initial attempts to add the ED eligibility to the IEP prior to our decision to let that issue go.

 

 

The record also made clear the kangaroo court-style nature of the manifestation determination meeting. The district would have had some explaining to do had the case gone to litigation.

 

 

Children who have behaviors that interfere with their own learning and/or that of others are some of the most difficult students to serve. We’re going to devote several postings to the topic of behavior because it is such a complex issue. There are so many considerations and even more theories of how things should be done that it becomes confusing and overwhelming even to people who have been working with these issues for a while.

 

Both the IDEA and Section 504 have rules about how behaviors are to be dealt with when they involve children with disabilities. You can download the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ notice regarding appropriate interventions under Section 504 and the ADA by clicking here.

The IDEA’s implementing regulations include 34 CFR 300.304(b)(3), which states that the schools must use “technically sound” tests that “may assess the relative contribution of cognitive and behavioral factors, in addition to physical or developmental factors.” [Emphasis added.]? 34 CFR 300.4(c)(10)(iii) states that, as a related service, psychological services include “obtaining, integrating, and interpreting information about child behavior and conditions relating to learning.”

 

34 CFR 300.324(a)(2)(i) states that IEP teams must give consideration to special factors, including behavior. It literally reads: “The IEP Team must … [i]n the case of a child whose behavior impedes the child’s learning or that of others, consider the use of positive behavioral interventions and supports, and other strategies, to address that behavior.”20 USC  1415(k) explains when a child’s placement can be changed on the basis of behaviors and describes the process by which the determination is made regarding placement when behaviors are the issue at hand.

State laws can vary. In California, we have The Hughes Bill (5 CCR 3001 and 3052).It’s pretty specific about what can and cannot be done.

Minnesota has some pretty straightforward regulations when it comes to identifying and serving children with behavioral problems. (See MAR 3525.1329.) Indiana’s special education rules contain language that define behavior-related terms and spell out processes for assessing and serving the behavioral needs of children with disabilities. (See Title 511 Article 7 Rules 32 – 47 and search the PDF using “behavior” as your search term.)

 

Research your own state’s rules and regulations to learn more about how the behavioral challenges of special education students are supposed to be responded to by schools in your area. You can access your state’s department of education, which should have a link to an online source for the rules and regulations, or at least a method of ordering a hard copy of them, by going to the US Department of Education’s directory of state agencies.

 

Please be sure to subscribe to our feed so that you can receive our next few postings, which will also be dedicated to dealing with behaviors that interfere with learning. If you have any comments or questions, please do post them.

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Understanding Who Is and Who Is Not Eligible for Special Education

Eligibility is a very confusing concept for most parents trying to negotiate their ways through the bureaucracy of special education. It’s an unfortunate reality that special education has to be regulated in order to make objective determinations as to whether students benefitted from their services or not, but the regulations create what is to some parents seemingly insurmountable barriers to entry.

 

This is further compounded by an industry-wide (and I am considering public education an industry, here) initiative to intervene before students are so far gone that they actually need special education. On the surface, this sounds like a good idea. If acted upon in good faith, it’s a great idea. Why wait until a child is so far behind that he/she may never catch up Why resort to labeling the child as “disabled” when what’s closer to the truth is that he/she was never taught the way he/she actually learns?

 

However, far too often, in the name of preventing an unnecessary referral for special education, strategies are attempted in the name of “regular education accommodations” and “Response to Intervention” that aren’t successful. In the end, it becomes apparent in these instances that these “strategies” were nothing more than bad faith delay tactics used in the hopes that the parents would reach the conclusion that their children were beyond help and simply give up.

 

After all, teaching children who are struggling to master certain concepts is really, really hard. It’s a lot easier simply to not. The employees of the education system get their paychecks either way. This is a deplorable situation for parents and educators who truly care, alike.  Good teachers are constantly fighting an uphill battle to do the right things.  After a while, it’s easy to burn out and give up, leaving behind all the people who are inclined to take the easy path and just not do much of anything.

 

That said, when it comes right down to it, who is really eligible for special education? It is a misconception that the presence of disability automatically qualifies a child for special education. It does not. A disability must be present in an eligible child, but that by itself is not enough.

 

There must be a negative educational impact caused by the disability – it must interfere with the child’s learning or participation at school to a significant enough degree that specialized instruction, modifications, accommodations, and possibly related services such as speech-language services and occupational therapy are necessary in order for the child to receive educational benefit.

 

For more than two decades, everyone has been carrying on about the abysmal standard established by Rowley. Or, more accurately, Rowley has been misrepresented by public schools as meaning they don’t have to do a whole lot. Amy Rowley was passing her classes without the sign language interpreter her parents wanted and could get around school just fine, in spite of her hearing loss.  That really doesn’t speak to the circumstances of a child with learning disabilities and ADHD who is reading three grade levels below his current grade.

 

There is another case, Mercer Island, in which the appellate decision declared that the Rowley standard of “some educational benefit” and “a basic floor of opportunity” is dead. Rowley was decided in 1982 in light of the predecessor of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), the Education of Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (“EHA”). The EHA was meant simply to give children with disabilities access to the public schools. Prior to the EHA, at least a million children with disabilities were denied enrollment and there was often no programming to meet their educational needs even when they were permitted to attend school. They simply stayed home or spent pointless hours in regular classrooms with no supports waiting for the day when they could drop out.

 

In 1997, the EHA was replaced with the IDEA. With it came much stronger language about what kinds of outcomes are to be expected. I concur with the findings in Mercer Island for the very obvious reason that the purpose of any education system is to teach students what they need to know so they can take care of themselves as much as is reasonably possible when they grow up. That’s what benefits the children and their families the most. That’s what benefits society the most. (See our posting, “The Big Picture – Special Ed Issues Impact Everyone“.)

 

The need for specialized instruction in order to receive educational benefit (setting aside for the moment how “educational benefit” is exactly defined) on the basis of a handicapping condition is what drives eligibility for special education. This could be something as relatively benign as an articulation disorder that prevents the student from speaking clearly enough to participate effectively in group learning activities with peers, read aloud in class, and/or effectively communicate personal needs or lack of understanding to instructors.  It could be something as severe as quadriplegia that prevents the student from independently navigating a school campus. There are a million ways to be disabled.

 

However, let’s say we have a child with quadriplegia who has mastered the use of his electric wheelchair and can get anywhere on campus he wants, is intellectually intact without any learning disabilities or emotional problems, and is able to hold his head upright and turn it sufficiently to follow instruction in the classroom. He grasps what the teacher is saying.  And, at most all he needs in his academic classes are accommodations, such as a set of books at home, a set of books at school, note-takers in class, access to a computer with dictation software on it, and assistance using his materials in the school setting in order to participate. Does this child require special education?

 

I’d argue that for a kid like this, PE is the only part of the curriculum he can’t participate in without specialized instruction and he would qualify on that basis alone, requiring Adaptive PE as his specialized instruction.  I’d also argue that for self-help needs such as eating and toileting, he would probably need a properly qualified 1:1 aide as a related service.

 

For a child with a disability that impacts his/her receipt of an education and/or participation at school, but who does not need specialized instruction, the solution is a 504 Plan. That’s another blog posting in and of itself. I’m not going to explain 504 right now.

 

The point I’m trying to make here, particularly to parents, is that special education really is meant for a specific group of kids.The federal regulations are found at 34 CFR 300.8.? Each state has its own additional language, as well. In California, for example, it’s 5 CCR 3030.

 

There are some parents who think that getting their child into special education will solve everything. That may not be so.  I’ve encountered parents who were simply looking for something to blame- a defect in their child – rather than their own incompetence as parents for their child’s problems.  Sometimes children are just responding to, or role modeling themselves after, the adults around them.

 

I’ve also encountered parents whose children did have mild problems that fell just short of qualifying them for special education. That’s the thing with the regulations. Somebody is invariably going to almost, but not quite, qualify for special education. The line has to be drawn somewhere. Those are the kids whose parents need to turn to Section 504 and learn as much about it as they can.

 

But, I’ve also encountered education agencies that didn’t want to admit that they had failed to conduct “child find” for years running, resulting in a failure to find a child eligible who should have been found eligible long ago, thereby denying the child a Free and Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”). Because these agencies didn’t want to admit fault and were hoping to avoid being held responsible for providing compensatory education to these children, they lied and said these kids weren’t eligible at all and never had been.

 

A fair amount of litigation arises over eligibility issues. The important thing for parents to understand is that the regulations spell out who and who is not eligible for special education. You need to understand the rules before you go charging off on a mission. State law usually hones the federal law on this issue.

 

For example, if a clinical psychologist has given a child a DSM-IV diagnosis of dyslexia, that doesn’t mean the child will qualify for special education as having a learning disability, even though dyslexia is a type of learning disability; what matters is that there is a discrepancy between achievement and ability or the child has failed to respond to scientifically research-based interventions in the regular education setting because of the dyslexia, which is a processing disorder. On that basis, the child can qualify for special education as having a learning disability.

 

Educators need to appreciate that parents often don’t understand this subtle distinction and be kind and helpful to them as they try to navigate the system. Mocking them for not knowing this is simply inappropriate. Being compassionate to the needs of the student and the angst of the parents who are worried about their child’s academic performance is very appropriate.

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Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are Not Appropriate

Update:

On January 4, 2013, a due process decision was issued in California that addresses “child find” and the use of SSTs, which you can read by clicking here. This case illustrates much of what is discussed below and provides good legal language that makes clear what “child find” is and what school districts’ obligations are to comply with the federal “child find” requirements.

Everyone involved in the special education process needs to fully comprehend what the federal “child find” requirements are, what that means for them and children who depend on them, and how they can best support a functioning “child find” system. In a nutshell, “child find” is the federal mandate requiring education agencies to actively seek out, identify, and serve all the children in their respective jurisdictions who are eligible for special education. The federal regulations can be found at Title 34, Code of Federal Regulations, Sections 300.111 and 300.131.

Legitimately, general education teachers are already over-burdened. They often have too many kids in their classes and not enough support from their administrations. But, that’s the nature of the job. I don’t like it and I’m more than happy to do what I can to improve the situation, but I certainly can’t fix the whole thing all by myself.

The problem I have with the “we already have to do so much” mentality that many teachers have is that they are compartmentalizing all of their various obligations to their students as though they are autonomous of each other and must be dealt with separately when many of them can actually be combined into one activity.

Children are incredibly complex organisms, their complexities markedly different from those of adults based on the fact that children are growing, where adults are aging. Neurologically, what’s going on in their brains is nothing short of breathtakingly incredible. To watch a child at play is enjoyable enough because children are beautiful, but appreciating the kinds of data that a child is taking in and wondering what he must be doing with it inside his head is both humbling and mesmerizing to me.

This is a mindset I think anyone going into a career as a K-12 educator needs to have. I think a great many people do have that mindset when they begin their careers, but over the years they get worn down and burned out by education agency internal politics, mindless bureaucracy, and parents complaining to them about negative outcomes resulting from or influenced by the agency’s internal politics and mindless bureaucracy.

Part of the petty politics that can come along with any organization is the decisions by top management to stay silent on a regulatory requirement so that the staff doesn’t incur the expenses that compliance would have otherwise entailed. In other words, they deliberately keep their people clueless to save money.

In my experience, this is what has largely happened with “child find” and general education teachers everywhere. They have never heard of “child find.” (Granted, in some places it goes by other names, such as “search and serve” or “seek and serve,” but even in those places where it’s called something else, it’s administration that calls it something else; the teachers still have no idea what it is, much less how to implement it. (The federal regulations actually use the language “child find” to refer to the process.)

If I were a classroom teacher and I realized that I was being deliberately kept ignorant of an obligation placed on me by federal law to the detriment of my students, I’d be pretty upset. I don’t know exactly what happens to people, but especially when they are just starting out in their careers and are still a little Pollyanna-ish about life but have absolutely no clout and are at the mercy of their employers’ whims as to whether they have a job or not, there has to be a fracturing of the soul at some point for some of those people when they realize that what they signed up for and what they wound up with are two very different things.

>For some people, that results in burn-out. Burned out people either stay and weigh the system down further with their defeated attitudes or they leave and go on to some other type of career. Other people manage to somehow rise above it and accomplish amazing things in spite of all the toxicity going on around them.

I realized a long time ago that I could best serve the situation by working outside of the system. I have all the respect in the world for the people who go to the front lines every day, make a positive impact on the lives of youngsters, and manage to come back at the end of the day still grounded and at peace.

Which is why this whole “child find” issue royally chaps my hide. Good teachers are being denied the tools and resources they need to educate their students. Apathetic teachers are being encouraged to remain apathetic. The public education system exists to educate children and yet educational services are being denied to children for fiscal reasons while administrative and legal costs soar out of control.

Many education agencies have subscribed to the “Student Study Team” model of addressing parent and teacher concerns about student performance, though there is nothing in the federal law that calls for Student Study Teams or SSTs. Most general education teachers from education agencies that utilize SSTs believe that only the SST can refer a child for special education assessment or that the proper response to a request by a parent for assessment of his or her child is to call an SST meeting.

The federal regulations governing the assessment process can be found at . You will note in neither the “child find” regulations cited above nor the assessment regulations cited here are there any references to SSTs.

SST meetings are not required by the special education assessment process called for by the IDEA. They are often just internal policies created by the education agency, not the law, though this varies from state to state.

SSTs can serve many legitimate purposes and I’m not bad-mouthing the SST concept per se. But, I do have a criticism of the practice of using SST meetings as a stall tactic or as an opportunity to try and talk a parent out of pursuing assessment. That sort of thing is only done in bad faith and has no place in our institutions of learning.

In California, it’s flat-out against the law. If a parent makes a written referral for assessment, the local education agency has 15 calendar days to get an assessment plan out to the parent. Period. Title 5, California Code of Regulations, Section 3021(a) requires local education agencies to honor all referrals for assessment, regardless of who they come from.

I went looking online to see how other states are doing things and stumbled across a very interesting publication put out by the Idaho Department of Education. Idaho Special Education Manual, 2007. I was fascinated by its description of its Problem-Solving Teams as part of its special education process. These are essentially SSTs being used as a pre-screening tool to make sure that special education referrals aren’t being made willy-nilly, but you can see from the description of the Problem-Solving Teams and their procedures how they could be used to delay the referral process when parents make referrals.

What I find troublesome about the way Idaho has worded things in this Manual (beginning on page 6), is that people might be erroneously led to believe that the Problem-Solving Team is the only way a special education referral can be made. That simply isn’t true under the federal regulations.

There was no language in the section devoted to referrals that described what to do in response to a parent referral. But, there is language that says parents can call a Problem-Solving Team meeting to discuss their concerns, which puts them through the paces of a potentially lengthy process before a referral for assessment is made (if it ever is) by the Team.

If I were a parent of a child with disabilities in Idaho, I would need a really compelling reason to go through the Problem-Solving Team process to achieve a referral if federal law permits me to simply write one up myself and bypass the Problem-Solving Team referral process altogether. My advice to parents in Idaho is to go ahead and make the referral and skip the whole Team thing if you’re already really sure that your child has a disability that impacts his/her education.

If you are a parent in Idaho, or anywhere else, making a referral for your child to be assessed for special education, just make sure you document when you made your referral so you can establish when exactly the Procedural Safeguards actually took effect. The date you put on the letter isn’t enough. You need proof of delivery.

If you’re a teacher, take it upon yourself to become familiar with “child find” and learn how you can best implement it in your classroom. Realize that children with hidden disabilities, like learning disabilities and emotional health problems, usually look “normal” and have average to above-average intelligence.

Just because they “look okay” doesn’t mean they aren’t eligible for special education. How are they functioning in the classroom? Are there certain things they just don’t get? Are their respective weaknesses so severe that it’s impacting their academic performance or how they interact with others in the school setting?

Try to put yourself in your student’s shoes. Where is the breakdown occurring and how do you think that makes your student feel? There are some helpful tips at LDOnline.org on how to recognize signs of a possible learning disability according to grade level.

The best thing any of us can do is continue to learn and grow so that we can equip ourselves with the knowledge and tools we need to make the special education process more effective and collaborative. When the “us-versus-them” mentality is gone and parents don’t have to maneuver around sordid education agency politics and manipulated policies to achieve appropriate services for their children, we’ll have made tremendous headway.

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The Ethics of Making the Record

Today’s posting includes a podcast for education professionals, which we’ve broken into two separate downloads due to the overall file size. We’ve focused in today’s podcast on the ethics involved in making the record.

It’s an established practice in special education that when parents start to seriously pursue services for their children with special needs that their local education agencies don’t want to provide, some local education agencies will resort to making the record in such a way as to discredit the parents’ requests or the parents themselves in anticipation of possible due process.

For you special education professionals who find that your values conflict with what you are expected to do on the job, today’s podcast is specifically for you. If you currently feel stuck in the middle between the demands being made of you by your superiors and what you know in your heart to be right, today’s podcast will hopefully shed light on your situation and help you navigate your way out of this terrible situation.

PodCast Part 1: Part 1- Taking the Higher Road When Making the Record
PodCast Part 2: Part 2- Taking the Higher Road When Making the Record

Additional Relevant Links:
Educators’ Protections Under Section 504
The Maxwell Daily Reader by John C. Maxwell

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Emotions Part 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers

I think it’s really, really important to look at the impact that special education non-compliance has on parents’ employers and co-workers. There doesn’t seem to be any research being conducted on this (at least none that I could find – if you know of any, please post a comment with more information). But, I know from talking to the hundreds of parents we’ve represented and provided with consultation that employers are hit very hard by special education issues – employees having to take off all kinds of time from work to contend with problems at school, employees making careless mistakes at work because they’re so pre-occupied with the problems their children are having in school that they aren’t thinking about what they’re doing, and employees who are so emotionally overwrought by what they’re going through that they become a morale problem for their whole department or even the whole company and other people are starting to complain.

Nobody ever talks about this and I don’t know why. It happens all the time and it’s not okay. Parents end up having to quit their jobs or get fired because their job performance is affected by the problems they are dealing with at their kids’ schools. There are things these parents probably don’t know that are hurting them and their children. Employers should be aware of these things, too, and be sympathetic to the fact that these things aren’t being advertised by the public schools and most parents have no idea of their protections. Here are some important things for employers and parent-employees to know.

IEP meetings must be held at mutually agreeable times and locations. Federal law mandates that local education agencies do everything they can to facilitate a parent’s meaningful participation in the IEP process.They can’t have the meeting without the parent unless they can show that they tried every way they could to get the parent to attend and the parent either simply refused to go or could not be located.

If the school is arbitrarily assigning IEP meeting times without first finding out if the date and time are mutually agreeable to the parents, and it isn’t mutually agreeable?, the parent has the right to reschedule to a time that will work for everyone. [34 CFR ? 300.322] When it comes to scheduling IEP meetings, it’s within reason to hold the IEP meeting during the parent’s noon lunch break, but it’s not within reason for a parent who works graveyard to expect the IEP team to convene at 2am right after he/she has gotten off of work. 

It is not okay for the school to call parents to pick up their kids and take them home because they are “having a bad day”. This often happens with children who have social skills deficits and problem behaviors. If a special education student has behaviors that interfere with learning that arise from?or are influenced by his/her disabilties, the local education agency is obligated to address them as part of the child’s IEP.

A functional analysis of the child’s behavior may need to be done to collect the data necessary to write appropriate behavioral goals, develop a positive behavior intervention plan, and determine the services necessary to support the goals and the behavior plan. [34 CFR 300.530]? The school can’t just call once the child has been at school long enough for the local education agency to get paid for the child’s attendance for the day and tell the parents to come pick the child up because he/she is “having a bad day.”  The child is difficult to serve and the local education agency just doesn’t want to?have to work that hard.   This happens all the time, but it’s unlawful.

I’ve worked with parents who lost their jobs because they had to keep going to pick up their kids from school for “having bad days” and take them home for the rest of the day. These kids weren’t suspended.They weren’t expelled. Their schools got paid for a full day’s attendance for each day they were in school long enough. In my experience, these kids usually end up getting sent home around 10:30am.

Unless a child is being suspended or is ill, the school can’t send him/her home. (I’ve seen children sent home for “fevers” they really didn’t have because staff just didn’t want to deal with them that day, though, so parents may need to verify the presence of any mystery illnesses for which they’re being called away from work to respond before actually taking the child home.) The point is that the behaviors are part of the problem the school is supposed to be addressing and parents shouldn’t be losing their jobs because public servants aren’t doing theirs.

I don’t say it that way to be crass. II’m using this language very literally. Public education employees are public servants, just like police officers, firefighters, city clerks, and librarians in public libraries. The taxpaying public has hired them to attend to the educational needs of the community’s children. They work for the local constituency. So, it always baffles me that some education agency administrators take a superior tone with parents and act like they’re doing the parents a favor when they do things they were already supposed to do. Sadly, a lot of parents submit to that kind of bullying behavior. Which brings me to the next important thing to know:

Parents can get really upset by difficulties they are having with their children’s schools. They can’t necessarily check those emotions at the door when they go to work and employers may need to consider bringing in an industrial psychologist if the situation in the workplace becomes too emotionally toxic. Productivity on the whole can be impacted when a critical employee is so overwrought that his/her job performance becomes poor.

Other people relying on a distressed parent to do his/her share of a project are put in very difficult positions when they are left correcting the distressed parent’s mistakes, listening to the distressed parent complain or cry (or both) instead of work, and covering for the parent while he/she is at school instead of at work. This is usually when a decision gets made about whether such a parent will remain an employee.

It is situations like these that compelled KPS4Parents to put together a service offering to employers where we can come in and consult with an HR department or business owner about a specific situation and then consult with the parent regarding his/her rights and what the parent can do to solve the problems they’re having (we’ve done this mostly with smaller businesses) and conduct employee trainings on special education-related issues (which we’ve done with large employers).

As the rate of autism continues to increase, now currently at the rate of 1 out of 144 children according to some sources, employers can no longer afford to think these issues don’t impact them. Any company that employs 10 people who are parents is all but guaranteed to have at least one parent among the 10 who has a child with some type of handicapping condition, and quite possibly more.  Autism is just one of a countless number of disorders that children can have. Employers need to educate themselves on this issue now because it’s going to become a righteous HR problem before they know it, if it hasn’t started to become one already. Resources need to be developed to help employers contend with the increasing number of parents amongst their employees who have children with special needs.  As much as KPS4Parents does to try to tackle this issue, this is one of those things that everyone needs to be doing something about. There’s only so much we can do by ourselves and we need your help to tackle these problem.

Our country is already in enough financial hot water. Businesses cannot afford to suffer otherwise preventable losses in productivity and declines in employee morale, right now. The business community is suffering horrendously already as it is with the financial sector practically falling apart at the seams. More and more businesses are leaving the country for places where the barriers to entry are not as great and the costs of operation are much lower. More and more good jobs have been outsourced to overseas workers and businesses are finding that they can’t afford to hire local talent. For many businesses, the only reason they are able to exist is because they have outsourced work overseas at a fraction of what it would have cost them to hire local talent. To suffer additional losses at a time like this could be the difference between being in business tomorrow or not. To suffer additional losses at a time like this when those losses could have been avoided calls an organization’s stewardship into question.

The business community has a vested interest in making sure that the public schools are able to deliver what is required to all of their students. That means that the business community should be doing what it can to make sure public schools have what they need while holding the public schools accountable for utilizing its resources, particularly those donated by the business community, to properly deliver special education services to the community’s children with disabilities.

I’d love to see Chambers of Commerce and industry-specific associations hosting parent education nights for their members’ employees who are parents of children with special needs. The more the parents know, the more they can get resolved without impacting their job performances. Once their issues with the schools have been resolved, these more emotionally grounded, focused workers can become even more productive. Never underestimate the power of parents finally overcoming what seemed insurmountable and finally feeling like their child is going to be okay. The concurrent senses of relief and accomplishment are esteem-boosting and can actually lead to improvements in employee performance. I’ve seen parents go on to do amazing things professionally after finally resolving their kids’ special education issues.

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Emotions Part 5 – Extended Family

The immediate family (parents and siblings) of a child with disabilities are generally the people we think are the most impacted by a child’s handicapping condition, aside from the child him- or herself. But, as with a pebble tossed into calm waters, there are ripples that travel outward in every direction, disturbing the calm of whoever is in their paths.

One of the challenges I’ve encountered as an advocate over the last 17+ years has been grandparents and other older extended family members who don’t understand or believe in learning disabilities. Largely, what has really been going on is very powerful denial. These elders don’t want to believe that such things exist because that could mean that the child could really have them and they don’t want to believe that, so they decide that the whole idea of learning disabilities is hogwash. I haven’t seen so much of this mentality lately. It was really prevalent in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

You have to bear in mind that, back in the day, no one knew about learning disabilities?or a whole lot of other disabilities that can compromise children’s success in school for that matter. If you looked okay, then you must be capable of achieving in school. Otherwise, you were just lazy. 

Older folks sometimes limit their comprehension of what it means to have a disability to physically observable things, such as being in a wheelchair or having obvious physical attributes as with Down’s Syndrome. When told that their grandchild has ADHD, they might respond that he’s just undisciplined. When told that their grandchild has dyslexia, he just isn’t trying hard enough. What is often really going on beneath the surface is that they take labels like “learning disabled” and translate them to mean “retarded.”

Getting through to them that the disorders are in no way alike (and even if they are, so what?) depends on who they are as people. Some folks are just stubborn and aren’t going to hear anything you say. Others just need to be educated on the subject and are totally open to new information.

As with parents when they first find out that their child has a disability, extended family members can first go into a stage of denial. There has to be a mistake! Each person moves through the phases at their own rate. Some get stuck at a phase and never quite move out of it. Eventually, those who move through all the phases without getting stuck will arrive at acceptance and start to recognize the symptoms and behaviors that make it clear that the child does have some kind of disability. At that point, these extended family members are in a position to respond to the situation most appropriately.

Family feuds can erupt over a child with special needs. Disagreements can arise not over just whether or not the child is disabled, but what to do about it.? Some family members may say “Don’t make waves!” while others may say “Give ’em hell!” Some extended family members may choose to shun the child and his/her immediate family because they feel uncomfortable around the child with special needs, while others embrace the child with open arms. 

Some extended family members will commit personal resources to addressing the child’s needs. I can’t tell you how many grandparents I’ve encountered who have personally financed private tutors and therapies and given hours and hours a week of their time shuttling their grandchildren with special needs to appointments and sessions. That goes for aunts, uncles, and close family friends, as well.

But, I’ve seen nuclear families pretty much going it alone, as well. Their extended families are not that close and don’t feel comfortable getting involved. This is particularly heartbreaking with single parent households where just the one parent is the only adult in the child’s life looking out to see that the child gets what he/she needs.

Extended family members who do get involved experience a wide variety of emotions. This is particularly the case with older extended family members who worry if the family will be able to collectively support the child’s needs, including covering the costs of things that should be, but have not been, provided by publicly funded agencies and programs.

Just babysitting for a child with severe autism, for example, can be exhausting. For older family members who may not be as healthy or physically fit as they once were, it is physically and emotionally draining to experience and witness just how much work is required to parent and educate a child with such demanding needs. For those with declining health, this can lead to a sense of powerlessness or even hopelessness, particularly if they are watching the younger, less-experienced-in-life parents of the child struggling to achieve appropriate services from the responsible agencies. Most often, the prevailing emotion on the part of these older family members is worry.

But, extended family isn’t limited to older family members. It also includes aunts, uncles, and cousins who collectively range in age from infancy to elderliness. For extended family members the same age as a child’s parents, these people are often raising families of their own and/or pursuing careers. Their plates are already full. They can easily become emotionally as well as physically unavailable to help out the parents of the child with disability. But, some families are stronger than others. I’ve seen the rallying together that can still happen in an extended family of the busiest people you can imagine. They can be very efficient in their division of the labor with everyone doing what they can in a way that creates a really solid support system.

All extended families are different, to be sure. Public education professionals need to pay a mindful eye to the type of support system a family has. While children with disabilities are entitled to a wide variety of services and supports, each child’s programming based on his/her unique needs, there is nothing that obligates a family to accept all that it is entitled to. I work with families who decline county mental health medication management services even though they were offered because they already have a prescribing psychiatrist who has been working with their child for years under their private insurance and don’t want to start over after all those years with someone new who doesn’t know their child. But, some nuclear families have little to no support from their extended families and are of limited means. They are, therefore, almost entirely dependent upon the public funded agencies and programs that exist to provide services to their children. 

Public school personnel should never take it for granted that just because a family may seem able to privately finance services, that doesn’t mean that it actually can or will. I’ve gone into school districts in affluent neighborhoods where special education is spoken of by school personnel as though it is a welfare program for the poor and severely handicapped. Parents of children with learning disabilities and the like are told their children are not eligible for special education and parents are given a list of tutors they can hire at private expense to help their kids on the side, which they do. My problem with that is not that wealthy people are paying for tutors they can usually well afford, but that they were put in that position through deceit and manipulation by people collecting paychecks from the taxpaying public. When it comes to special education, a citizen is a citizen and the system is supposed to be there for everyone, regardless of socio-economic status.

When families are able to offer, knowing they don’t have to, to provide a portion of a child’s entitled program at private expense, the involved public agencies are usually pretty appreciative and will do all they can to fill in the remaining holes. It’s when public agencies mislead families into thinking that such services can only be obtained privately or simply refuse to pay for them regardless of what the families know of their rights, particularly when those families don’t have the resources to pay for them, that I’m in hot pursuit of reimbursement and/or the public funding of such programs.

It’s important for families to support each other as best as they can. For those of you who are parents of children with special needs, take some time to think about your own extended family and the type of support system you have and where it could be strengthened. The more emotionally healthy your family is, the better the support system in place for your child with special needs and you. The better your personal support system is, the more you are able to contend with any challenges you encounter along the way as you parent and advocate for your child.

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Emotions Part 4 – Students

In the last three posts, I discussed the emotions of the adults involved in the IEP process, not because the adults are the most important, but because they are the most responsible. How the adults in the situation choose to behave and the decisions they make affect the course of the lives of each individual child who requires special education forever. And, I really mean forever. 

No child is served by ignoring how the special education process directly impacts him or her. In fact, the impact that many of the decisions made by the adults in the IEP process have on children is required under the law to be measured. Measurable annual goals, as required by 34 CFR 300.320(2), look to determine whether the interventions and approaches decided upon and agreed to by the IEP team resulted in success. For the most part, the law is very student-centered.

Assessment can be a very grueling process for a child, particularly a young child. The nature of the suspected disabilities being assessed also plays a role in just how much standardized testing a child can tolerate in one sitting. Children with low motor tone can fatigue easily when being asked to perform paper/pencil tasks. Children with severe attention deficits can’t stay on task more than a few minutes at a time. Children with autistic spectrum disorders often have a hard time with the fact that the testing is not a normal part of their routine and the disruption to their predictable schedules can sometimes be enough to provoke non-compliant behaviors or tantrums, compromising the assessment process altogether.

By and large, children do not want to be disabled. The severity of the disability and the cognitive abilities of the child both impact the degree to which the child responds aversively to being “different” from his/her peers. Children with low cognition may not really comprehend just how different they are.They may come to terms with their circumstance rather quickly, regardless of whether they fully understand their situations or not.

I once worked as a job coach for developmentally disabled adults, providing supported employment services. One of my consumers was a fairly capable man who lived on his own in an apartment and had a full-time job working maintenance at a local driving range. He was very mildly cognitively impaired. He suspected that he had been brain injured in vitro during an incident of domestic violence, as his father regularly beat his mother throughout their marriage, including when she was pregnant. We were talking about life in general one day and he revealed this fact to me and the fact that he sometimes wondered what he would have been like if he hadn’t been disabled. He shrugged and summed things up by saying, in so many words, that he’d probably be living in his own place and working a full-time job, so really he didn’t think he had ended up in too different of a situation than where he would have otherwise ended up. I thought what he said was brilliant.

One of the attorneys I work with told me of a friend of his whose son was born with Down’s Syndrome. Intervention had been so successful for this young man that he lived independently, had a job, and easily accessed public transportation and all the entertainment and cultural enrichment opportunities that exist in the Los Angeles area. He could be frequently found taking the bus to work or some local attraction or point of interest. He was so confident in his abilities and proud of his own personal growth that he would tell people that he “used to be retarded,” judging himself against his own personal accomplishments more than anything else. What an example! 

But, I’ve also worked with kids who started out with learning disabilities that went unserved for years only to develop serious emotional health problems after years of academic failure. These feelings of low self-esteem bled over into other aspects of their lives, undermining their friendships, family relationships, and responses to life in general. 

A learning disability is quite unlike a cognitive impairment. People with learning disabilities have normal to above-average IQs. They just have a hard time processing certain types of information. A visual processing disorder means the person has a hard time making sense of what he/she sees. An auditory processing disorder means the person has a hard time making sense of what he/she hears. That has nothing to do with intelligence.

When perfectly intelligent children fail at something that other perfectly intelligent children can do without even thinking about it, it can make them feel bad about themselves. They often don’t want other people to know about their disabilities. They’re embarrassed by their shortcomings. Parental attitudes about these kinds of things can have a huge influence on how the kids respond.  Parents who are more interested in “keeping up with the Joneses” rather than true quality of life are more likely to be ashamed of having a child with learning disabilities than parents who don’t.  Parents who are constantly worried about what other people think can do a lifetime worth of harm to a child with a disability. But, I know many perfectly grounded parents who have made it perfectly clear to their kids that they love them no matter what and the rest of the world can go jump in a lake for all they care and their kids are still emotionally hung up over being “different.” 

Age has a lot to do with this, too.  Younger children are more forgiving and the younger kids are, the less they all know and the less children with disabilities (particularly “hidden” conditions like learning disabilities) appear to be different from their peers. But, as children get older, the expectations placed on them academically and in terms of social sophistication increase. The kids with disabilities will start to lag behind their peers in some ways and the gaps will start to widen.  It doesn’t take long for kids to realize that this disparity is happening.

If the friendships formed in the early years have been nurtured and fostered into a healthy support system, the children with disabilities are more likely to continue to be accepted by their peers for who they are.? But, kids who end up moving away or who never really formed solid friendships in early childhood (which really speaks to the degree that the adults in their lives facilitated their friendships in a healthy way) can end up losing their friends as the differences become more apparent.

It is common for children with disabilities to feel like their lives are spiraling out of control. If the adults involved in their lives can’t achieve a collaborative energy amongst themselves and there are evident disputes amongst the adults about how the child’s needs can best be tended to, that feeling that life is in an out-of-control tailspin is greatly heightened. Children rely on the adults in their lives, particularly their parents, to be their rocks and foundations.

How issues are approached is vitally important. I absolutely hate going into situations where justifiably frustrated parents have hired attorneys to take their school districts to due process and the next day the kid goes to school and tells his/her teacher off, ending with “My parents are going to sue you!” That helps absolutely nothing.

Because the decisions adults make will change the course of a child’s life forever, when IEP teams are working together well, I believe it’s important for the children to sit in on at least a part of their own IEP meetings. As they get older, it’s important that they participate as members of their own IEP teams. 

Parents have to be careful with this, though. If the purpose of the IEP meeting is to resolve disagreements about what should be in the IEP, it can be upsetting to children to be present during those discussions. It depends, though. I’ve seen various situations over the years where it was appropriate to have the kid there to settle the dispute once and for all while in other situations, kids had been reduced to tears or their parents held back on advocating for what they believed in because they didn’t want to upset their children (and, in the latter instance, that was the whole reason the school staff had insisted that the children participate).

Ultimately, the adults involved have to remember than an IEP is all about the child for whom it is being written. Not only do the adults have to respect each other, they have to respect the child and how their decisions will emotionally impact the child both in the short- and long-term. The child may have to do something he/she finds unpleasant in the beginning because it will lead to successes that will ultimately allow him/her to feel good about him-/herself. It’s up to the adults to make sure that the proper supports are in place so that the child’s initial aversion to the task does not undermine the overall goal, which means being attentive and properly responsive to the child’s emotions.

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Emotions Part 3 – Administrators

When administrators become passionate about special education issues, very often their passions are driven by fiscal concerns and/or political ladder-climbing. I have encountered administrators who were more concerned about child welfare and the long-term consequences of the decisions being made than eliminating costs by refusing to educate children and guaranteeing their own paychecks. When I encounter these rare individuals, I practically drop to my knees and worship at their feet.

There are not enough people with integrity in public education administration and that is truly a crying shame. Those administrators who are trying to do the right thing are still burdened with cost concerns, however. It’s how they respond to those concerns that generally defines who is a “good guy” and who is not. A good administrator tries to figure out how the agency will pay for an educationally necessary service, not whether the agency will pay for it (which is largely based on an analysis of what the risks of getting caught breaking the law and going into litigation might be).

When administrators come to the table, it is cost considerations that are often weighing most heavily on their minds. Most school boards, it’s safe to say, are manned by people who are not professional educators. Many are just people trying to get a toe-hold into politics. They understand special education even less than they understand regular education. They are looking at the overall costs of running the agency and, as a board, make decisions that influence the way things are done all the way down to the classroom, usually without appreciating the long-lasting impact of their decisions.  As Mark Twain once said, “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.” (Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar)

These are the people that agency administrators – good or bad – have to answer to. Over time, it can become more and more the case that an administrator’s job becomes about cow-towing to the board than examining the impact of policy decisions on actual children. In other instances, people go into administrative positions because they have seen children as nothing but numbers from the very beginning. It’s the nature of a bureaucracy to evolve into this kind of machine and attract people who are just looking to be cogs in that machine in exchange for a paycheck. When you see the salaries that top administrators get paid, you realize that we have created a system that gives a financial incentive to people to look at children as numbers rather than as our future.

You can easily end up dealing with a very powerful “not out of my budget” mentality among the higher ups in the administration. The problem with this kind of thinking is that public education is just one facet of our society. When we look at the over-arching entity that we often refer to as “The Government,” public education is just one component of it. The preventative steps that could and should be funded at the K-12 level are far less costly than dealing with unresolved issues throughout a person’s lifetime at taxpayer expense after he/she exits the K-12 system. But, shortsightedness is aplenty in public education and parents need to recognize that the walls that administrators may put up are often deeply rooted in this sort of mentality.

Parents and school site staff have to deal with different emotional responses from administrators. Parents will see some administrators as indifferent, insincere, or conniving. Sometimes those perceptions are accurate. Often times, however, administrators are maintaining poker faces and watching to see the direction things move in so they can plan their next steps, regardless of their intent. Even the ethical administrators have to walk a fine political line that often requires a somewhat noncommittal approach. 

The good administrators know they’re going to have to sell the idea of providing a unique service that costs money to their board and even though the law puts the responsibility of determining IEP content in the hands of the IEP team, most boards would have conniptions if an IEP team actually committed the education agency to a costly service without the administrators first achieving board approval of the expenditure. That puts administrators in the middle of a very awkward situation.

Diplomatic administrators may suggest to the IEP team that the education agency members of the team “do some research” to {identify some options” and that the team reconvene at a later date to continue its discussions. Parents and teachers need to appreciate that the behind-the-scenes dealings probably involve the administrators trying to determine the degree to which their boards are going to support the most appropriate outcome. That said, parents in particular need to watch the nonverbal body language of administrators during meetings and try to understand where the administrators are really coming from. Sometimes suggesting that the team continue an IEP meeting under the auspices of “doing research” and “identifying options” is just a stall tactic and they’ve already made up their minds to say “no” to whatever is being requested.

The emotions of administrators are a trickier issue for the other members of the IEP team because people don’t usually climb that high up the political ladder by wearing their hearts on their sleeves all the time. Being a smooth operator is more likely to garner success than constant hysterics. That said, school site staff are more likely to see fireworks behind closed doors without parents present than would be seen if the parents were around. 

I spoke once to an occupational therapist who ended up quitting her district job and going into private practice because she got sick and tired of getting screamed at (literally) by the district’s director of pupil services for actually pointing out when children had apparent visual processing disorders. This particular director of pupil services (who was finally asked by her employer to leave after decades of tyranny) was worried that any reference to visual processing deficits would result in parents asking for vision therapy services, which this particular administrator didn’t believe in and didn’t want to pay for. During the IEP meetings, this administrator would just sit at the table turning shades of purple and red while saying “no” and making excuses or just flat out saying “we’re not going to even consider that.” Behind closed doors, she would verbally abuse her staff for any suggestions they made during the meetings or statements they had incidentally made to parents that “put ideas” into the parents’ heads about what they might ask for.

Different from teachers and school site staff, high-level administrators have power and that changes how they respond emotionally to situations. Parents can become frustrated and distraught because they feel powerless in the IEP process and their children are suffering.? Teachers can become frustrated and distraught because they are sandwiched between parents who are turning to them for answers and holding them to very high expectations and administrators who are expecting them to follow internal processes and procedures that might not actually support what it is they need to do, leaving them caught in the middle.  That’s a powerless feeling, as well.

Administrators are sandwiched between IEP teams and school boards, the first asking for things and the other often trying to prevent expenditures. That’s the hierarchy regardless of an administrator’s motivations or intent. The difference is that most administrators have gotten fairly accomplished at dancing around the issues and finding ways to push through the things they want to see achieved and saying “no” to things they are less inclined to support. More so than parents and teachers, administrators’ personal opinions can and do influence outcomes. This can make them arrogant and full of themselves if they aren’t very nice people. Power can easily corrupt.

Parents, teachers, and administrators all need to work together collaboratively in order for special education students to be appropriately served, but without understanding and respecting the pressures and feelings of all the different team players, that just isn’t possible. You have to keep your brain turned on and your eyes and ears open at all times. It takes sustained effort, but it’s worth it in the end.

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Emotions Part 2 – School Site Staff

Parents are not the only ones who have emotional reactions to things that happen in the special education process. Special education is a very complex undertaking that involves a lot of people, each with his/her own perspective.

Teachers and related service providers (speech-language specialists, occupational therapists, etc.), being in the trenches as it were, are the people most in a position to see the educational impact of a child’s special needs first-hand. What they don’t know can hurt a child.

Parents who jump to blaming teachers and providers without considering all of the factors that these professionals have to deal with, however, don’t help the situation. That isn’t to say that teachers and providers are without responsibility and shouldn’t be held accountable. But, things have to be done the right way.

There’s usually a whole lot more going on behind the scenes beyond the control of the teachers and related service providers that parents don’t know about or understand. Many parents may look at teaching and professional staff, as well as school site administrators, as having a lot of say in how things go down, but the truth is that their effectiveness is also influenced by internal agency politics that start at the top of the agency’s administrative hierarchy and trickle down into the classroom through bureaucratic channels.

What teachers and related service providers are prevented from doing by the internal politics of the agencies they work for can also hurt a child, and most teachers and providers who find themselves in these kinds of circumstances are sickened by them. I’ve spoken to many people over the years who left the teaching profession because they were unsupported by their administrations, were denied the tools they needed to teach all of their students (particularly those with unique learning needs), and were told not to say anything to parents or make waves lest they find themselves unemployed. This is entirely unacceptable on a variety of levels, not to mention unlawful.

In many of the difficult instances I’ve seen, teachers and related service providers have not been properly trained on what to do and/or have had critical resources withheld from them by the powers that be.  When parents understand that teachers and service providers are usually jumping nervewracking hurdles within their agencies behind the scenes, a more constructive and collaborative way of working together can be developed and the professionals can come to regard the parents as resources rather than additional obstacles.

Teachers and related service providers, like parents, need to check their emotions at the door when it comes time for meetings with parents and co-workers. I once attended an IEP meeting for a little girl who was being raised by her single dad and the little girl’s teacher, as it turns out, had a mad crush on the dad. This same teacher was actually a pretty decent special education teacher in terms of her caring for her students and how effectively she communicated with them. But, the school district she worked for had trained its special education staff incorrectly on how to write IEP goals, resulting in IEPs filled with nonsensical gibberish. 

The exasperated father kept going back to her asking for clarification, which she was more than willing to oblige, and calling new IEP meetings to better describe the goals without really getting anywhere productive. As a professional person, he knew what kind of standards he was held to when it came to goal-setting and he just couldn’t fathom his daughter’s IEP goals. 

I wrote a letter to the district explaining why the goals were completely unacceptable and an IEP meeting was again called to address the goals. He and I went to the IEP meeting where this teacher, who had tried so hard to please this frustrated parent using the knowledge and information she had, bawled uncontrollably throughout the IEP meeting.

The teacher took the parent’s hiring of advocates to address the goals she had written as a personal attack, despite the fact that the real failing was in the way the district had trained her to write the goals and not something that we’d ever blamed her for specifically. Her sense of rejection was only further amplified by the fact that part of her motivation in working so hard with this parent was because she was attracted to him and, clearly, if he had hired a quasi-legal representative to respond to her efforts, her affections were not?being returned.  It was one of the most uncomfortable IEP meetings I’ve ever attended.

That certainly doesn’t happen to me every day. But, I’ve gone to a number of meetings where teachers or service providers were defensive, rude, condescending, and inappropriate because they were bad people doing bad things. I went to a meeting once where a mean and nasty speech-language pathologist had produced a very poor assessment report on behalf of the district that failed to include any subtest scores, making it impossible to see whether the child had demonstrated subtest scatter (subtest scores that are not close together, indicating relative strengths in some areas and deficits in others, as opposed to the subtest scores more or less being about the same regardless of the areas tested). When I asked for the subtest scores, she sneeringly advised that she couldn’t provide them because she had shredded the assessment protocols (the booklets in which the student’s actual answers and scores are recorded). Shredded them!!!

In California, unlike many other states, assessment protocols are considered part of a student’s records and, therefore, must be maintained as such (meaning that parents have the right to copies of them). Here, the assessor had destroyed a protected student record and for what She couldn’t prove that she had properly administered and scored the assessments in addition to the fact that she couldn’t really show how the child had performed on them. 

On behalf of the parents, I immediately disputed her results and asked for an independent educational evaluation (“IEE”), which is basically a second opinion by an outside assessor not employed by the education agency, at public expense.? The only way the district could have turned down the request would have been to take the family to hearing to assert the appropriateness of its assessments, which it couldn’t do because the speech-language pathologist had shredded the evidence.  The district sensibly agreed to the IEE.

The thing I hope you take from this posting is that teachers and service providers are people too. Parents and administrators need to understand this but nonetheless expect the utmost ethical conduct from teachers and providers as well as a legitimate interest in learning whatever they can to make sure their students receive meaningful educational benefit. 

Teachers and providers need to understand that protections are in place (see our first posting of November 11, 2008) to prevent them from being retaliated against by their employers for doing what they think is right by their students with disabilities.  Administrators need to be sensitive to the feelings of pressure they may be inadvertently placing on teachers and providers to say and do things that betray their moral judgment. This is the kind of thing that leads to teacher burn-out and prompts service providers to leave public education and go into private practice.

Teachers and providers need to have confidence in their own voices and insist that they be provided with the training and supports they need to do their jobs well. Disenfranchisement is the usurper of success and depriving our children of success is an unacceptable outcome for us all.

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Emotions Part 1 – Parents

Parents come in every flavor and how each of them responds to the demands of advocating for a child with disabilities varies from one to the next.That said, there are some basic assumptions that can be generally made about parents of children with disabilities and they are, as follows:

  • Parenting children with disabilities can be harder than parenting children without disabilities or, if not harder, hard in ways that most people could never even imagine. This can be particularly true for parents juggling the needs of more than one child, aging parents, and/or demanding jobs.
  • Parents of children with special needs went through pregnancy or adoption having the same dreams of success and happiness for their children that all parents have. It can take some parents a while to adjust to the idea that their children are disabled and the path they will have to travel is different from what they expected it to be.
  • No child comes with instructions and becoming a parent, particularly a new parent, involves a lot of figuring it out as you go. The frustration and feelings of inadequacy that often come with being a parent in general can be magnified when you become the parent of a child with a disability. You can end up kicking yourself much harder for your mistakes because more is on the line (or you at least perceive it that way).
  • That said, many parents get through the initial stages of worrying themselves sick and settle into a reasonably comfortable mode of having a pretty decent handle on things for the most part, getting occasionally derailed by arbitrary medical, educational, or other service issues that arise involving agencies responsible for serving their children’s needs. When that happens, these parents can become angry.
  • Being the parent of a child with a disability makes a person emotionally vulnerable. You can be reduced to feelings of frustration, fear, and failure in a nanosecond. When people actually step up and help you out, you can be so eternally grateful that you are brought to tears of relief.
  • Asking for help is hard for some parents. When they finally bring themselves to do it and they’re met with resistance or game-playing, they can become incensed. When they ask for help and are received graciously with understanding and integrity, they will often become the best players on the team and defer where appropriate to the expertise of others.
  • Disabilities that involve serious behavior challenges can turn an entire family upside-down. Parents of children with these kinds of needs are often exhausted, exasperated, and overwhelmed.

If you are a professional working with parents of children with disabilities, it’s important to take their feelings into account and truly respect them. Some of the ugliest behavior I’ve seen as an advocate has been public agency personnel mocking a parent’s emotional response to a difficult situation or using the parent’s response to discredit anything the parent has to say.

If you are a parent, realize that many people are uncomfortable with emotional displays and will use any emotional response you have as a justification to take you less seriously. Getting angry and blowing up at people almost never serves you. Crying during IEP meetings can be perceived as instability and weakness on your part and can cost you credibility.

When developing an IEP for a special needs child, parents need to go in and stick to the facts, treating the process like a business transaction. Speak from the heart and with good faith intentions, but remember that the purpose of any IEP meeting is to create the content of your child’s IEP, not belabor how certain people or events make or have made you feel.

If you fear that you’re going to break down or blow up about something, save it for later when you can write a to-the-point letter describing your concerns. If it’s that upsetting, you’re probably better off making the record anyway. Plus, when you deal with upsetting situations in writing, you can take your time and choose your words more carefully (which is important because written communication can become evidence under certain circumstances and you always want to think about how what you’ve written could be perceived by a Judge or investigator).

Additionally, when you’re exchanging communications in writing, the folks who are responding to you are more likely to think about what they’re saying before they go flying off the handle, too. In any event, they aren’t sitting across the table from you saying things that push your buttons and set you off.

Respecting the feelings of everyone involved in any collaborative process, such as an IEP meeting, is just common courtesy. Parents are usually the most emotionally invested members of the IEP team. After that, teachers who truly care about their students are usually the next most emotionally invested members of the team. Disrespecting their emotional investments in the child at issue is a mistake on the part of any of the other IEP team members. The emotional investments of parents and teachers in children with special needs make them more likely to come up with creative, appropriate ways to get the job done.

What are your thoughts and experiences on this topic? Post your comments and let us know.

If you advocate for a child with special needs, consider purchasing a copy of Wrightslaw: From Emotions to Advocacy: The Special Education Survival Guide.