Public Policy Topics – Page 3

December 31, 2021January 1, 2022

Poll for Jan. 15, 2022 Meetup

I have started an online special education advocacy group on Meetup, and our first bi-weekly meeting is scheduled for January 15, 2022. In advance of our first meeting, we’re collecting information about what will be discussed.

If you intend to participate in our upcoming meeting of January 15, 2022, or would otherwise like to inform the discussion, please answer the following poll question by no later than January 10, 2022:

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I’m looking forward to expanding our outreach to parents and professionals involved in special education through Meetups. Feel free to share this information with others who might benefit from it. ~ Anne

December 23, 2021January 13, 2022

Amazon Gift Card Contest

KPS4Parents will be giving away a $10 Amazon eGift card on March 31, 2022!

It’s easy to enter to win.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ask-anne-episode-56535240

Just watch this introductory video for Ask Anne and post a special education-related question below or on this video’s post on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/posts/ask-anne-episode-56535240.

You can also submit your questions for Ask Anne at https://kps4parents.org/home/anne-m-zachry-m-a-ed-psych/submit-your-questions-to-ask-anne/.

Ask Anne is a patron-supported program on Patreon in which KPS4Parents’ CEO and lead advocate and paralegal, Anne M. Zachry, M.A. Ed Psych, answers questions submitted by parents of children with special needs, professionals who work with special education students, advocates and attorneys for children with special needs, and others with questions about how publicly funded special education is supposed to work.

With more than 30 years of field experience advocating for children with special needs, designing and evaluating individualized educational programs, supporting attorneys in special education and disability-related complaints and litigation, and filing complaints with state and federal regulators, Anne has insight into the technical requirements, evidence-based practices, and public education agency politics.

Give us a good question for an upcoming episode of Ask Anne by midnight Pacific Time on March 30, 2022, and you could win the $10 Amazon eGift card.

Only serious special education-related questions will result in contest entry. The winner will be chosen at random from valid entries and announced on March 31, 2022 at 5pm Pacific Time. Selection of questions are at the sole discretion of KPS4Parents.

All questions actually used in upcoming episodes of Ask Anne will include a shout-out to those who asked them plusHonorable Mention shout-outs to up to 10 people who asked great questions that didn’t quite make it into each episode.

The winner, the individuals whose questions are used in our upcoming episodes, and our Honorable Mentions will all also receive a handwritten note of thanks from Anne. We hope you find this an engaging way to get answers to your special education-related questions and look forward to answering your questions in upcoming episodes of Ask Anne.

Submit your valid special education-related question to us for consideration and entry into this Amazon eGift Card Giveaway. There is no limit on the number of entries per participant, so long as each entry is a unique, legitimate question specific to special education appropriate for Ask Anne.

To view past, present, and future episodes of Ask Anne, subscribe on Patreon.

December 23, 2021December 23, 2021

Recent Uptick in Behavioral Challenges

Now that the Fall 2021 half of the regular school year has come to an end and all the students on my caseload are on Winter Break, I’m taking advantage of the break from back-to-back Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings to reflect on the most serious issues I’ve had to deal with so far during this first half of the current school year.

While I’ve had to deal with a lot of different challenges, it is the impact that the lack of appropriate services during shutdown, from March of 2020 to August or September of 2021, that has hit hardest. It’s been the absolute most hardest on my students with intensive behavioral services in their IEPs who have suffered the most regression and lost educational benefits. School districts all over Southern California, and likely elsewhere throughout the State and beyond, refused to provide in-person services to children on IEPs who required them in order to continue learning during shutdown.

This was in spite of explicit changes to State law that mandated in-person services for those special education students who needed it and compensatory education for any special education students who lost educational benefits during shutdown. Not only were in-person services denied, compensatory services are still being denied as school districts act like their students’ regression has nothing to do with the fact that the districts failed to provide in-person services to these children during shutdown.

What was done instead? Aides employed originally to provide direct, in-person support to these students in the classroom setting were put on Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, or whatever else platform their employers were using for distance learning as remote participants. How in the Hell an aide on Zoom was supposed to provide the supports necessary to facilitate the student’s participation in online learning via Zoom was anyone’s guess. It consistently failed to work.

Further, even though the new laws clearly made it an option, only one of my students’ districts hired a non-public agency (NPA) to provide in-person behavioral support services in the student’s home during distance learning so the student’s behaviors could not be permitted to allow him to escape/avoid the instruction. Instead, they rewarded his participation and prompted him to return to task when his attention wandered, so he was able to make excellent academic progress during distance learning.

What he wasn’t able to work on was his social skills with peers and adults in normal everyday settings. When he returned to on-campus learning, his classroom behaviors became increasingly challenging and the behaviors of the other students in the class became escalated in response. It eventually got so bad that the other students in his non-public school (NPS) classroom assaulted his NPA behavior aide because they blamed her for keeping him in their class. He triggered them that badly.

We ultimately changed his placement right before Winter Break started and a due process case for the involved district’s utter failure to offer or deliver a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) for the last two years is now pending. Settlement is entirely possible, which I can’t discuss in detail, and the IEP team has come up with a strategy to hopefully salvage his education for the moment, but this is a student who is able to meet academic standards in spite of his grossly impaired social skills.

Our concern is that he will graduate with a diploma and get arrested the next day for acting out in public. His behavioral needs have been exacerbated by shutdown because he didn’t get any instruction or practice in behaving in socially appropriate ways when in-person with peers or adults at school. In part, this was because the NPS he had attended had a “philosophy” that failed to conform with the evidence-based scientifically valid practices of the NPA that was providing his behavioral interventions.

As such, NPS staff regularly failed to abide by the Behavioral Intervention Plan (BIP) in the student’s IEP, much to the frustration of the NPA experts who had designed it and much to the danger of the Behavioral Intervention Implementation (BII) staff who was assaulted by my student’s classmates because he made them so upset. Rather than work collaboratively with the experts hired to address his behaviors using methods proven to work by science, the NPS staff would engage in ad hoc interventions based on whatever ideas popped into their science-denying minds in the given moment, none of which worked.

Most of the students in the NPS had mental and emotional health needs, many of which arising from past trauma, but our student had autism and just didn’t know how to read the room. It was dubious as an appropriate placement from the outset, but the ecological factors of the on-campus setting weren’t a problem during distance learning.

It wasn’t until our student, who not only has autism, but also ADHD, started attending on-campus, which required him to be in transport between home and school for a total of five hours per day, and then attempt to behave in a socially appropriate manner among other students with serious mental and emotional health needs, that things really fell apart. He might as well have been put into a rocking chair in a room full of long-tailed cats.

The harm was inevitable. And, as always, he’s being blamed and vilified while no one from his school district offers something appropriate to his needs. We’re hoping the interim placement he has for now will benefit him more than where he’s been, but it’s still less than ideal. It may take a judge to figure it all out.

I’ve had two other students on my caseload face expulsion just within the last few weeks. One student’s case just recently settled after the involved school district attempted to assert that behaviors that were clearly associated with the student’s disabilities somehow magically were not, during a Manifestation Determination (MD) IEP meeting.

The only way for a parent to appeal an MD IEP meeting outcome is to file for due process. Because the student is facing expulsion, the hearing is automatically expedited. This gives parents very little time to prepare for hearing, much less find adequate representation.

I was able to refer this family to an attorney right away who was able to handle the MD appeal via due process. We were lucky to find a really good attorney who could take the case right away and handle it. Most of my attorney colleagues are overwhelmed with the volume of cases they are getting, right now. The violations are everywhere, evidently, and this failure to provide in-person services during shutdown when they truly were needed seems to be a recurring theme.

This case settled because we were able to move quickly through the process and find a good attorney who could handle going to an expedited hearing if necessary or otherwise negotiate an appropriate settlement. Not everybody is having that same experience, these days. This family was lucky. The violations in this student’s case were pretty egregious and the attorney was able to convince the involved school district that it wasn’t worth going to hearing.

My other student facing expulsion still awaits a decision from school site administration as to whether the principal should just let the IEP team effect a change in placement for special education reasons rather than subject this student to expulsion proceedings. Again, the involved school district tried to claim that the student’s disability had nothing to do with the behaviors, which was simply ridiculous.

The student already had behavioral interventions built into his IEP to address the very kinds of behaviors for which he was in trouble. He had a history of escalating to the most outlandish behaviors he could think of to come right up to the line and just barely cross it enough to get himself kicked out of school to avoid the instruction. He hated it that much.

He had transitioned to his current placement in a Special Day Class (SDC) for special education students with behavioral challenges from a special school where all the students had behavioral challenges at the start of the 2019-20 school year and had been largely successful for most of that school year, until the shutdown started in March 2020. During that time, his targeted behaviors of work refusals and avoiding the classroom setting altogether were entirely reinforced by being stuck at home on the computer while the aides from his SDC were also in their own homes using their district’s online meeting platform.

There was no one in his home trained in the interventions that were necessary to compel his compliance with teacher directions. There was no one who could make him even login. He had a baby sister at home and his mother was not about to have him triggered into angry outbursts in the home by trying to convince him to participate in the instruction with a baby in the house. Further, his mother was medically fragile and required multiple surgeries throughout the shutdown and afterwards. She was in no position to handle the angry outburst of a frustrated teenager with no impulse control due to ADHD struggling with the work because of a co-morbid learning disability.

We have a complaint pending before one of his school district’s regulatory agencies in response to its mishandling of his behavioral needs to date. He is now pending expulsion for a behavior we’re fairly convinced he engaged in so as to be kicked out of school. We don’t believe he ever had any intent to hurt anyone, but he did enough wrong for someone who doesn’t understand the function of his behaviors to think he might pose a credible threat. Law enforcement determined he posed no threat. It appears that district personnel may have exaggerated the severity of the behavior on purpose to justify expulsion.

All that said, the expulsion case may be dismissed if the district agrees to simply let the IEP team refer this student back to his previous placement at the special school. It was successful in preparing him for his transition to a comprehensive high school placement before shutdown; it should be able to return him to that state and help him transition back, again, with success. We also have a ton of new assessments pending to figure out what the most appropriate IEP for him should be, going forward.

This situation may deescalate before it has time to turn into a full kerfuffle. If we can all just agree to work together to address this student’s serious behavioral regression through the IEP process and avoid the expulsion process altogether, particularly given that this district is being looked at very closely by one of its regulators right now for failing to adequately support this student thus far, already, we can implement a solution that will eliminate the parent’s need to pursue accountability.

The goal isn’t to nail the school district’s hide to the wall; the goal is to get the student appropriately served as quickly as possible. Nailing hides to walls should only take place if it’s absolutely necessary to get a student appropriately served as quickly as possible. It’s a last resort option.

I have yet another student whose case is pending settlement, hopefully. It would be foolish on the part of his school district to allow it to go to hearing. I can’t discuss much about it while it’s pending settlement, but suffice it to say his school district totally blew it by failing to provide in-person behavioral services and supports during shutdown.

He has a host of learning challenges including partial vision loss, severe autism, intellectual disability, a seizure disorder, extremely limited communication skills, and self-injurious behaviors that frequently result in property damage in his home. His windows now have Plexiglas® panes and the dry wall in his home has been replaced so often, his family has lost count. He has made frequent trips to the emergency room and urgent care for medical treatment after hurting himself during an outburst. He has hurt his petite mother by accident.

He’s now a young adult who is still eligible for special education and he’s had these behavioral challenges his entire life. He’s been a student of the same school district his entire public education career. It’s not like they don’t know what he needs. Before shutdown, he received intensive 1:1 and 2:1 behavioral supports throughout the school day to keep him safe and engaged in the instruction. He got none of that at home during shutdown.

His mother was left to be his 1:1 aide support during distance learning over a computer while his actual aide support staff stared back at him from the screen from their own homes. He was immediately triggered into violent outbursts because he didn’t understand why he wasn’t at school with these people instead of looking at them on a computer screen. His participation in distance learning had to stop immediately for his own safety and that of his mother. It’s been a struggle ever since to get an offer of appropriate services in his IEP as a prospective matter of FAPE, much less with respect to all of the compensatory remedies he’s due.

This student’s case has been referred to a different attorney than the one mentioned above, but also an amazingly talented and smart one. Because settlement terms are still being discussed, I can’t speak much further to the matter, but I think the point is made that this is happening way too much. We’ve got too many kids who didn’t get what they needed during shutdown who are now owed compensatory remedies and they have until March 2022 to file for due process on their claims.

Special education attorneys who represent families are working at capacity with respect to their caseloads. That said, there have now been enough cases litigated and settled since the increase in claims began that openings are starting to come on many caseloads. Others are bogged down by appeals, which are largely occurring in the federal District Courts.

Some attorneys are having an easier time these days than others, just depending on whether they get good judges at the due process level, or have to work the appeals system before they get to someone willing to take the time to really listen to the arguments and examine the evidence relative to the rule of law and applicable science. That’s always the chance that attorneys take with these cases, and it’s not fun to work the appeals, I promise you.

I’ve provided paralegal support on cases all the way up to the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, and there is nothing more tedious than a Table of Uncontroverted Facts, because there are always facts that become controverted between the parties. The back-and-forth between the parties about what facts were agreed to, which ones were disputed, and all the references to the evidence and testimony on the existing record from the original due process case and previous appeal to the District Court that supposedly supported each party’s asserted facts, became one of the most exhausting exercises I’ve ever engaged in as professional. I have ADHD – Inattentive Type, myself, so trust me when I say it was grueling.

Litigation should always be the very last resort to solving a special education problem, but these days it’s been necessary. For those of you finding yourselves in similar circumstances, I’d like to share a decision from the California Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH).

I downloaded the PDF of this decision just in case it ever gets taken down in the future, and have uploaded it to our site. Click here to download the PDF of this due process decision from California in which the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) found in favor of a student who was deprived of educationally necessary in-person behavior services during shutdown, if the link to the OAH site doesn’t work. In this case, the ALJ ordered compensatory services as remedies to the student.

If this decision can help you argue for resolution to your own child’s lost educational benefits during shutdown, whether via due process or just a sensible discussion with your school district’s representatives, it will have served its purpose as a persuasive authority on the subject. If you find it necessary to hire an attorney to file for due process over shutdown-related deprivation of educational benefits, be sure to share this authority with your attorney. They may have very well already seen it, but if you can relate the facts of your own child’s case to the facts of this due process case linked to here, you will help bring your attorney up to speed regarding your child’s claims, so you can timely file your case before March 2022.

You may also choose to use this decision to support your arguments as you advocate for your own child in the IEP process as a parent. If you share this decision with your school district’s IEP team members and relate the facts of your child’s situation to the similar facts in this due process case, presuming your child’s case follows a similar pattern of a denial of behavioral services from his/her IEP during shutdown, your school district may be compelled to work with you rather than have you lawyer up and then have to deal with the costs of a legal action.

Parents’ attorneys’ fees and costs can be recovered from the offending school districts as a condition of settlement or upon prevailing in due process or appeal. School districts are smart to work things out through Informal Dispute Resolution (IDR) Agreements or Confidential Settlement Agreements, if they can. The costs of due process and any subsequent litigation are far too great for taxpayers to fund when those dollars could be spent on educating children, instead. Spending education dollars on fights over the deprivation of educational benefits just adds insult to injury, honestly.

The evidence is increasingly making clear that far-right politics have way too much influence on public education at various levels of government, from local to state to federal education agencies. This is how public service was infiltrated at its weakest point. Extremists would get elected by an uniformed or misinformed electorate, then hire their cronies to work for them within their agencies, undermining the efficacy of local government while mishandling the finances in order to “prove” that government doesn’t work while arguing for increased local control and reduced regulatory oversight.

Then they pay themselves more than they’d ever earn in the private sector where job performance matters as they slash resources to those expected to actually deliver on the agency’s mandates who work beneath them. This is the climate in which special education violations occur. This is why public agencies defy the regulations to the detriment to some of our most vulnerable children, many of whom coming from low-income households whose parents are often at a loss as to how to fight back. Most parents won’t do anything because they don’t know what to do and don’t realize how badly their children are being hurt in the long run.

If you are a parent whose child did not get appropriate services during shutdown, and who has regressed and may require compensatory services to be brought back to where he/she should be in school, right now, you’re not alone. Whether you negotiate resolution on your own with you local education agency or hire someone to help you, know that many other parents have already started to fight this same fight before you, and some really helpful decisions are coming out of the various venues that can help bolster the arguments you and/or your representatives make on behalf of your child.

I hope this helps you put your own child’s situation into perspective and gives you some ideas on how to go forward in the most constructive and least adversarial way possible. I can only imagine the other families’ stories that out there similar to the ones I’ve described and the case captured by the decision linked to above. All of you are in my heart and I’m praying for you all.

#specialeducation #disabilityrights #disabilities #childrenwithspecialneeds #positivebehavioralinterventions #positivebehavioralsupports #appliedbehavioralanalysis #evidencebased #evidencebasedpractice #regulatorycompliance #compensatoryeducation

October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

An Appeal to My Colleagues

*Urie Bronfenbrenner, Human Development Researcher*

I have a million other things I need to be doing right now, but this is one of those moments where if I don’t stop and purge these thoughts from my mind into print, they will torment and distract me until I do, so the sooner I finish this post, the sooner I can get back to work without continued torment and distraction. I wasn’t intending to post, right now, because my caseload is blowing up and my other endeavor, The Learn & Grow Educational Series, is starting to require more of my attention lately as it continues to experience its own growth and expansion. My plate is full, but it’s the reasons why it’s full that prompt me to stop what I’m doing and post this today.

In the course of analyzing the incoming bombardment of data that is my life, I’m seeing the connections between the specific issues I’ve chosen to take on with my professional skills and the turmoil being experienced by the world at large, right now. I’m seeing common allies and culprits across issues, and recurring themes and trends that can be generalized from the work I specifically do to the work that needs to be done overall to cure the defects of reparable systems, and overhaul and replace systems that no longer serve us.

Today’s post is an appeal to my colleagues to think beyond the bubbles and silos in which you may exist as professionals and recognize the need for your respective skills to contribute to much larger solutions on a much simpler scale. Capable, ethical, and responsible people each making what contributions they can along they way, just in the course of doing what they were already going to do, can reshape society into a healthier version of itself. We need to see our everyday activities as substantial contributions to the world that exists around us and appreciate that every little decision we make really does matter. If enough of us are thinking right and making the smart, ethical, and responsible decisions, we can help influence those around us who are less capable, thereby loving our neighbors as ourselves and being our brothers’ keepers when necessary.

We each help make the world we live in be what it is through our individual actions with each other. Those actions and their outcomes become woven together into complex relationships that evolve into established systems supported by nothing but learned behaviors. We don’t do them because that’s the way things work; the reason why that’s the way things work is because that’s the way we do them. That being the case, we have every reason in the world to believe that enough smart, ethical, altruistic people can facilitate healing throughout society to a more powerful degree than a minority of fear-based thinking, hate-mongering cowards can try to destroy it. It comes down to mindfulness and living a life of purpose that serves the common good while also serving oneself and one’s immediate loved ones in healthy and constructive ways.

One of my favorite theorists from human development research is Urie Bronfenbrenner. The lame graphic below is one I created in graduate school so as to avoid a copyright infringement by grabbing someone’s more professional graphic off the internet, but it illustrates the model. Follow the above link for more information about Bronfenbrenner’s model, if you’re not already familiar with it or need to brush up on it. It’s quite sobering in light of current world events.

*Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Model of Development*

Bronfenbrenner realized that, while nature had a certain degree of influence on the raw materials with which each person started out in life, it was the environment in which that person was raised relative to those raw materials that dictated the unique development of that individual person. No two people who have ever existed, exist now, or will exist in the future will ever be entirely identical to each other because, regardless of genetics, actual life experiences that shape people through learning are never identical from one person to the next.

Genetics provide for a whole lot of variability, but they’re still technically finite in spite of their vastness. Environments are ever-changing; they must be adapted-to in the moment via individuals’ behaviors and over time via genetic mutation of the species.

For those of you among my colleagues in special education and related fields who are expected to individualize programming according to the unique needs of each constituent served, this shouldn’t be a leap of logic for you. For people unfamiliar with what it takes to truly individualize something for another person, particularly another person with diminished capacity to communicate their needs, it might as well be alchemy or voodoo.

The bottom line is that everybody thinks differently and has relative strengths and weaknesses. You can’t assume that just because it’s obvious to you, it’s obvious to everyone else. But, you also can’t assume that just because it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, either. The sword of understanding cuts both ways for each of us.

We’re each good at some things and not so good at others; that’s normal. Some people, however, are not so good at recognizing when they’re not so good at something. This goes to another body of psychological science, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that’s a whole discussion unto itself that I’ll link to but not delve into, right now. One lay person’s less-than-kind distillation of it, once it was explained to them, was, “So, basically, dumb people are too dumb to know that they’re dumb.”

The point is that those of us who get it have to carry the weight of those who don’t and/or can’t. It’s the opposite of authoritarianism, which demands the compliance of coerced individuals; what is called for, here, is the responsible stewardship of public service agencies to actually serve the public according to their mandates in conformity with the professional ethical standards of their involved professional disciplines.

For those of us supporting the needs of individuals with disabilities, we understand that the situation sometimes requires helping people exercise their informed choices as independently as possible. Other times, our responsibilities require us to protect the rights of those who are incapable of making fully informed choices without our help and are otherwise helpless and vulnerable to exploitation. We understand this better than most people and we need to recognize that we are collectively unique as a result. It’s not that big of a stretch between the issues of conservatorship abuse and voter suppression and nullification laws.

A whole lot of science in the areas of psychology, sociology, communication, behavior, instruction, organizational planning, leadership, and related disciplines has been conducted over the last 100 years. Many of us have access to that research but don’t make the time to follow it. I encourage every one of my professional colleagues to create a saved search for a specific body of peer-reviewed research and, whenever you are able to grab a free moment, take the time to run the search and read something new from the science that tells you something you didn’t already know, then think about ways to incorporate it into what you are doing in your work and follow through on applying them.

What small change in a routine task can you make that applies the knowledge you’ve gained for the better? Over time, how much better will things incrementally get with each little new thing you tweak after reading from your saved search? Is it a relevant authority to something you are currently writing? Does it help you better understand how to individualize a particular constituent’s goals and services? Is there another colleague who you think might benefit from the information with whom you can share it? Can you share your thoughts about it on LinkedIn and/or other professional online platforms in a constructive way?

Nothing exists in a vacuum. The more we recognize and honor the logical connections among our respective professions and how the science applies to out constituents and their service needs, the more we realize that Bronfenbrenner was right.

J. V. Wertsch, who worked with Bronfenbrenner, states in his 2005 review of Bronfenbrenner’s book, Making Human Beings Human,”Starting with the assumption that ‘to a greater extent than for any other species, human beings create the environments that shape the course of human development’ (p. xxvii), Urie has argued that it is incumbent on all of us to create decent, nurturing environments for human development.” [Emphasis added.] In my opinion, that’s something we have yet as a species to do; ants do a far better job of this than we do.

Unfortunately, because we still are not proactively applying Bronfenbrenner’s science as an ongoing element of how our society functions, we still do not love our neighbors just as we love ourselves and we are not our brothers’ keepers when our brothers go astray. We blame and punish people for having weak minds rather than remediate the effects of their shortcomings. As a species, humans generally treat their abilities as unfair advantages and use them to exploit others. They should be humbled by the responsibilities that come with their gifts and use them prudently with good intent, but in the absence of informed, deliberate planning, what has naturally been allowed to come to fruition is a society that rewards abuses of the rules more richly than compliance with them.

Those of us trying to facilitate functional independence among our most vulnerable children and adults know all too well that there aren’t enough of us with the necessary expertise to change the maladaptive behaviors in every bad situation that is collectively poisoning society, right now. The most we can do is the most we can do in our respective situations. We have to hope people will start copying our strategies that work when they see our successes. We need to start generalizing our successes into other areas where the same degree of expertise is not available, just as a matter of making sure our democracy thrives and functions as it should according to what can be proven true and responsibly effective for everybody.

Further, we as a society have historically regarded those individuals on the cusp between “can’t” and “could with learning” as an acceptable shade of gray on the spectrum of social involvement, but now they have become an outspoken and increasingly violent minority of individuals who cannot successfully function with independence in the quickly evolving world. They don’t know how to adapt but they can still wreak havoc on their way down the tubes.

The only difference between “can’t” and “could with learning” is the provision of instruction. The outcomes of both are the same if no instruction is made available; there has to be the “with learning” part in order for the choices of the person who can learn to differ from the choices of the person who can’t.

The problems we are seeing in the world today from misinformation being spread on the internet goes to the degree to which many internet users have no idea how search engines and social media algorithms indulge subjective biases and feed them whatever will increase their engagement without regard for how those choices impact the individual user or society on the whole. When all of our individual choices put together collectively shape the fabric of society, an artificial intelligence that only reinforces user engagement with neutral disregard for the quality or nature of that engagement will, by design, radicalize the most violent of the weakest minds into acts of terrorism. It weaponizes a previously harmless sub-population by turning them against us in irrational, violent ways and selling them the products to do it.

At the end of the day, humans are again proven to be part of nature and not something separate from it. The natural consequences of poor choices eventually catch up to people, one way or another. Sometimes other, innocent people become collateral damage along the way, and its in the interest of minimizing those numbers now and ultimately eliminating them as soon as possible that those of us who already work in professions helping people with disabilities need to generalize our skills into other aspects of human need where possible. What those of us working with individuals challenged by mental health issues already know can be imperative to addressing domestic terrorism.

As an example of generalizing one’s skills beyond one’s professional area of focus, while I still represent students with disabilities and consult with their parents as a lay advocate, provide paralegal support to attorneys representing students with disabilities in various legal proceedings, and design and implement compensatory programs for individuals with disabilities who were wrongfully denied services by publicly funded agencies, I also created something else using my knowledge and skills.

I created the Learn & Grow Educational Series to address food insecurity and sustainable living issues. The science of instruction is also the science of marketing, and social media can be used just as effectively to push learning as it can be used to push sales. In many cases, content creators push both, with the sales funding the instructional content and the instructional content driving the sales in a synergistic way; if it were organic, it would be considered symbiotic. The science I rely upon to determine appropriate educational goals and services for my learners with special needs is the same science I rely upon each time I create a new Learn & Grow learning experience for my online and in-person learners.

Through Learn & Grow, I’m able to teach people everywhere how to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables anywhere using free and/or inexpensive materials, even if they have no open ground for growing. I use evidence-based instructional practices to teach them how to make self-watering containers from buckets for patio, balcony, fire escape, and rooftop gardening.

These containers are water conservative, using as little as one-tenth the amount of water of in-ground growing, and self-regulating, meaning the soil is never too wet or too dry so long as the reservoir beneath it doesn’t run dry. These containers are portable, meaning renters can take their gardens with them when they move. I’ve moved my own garden five times since I first started it in June of 2013, and the goji berry thicket I started from seeds when I first started the garden is still going strong in its original container, giving me two crops of berries per year.

The design of these containers is totally open-source, public domain knowledge. What is unique to Learn & Grow is the body of evidence-based instruction and project ideas using this gardening method that I provide in person and which lives online through Learn & Grow’s website, Facebook page, Instagram account, and video channels on YouTube: Food for Thought and Learn & Grow with Emmalyn. This is where I was able to apply my skills normally used in special education and disability resources to address other types of challenges the world is currently facing, specifically food insecurity and climate change. In October 2020, I expanded the Learn & Grow curriculum to include sustainable living methods, starting with alternative energy sources and gray water recapturing.

I’ve most recently started conducting online Meetups using Zoom and Prezi for urban gardeners in the greater Los Angeles area who can benefit from Learn & Grow’s instruction regarding self-watering bucket gardens. Without any marketing, my online classes are getting bookings and my Meetup group continues to grow in membership. Once I start marketing it, I expect to reach a larger number of learners who want to be able to grow their own food in their apartments, condos, mobile home parks, and other limited growing environments. This is an adaptation to their environments I can help them make, a lá Bronfenbrenner, to create a greater quality of life using sustainable means in a very healthy way. If they get their buckets used from local restaurants or bakeries, they keep that plastic out of landfills and reuse it for something entirely purposeful.

For me, achieving increased food security, recycling, water conservation, and portability with a single solution is too good of a thing not to share. It’s not directly related to publicly funded services for individuals with disabilities, but it relies upon the same sciences to be successful. I can generalize what I already know from what I’ve been doing professionally for the last 30 years to tackle an entirely different area of need, and it’s not that hard. It’s not any harder than representing a child with special needs in a federal complaint or supporting a child’s attorney in due process, and I can do those things.

Plus, I’m taking advantage of online tools to automate as much of my Learn & Grow content as possible, so the planning phase is followed by the scheduling phase which is then followed by an automated implementation stage that frees me up for months to years at a time to focus on other things, like the individuals on my caseload. I can drip instruction just as easily as I can drip marketing messages using the same online tools.

I also recently rejoined my local Kiwanis club, which is a community service organization. I’m helping the club use Learn & Grow to provide self-watering bucket gardens to community-based programs, like adult day cares and preschools, as well food insecure individuals through local food pantries, hunger relief programs, and shelters. I’m able to address food insecurity through a more direct means by partnering with my local Kiwanis club, which has ample volunteers and existing trusted business partners willing to invest in the right community service projects with their donations. This is a win-win-win for all involved, and it only happened because I went outside of my normal professional duties to tackle another social issue in ways that only someone with my unique skill set could.

All of us have skills and expertise that can be generalized to another problem in the world other than the one about which you spend most of your time thinking. I promise you that finding some other way to express yourself and apply your skills to something hugely constructive towards making the world a better place will open your mind in ways that makes you a better thinker back on your regular job and give you a healthier outlook on life.

Food shortages and economic collapse were the unknowns I most feared back when I started Learn & Grow in 2013. That was only made more real when Learn & Grow was discovered by panicked Venezuelans in 2016 when their country’s economy collapsed and their government subsidized food supply collapsed along with it, leaving them with no food in their stores and no more coming any time soon. I’m not afraid of that, now. My garden has grown to sixty-one self-watering containers and I have four laying hens who give me eggs throughout the year. Come what may, I’ll be okay for food.

The shortages in the stores at the start of the pandemic and the supply chain shortages happening right now have only been slight inconveniences compared to what could happen if the whole supply chain were to collapse altogether. Most people have become dependent upon it, and that’s dangerously unhealthy. If the commercialized food supply collapsed tomorrow, what situation would you be in?

As much as I live and breath special education and disability resource science and law, I can’t have figured out a way to dodge the bullet of a collapse of our commercialized food supply, have the ability to teach people according to their individual capacities to learn, and not use my skills to teach other people what I’ve figured out to survive a very dire time of food insecurity in this country. And, I know I can’t be the only one.

I know there are others of you out there who see issues with social justice, public health, climate change, domestic terrorism, and/or the ongoing threats to our democracy that would benefit from your unique perspectives and skills. Something horrible happening in the world today has factors in common with a problem you’ve already solved. Your solution translates into something that can be generalized to solve other serious world problems. Don’t keep it to yourself.

I’m not special; I’m just specialized in my knowledge and skills, and they can be applied to more than one context. That doesn’t make me unique; it makes me a member of a unique sub-population of individuals with relevant skills.

You, my professional colleagues, can do something about society’s ills today without it being political. Helping people everywhere grow their own food doesn’t take sides in anything. Everybody needs to eat. Food is a basic survival need no matter what somebody chooses to believe. Individual food security is a highly personal and universal topic with which every person can relate. So is access to clean drinking water, safety from violence, affordable housing, and a host of other issues begging for your expertise.

Most cultural disputes are about access to resources, and the United States is experiencing a cultural civil war, right now. It is fueled by misinformation meant to tear our country apart being published online by bad actors exploiting the capable hands of people with weaknesses of the mind who fear losing what they have to imaginary threats they believe to be real. People who can’t or won’t face their real problems will imagine things to be their absolute worst without confirming whether they actually are. They catastrophize things. It’s a symptom; it’s not healthy. It’s a feature of anxiety, which is always about lacking predictability. They cling to the familiar because they can’t predict anything else and their fear of the unknown is greater than any discomfort they may feel, if any, in their predictable routines.

People who can’t actually understand what is really going on have no sense of predictability about what is about to come. They will pin their expectations to what they want to happen next as opposed to what the facts dictate will happen next. They can’t follow an evidence-based thought process, so they substitute it with wishful thinking, but unrealistic expectations are just preconceived resentments. When things don’t turn out according to their wishes, they get mad at reality and insist that it bend to fit their fantasies rather than adjust their expectations according to what actually is. They don’t understand everything going on, so they can’t adjust their thinking according to all the relevant facts.

How can you, as a professional, interact with people who exist in this state without demeaning or condescending to them? Can you interact with them fully understanding that, like many of the individuals with disabilities we serve, these people are doing the best they can with what they have and they need our loving, responsible guidance to find their ways to the right side of things? If we just help them address their needs in more pro-social ways, they won’t feel compelled to attempt to meet them in anti-social ways. It’s basic ABA.

I’m asking my professional colleagues to please strongly consider using your knowledge and skills to address any of the many nonpartisan issues that are currently challenging the human species, right now, that are outside of your normal area of practice. See if there is a Kiwanis club in your local area that could use your help. Identify an unmet need in your local community and find out what is needed to address it, then find other people who have the necessary skills that you lack and start your own thing. Just find a way to contribute, even in a small way, to a nonpartisan issue in your community that isn’t currently getting enough attention.

The technology available to us today is a tool, but, like a hammer, it can build or kill depending on how it is used. I’m with Urie Bronfenbrenner on this one; we should use our knowledge and resources to make the world a place that meets everyone’s needs, rather than a place that meets the needs and wants of those who know how to exploit and take advantage of those who don’t. The tools now available for people to collaborate and get things done remotely, thanks in no small part to the necessities that arose with the pandemic, are phenomenally powerful and easy to use. The tools to create online content decrease in cost and become increasingly rich in features over time, and most people only need a few good features to make stellar content. Learn more about the ways you can participate in your citizenship in nonpartisan ways by studying the research on servant leadership.

If you find yourself in an environment in which acting in the short-term for immediate gain comes at the cost of considering the long-term consequences, and you can’t be a positive influence for more responsible thinking and planning, get out. You’re wasting your precious gifts on people who will never appreciate them and would use them to harmful ends if you let them. There are other places you can go where your gifts will be appreciated and put to proper use, where you can earn a decent living and live with yourself in peace. You just have to take the time to find it or create it. That’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it.

There is no way to memorize a script for every possible thing that could happen in the future in order to be prepared for if/when it happens. Nobody can remember that many scripts, much less predict every possible future in advance and develop a script for it before everything changes and new scripts are needed. Living a life that follows the same specific script in order to keep it predictable is a symptom, not an adaptive strategy. That’s not participation; it’s approximation. It’s parallel play.

The only way a collective of people can work together towards a common goal is to act according to common guiding principles. For example, if everyone helping with Learn & Grow agrees with and abides by the guiding principle of, “Make sure everyone can grow enough healthy food to survive, come what may,” whatever decisions they face along the way will come down to whether or not their choices facilitate everyone growing enough food for themselves, come what may. If you have a fixed outcome in mind, it’s the next best thing to having a script for every possible contingency. Having that fixed outcome limits the number of actions you can take, so it whittles down your choices to a more manageable list of alternatives. The more ethical conditions that have to be satisfied by the solution, the narrower the options, meaning the easier it is to decide.

What makes leadership and decision-making so overwhelming for most people is the sheer number of possibilities and figuring out which one makes the most sense. By using a consistent, agreed-to guiding principle as a “North Star” for decision-making, team members can be consistent among each other with their choices and actions towards achieving the common good. We don’t need a savior to swoop in and save us. We just need to be mindful of how our actions throughout the day shape the world around us and consciously choose actions that promote the things in the world we want to see based on what we’ve learned from all of our life experiences, including those most commonly associated with work, even if at only the tiniest level. It all adds up in the end, and every little positive contribution matters.

This is mindfulness meeting purposeful action, and I hope you’re inspired use your gifts to help in impactful, constructive ways that remind everyone you touch that we only get through these terrible times by working together. Because of your professional skills, you’re in a unique position to help humanity survive this time of upheaval and transition and thrive once the worst of it has passed. I look forward to seeing what truths each of you end up speaking to power over the next few years and appreciate the efforts of all of you who choose to contribute in ways you can towards a better tomorrow for everyone.

September 4, 2020August 22, 2021

Pandemic Era Special Ed.

This video is not a regular part of any of our YouTube or Patreon programming. It’s something that we just needed to put out there because there are a lot of parents looking for answers, right now, and we have at least some answers that can benefit many families of children with disabilities and an ethical obligation to share that knowledge.

This isn’t a short video, but that’s what the pause button is for. You can always save it and come back to it later to finish, if you need to. You can watch it once and save it in case you need to refresh your memory later on about something. It’s a tool to help parents still dealing with shutdown and distance learning involving their children with special needs.

We’re going to leave this up on our YouTube and Patreon channels, our Facebook page, and our blog for so long as it remains relevant because we expect a whole lot of families will be going online searching for answers throughout this current new school year as the pandemic continues to rage throughout the country. No one really knows how long it will be before the pandemic is brought under control, and we all have to be prepared for shutdowns to come and go periodically as flare-ups happen until it is finally reigned in. Right now, many areas are currently on shutdown, including many parts of California.

Mentioned in this video, are two reference items:

New California legislation and California Department of Education (CDE) guidance as to school districts’ duties under the law, as supplemented by the new legislation, including the provision of in-home, in-person special education services if they are necessary for students to receive a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) during shutdown: https://bit.ly/3jInffh
A recent stay-put order issued by California’s Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) requiring in-person, in-home services to implement a student’s IEP during shutdown: https://bit.ly/3hZfnFA

Additionally, in the video, the procedures adopted by one school district to provide in-person, on-campus special education assessments during shutdown using appropriate safety protocols were referenced. They can be viewed here: https://bit.ly/3jOkycf

Also, the book, From Emotions to Advocacy, by Wrightslaw, was referenced during the video as an excellent resource for parents trying to keep their cool and work strategically as they advocate for their children with special needs. You can find it here: https://amzn.to/31WH0JV *

If you have questions about special education, including school closure-related concerns, please post a comment or email us at info@kps4parents.org. Find us online at https://kps4parents.org.

Facebook: https://facebook.com/KPS4Parents

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KPS4Parents

YouTube Special Education Quick-Fix Videos: https://bit.ly/2Z0951d

Patreon Channels: https://www.patreon.com/KPS4Parents

Anne’s t-shirt reads, “Science. Because figuring things out is better than making stuff up.” While we couldn’t find the exact same design, we found this great design with the same statement at: https://amzn.to/3i1d7xC *

* Note: Fundraising affiliate links are included in this post. KPS4Parents is a non-profit organization and funds raised are applied towards our costs of providing low cost and pro bono lay advocacy services to children with special needs and their parents who are unable to pay our regular hourly rate, which is billed at cost.

Donations can be made to https://paypal.me/learnandgrow.

September 25, 2009

Podcast: Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are not Appropriate

On November 27, 2008, we originally published. “Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are Not Appropriate.” As we begin to move into the new school year, KPS4Parents will be recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are not Appropriate.”

March 25, 2009

KPS4Parents Interviewed by LRP

I was recently approached by John Haughey, writer and editor for LRP Publications, for our input regarding a due process decision arising from a case in Chicago. For those of you unfamiliar with LRP, it is the publication powerhouse that supplies information regarding special education law, policy, and practices to public education agencies and the attorneys who represent them.

LRP maintains, through its website http://www.specialedconnection.com/, the most comprehensive database of special education due process decisions from around the country, as well as state and federal appeal cases. With a subscription rate for full access at around $2500 per year, only the well-financed generally have access to this otherwise difficult to access public information.

Even so, many attorneys who represent students with special needs and their families will choke down this subscription fee for access to case decisions that provide appropriate authorities for their own work. Other products of LRP Publications are reviews of special education decisions and articles that discuss the subtle or not so subtle nuances of special education law.

Which brings me to the Chicago case about which Mr. Haughey, who is a very nice man, asked to interview me. KPS4Parents very much appreciates the opportunity to lend perspective from the child and parent side of the issue to LRP’s work. For many who work with families of children with disabilities, and who are leery of LRP because of its strong affiliation with the public education agencies and their attorneys, we hope you appreciate that LRP was actively reaching out to hear the child and family side of the issue.

While the way our comments were reported doesn’t provide the full context in which what was quoted was said, we stand behind what Mr. Haughey wrote of our input. Unfortunately, because this article is copyrighted by LRP Publications and you have to be a subscriber to their site to see it, we can’t give you access to the whole thing. However, LRP was kind enough to agree to let us audio record my interview with Mr. Haughey and we were given consent to quote Mr. Haughey’s quotation of me from his article.

The Chicago case was one in which a special education student was awarded compensatory education in the form of placement in a private school for children with learning disabilities at public expense after his school district was found to have denied a free and appropriate public education, or FAPE, to him. In this case, it seems, the school district had placed so much of an emphasis on placing this student in the least restrictive environment, or LRE, that it had failed to consider whether he could actually receive educational benefit in a general education setting.

I was one of several people from around the country interviewed for Mr. Haughey’s article. Also interviewed were a public school principal in Wisconsin and a special education attorney in New Hampshire. While I had the benefit of reading the decision issued by the Illinois Hearing Officer, I did not have access to the transcript of the hearing or the evidence, so I have to take the decision at face value. That said, I know from personal experience that hearing officers are extremely challenged to get all the fact exactly right, so I was still left with some unanswered questions after reading the decision.

It was an interesting read, nonetheless, and what I want to focus on here is the case as represented by the hearing decision. I offer our sincere respect to the family involved in this case, particularly considering that the case reflected in the decision is probably not exactly reflective of the case the family attempted to have tried. I also offer our most emphatic support of the student in this case because it was this young man’s life about which this case resolved. He is the one who will have to live with the consequences of what this case did and did not yield on his behalf. So, to the extent that I’m about to talk about this case as though the decision is 100% reflective of the facts, and I’m about to use it as a generic example for the benefit of others, please do know that we very much understand that this was really about one boy and his right to learn to read, write, and do math and very much appreciate that this family stuck its neck out in an effort to effect change.

The decision in the case at issue here reflected a number of shortcomings that the LRP article, which was brief, did not go into. One of the issues was that the assessment data fell far short of the mark and this young man’s IEP teams were without the data necessary to make informed decisions regarding what was or was not a legitimate offer of a FAPE based on his unique learning needs. So, there was this first undermining of the process that ultimately made it impossible for the rest of the process to be properly executed.

The decision doesn’t specifically speak to whether the parents’ participation was meaningful in the IEP process, but I would argue that an IEP meeting denies meaningful parental participation if the information necessary – that is, data that explains what the student’s needs are – is not made available to the parents so that they can make informed decisions. Likewise, most parents are clueless regarding what data is necessary and how that data should be used. They are left to trust the judgment of school officials who may or may not understand their obligations under the law to special education students.

What was implied by this decision was that the school officials believed it was more important to place a child with an above-average IQ in the general education setting regardless of what his actual learning needs were than to examine the full continuum of placement. The decision suggests, and LRP’s article comes right out and asserts, that there was an emphasis placed on the LRE requirements more so than on what constituted a legitimate offer of a FAPE. I have to question this interpretation to a certain degree. That’s not exactly what I got out of reading this decision.

Yes, it’s true that, according to the decision, the District asserted that it only offered placement in the general education setting because it perceived that setting to be the LRE and that the student didn’t require a more restrictive placement. That may have actually been true.? Where the District may have fallen down was not necessarily?where the services were being provided but whether the proper services were being provided at all. The decision doesn’t address this consideration.

If you go back and look at our blog posts of the past and read the articles regarding the IEP process, you quickly come to understand – if you didn’t already know this – that services and placement are the last things discussed by the IEP team. What drives the selection of services and placement is the goals. The goals describe your intended outcomes of intervention and services and placement are the vehicles by which the goals are meant to be achieved. To the extent that the child can receive services such that his goals can be achieved in the general education setting, placement in the general education setting with non-disabled peers should occur.

In the Chicago case, it was not clear from the decision that there was any examination of what services could have been provided in the general education setting that could have seen the child benefit from his education. The decision reflects that only accommodations and modifications were made in the general education setting, not that services were pushed in or provided as supplemental supports.

Now, that said, this had apparently been going on for a while. As a result, the student had failed to receive educational benefit for years. By the time his case got to hearing, he was due compensatory education to make up for the years of lost educational opportunity and, at that point, the only real way to provide him with that kind of remedial support was to put him in a very restrictive setting, that being a private school for children with learning disabilities.

There very well may have been a time when placement in general education with appropriate supports and services would have rendered educational benefit and prevented all of this from ever happening. But, we’ll never know. The decision doesn’t speak to what would have been a FAPE for him in the past. It only speaks to the harm done by the District’s inappropriate offers of only accommodations and modifications in the general education setting for this student and the fact that compensatory education is now due to the student as a result of that harm.

This brings me to the next consideration: the use of the term “LRE.” As we’ve stated in blog articles before, the LRE?- the least restrictive environment – is the setting in which the student can receive educational benefit with the most exposure to typical peers and the typical school experience as possible. It’s relative to the student’s unique needs. This was the aspect on which I was quoted by Mr. Haughey in his article for LRP Publications.

Mr. Haughey wrote that I said, “LRE is relative — relative to the needs of the child,” which is true. Mr. Haughey went on to write: “Zachry advises parents to ask these questions in determining if the general ed placement is appropriate for their child: ‘Is it going to achieve the outcome you are looking for Are we leveling the playing field, or are we putting him on a completely different playing field?'” ?This advice actually was intended for the entire IEP team, not just parents.

Mr. Haughey also wrote that I said that parental pressure often can allow institutional bias for mainstreaming to go unchallenged, but did not include the context in which my statement to that effect was actually couched. This is something I want to clarify before my words are used to fuel the anti-parent bias that already pervades the public school community, and which some attorneys who represent public education agencies actually exploit for their own financial gain.

It is true, and I’ve written in our blog on this before, that most parents really do not understand the special education process. That’s one of the reasons we publish our blog in the first place. It’s also true that far too many professionals in special education really do not understand the special education process, either, which is another huge reason we publish our blog.

People on both the school and the parent sides tend to put placement before everything else, treating special education as a place rather than a service, even though placement is only one aspect of a special education student’s program and the last thing the IEP team should consider. So, again, we have this case out of Chicago and the attention that LRP is giving it that both focus on the placement more than anything else and I can’t help but wonder about the message this is sending to the folks in the public education community. Does this reinforce the false notion that placement is the only really important thing to talk about and that present levels of performance and goals are just procedural fluff?

It is also true that there are a great many parents out there who, in the process that parents follow in coming to terms with being told that their children have handicapping conditions, are in a stage of denial and, in their ignorance, think of special education as a place rather than a service to help their children learn. These parents view special education as a label – a “Scarlet Letter” – that will brand their children as though it is somehow advertised who and who is not on an IEP.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t insensitive clods in the public education system who have no sense of student confidentiality, but for the most part, public school employees do not go around blabbing students’ personal business to the other kids. Generally speaking, kids with learning disabilities and other “hidden” handicaps blend in with everyone else and no one knows they’re on IEPs unless they tell their peers themselves.

So, the parental fear of the child being labeled is often a rather irrational one. But, it’s also a natural stage of the process that every parent goes through. Sometimes it’s a fleeting moment before the parent moves to the next stage towards acceptance and proactive involvement, but sometimes parents get hung up at this stage for a while – or even indefinitely.

Like the stages of grief, how long a particular person spends at each stage of the process depends on that person’s individual growth and development as a human being. It’s unfair and inaccurate for school personnel to presume that all parents are in denial. Most parents of children with special needs experience at some point a great deal of relief of finally understanding what is going on with their child so they can start constructively coming up with a game plan. They get past the denial at some point.

But, while parents are in that denial phase, they are often resistant to the application of the term “special education” to their children, particularly if they are in denial at the time that their children are found eligible for special education services. They envision the proverbial “retard room” from their childhood educational experiences and can take any identification of eligibility for special education as a condemnation of their children’s potential. This is truly unfortunate. Within this context, it is true that parental pressure often can allow institutional bias for mainstreaming to go unchallenged, as Mr. Haughey reported.

Sometimes, however, it is the student’s bias that’s the problem, which Mr. Haughey and I discussed during the interview, as well. Sometimes the student doesn’t want to be placed in a more restrictive setting out of embarrassment, but is also embarrassed in the general education setting by not being able to keep up with peers. In a situation like this, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That’s a really hard problem to overcome and usually comes down to the parents telling the student, “Look, this is the way this is going to go down and you’re just going to have to deal with it,” regardless of what the placement determination turns out to be.

In other instances though, and from what I could gather from reading the Decision in the Chicago case such was the situation there, the parents don’t really care so much about where services are provided so long as their kids get the help they need. The Chicago case seemed to me to be about a family asking for help for their son and not getting it, and the denials for help by the District being based on an inappropriate application of the LRE requirements.

Truthfully, what I suspect but would need evidence to know for sure, is that the District probably didn’t want to pay for the intensive remedial services this student needed and used the LRE as an excuse to deny them. Otherwise, no one at the District had a clue about what LRE really means and requires. Special education noncompliance tends to arise out of ignorance, petty politicking, or a combination of both. As with any due process case, we’ll never really know all of the truth about this situation, but we appreciate the opportunity to examine it and hope that my analysis provokes thought on the part of others to make the special education system better.

November 27, 2008

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.

November 24, 2008

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

November 19, 2008

The Big Picture – Special Ed Issues Impact Everyone

In June of 2006, I read an article in Commentary that scared the bejeezus out of me. The article was titled, “Why Have Children?” and was authored by Eric Cohen. After doing additional research, I wrote an article of my own titled, “Plugging an Important Hole in America’s Economic Dike: Preserving financial resources for a troubled future by educating the disabled” and hosted it on KPS4Parents’ web site at https://kps4parents.org/08_2006_article.pdf. I’m not going to repeat?everything you can read for yourself in these other materials, but I do have a few points to make. Here’s the Big and Scary in a nutshell: Our economy is a wreck. The biggest demographic cohort among us is the Baby-boomers. More and more of them are hitting what has traditionally been regarded as retirement age. A lot of them took a huge hit when the stock market crashed in the early 2000s. Recent developments with the real estate market, which has long been touted as one of the best places to invest, have taken their toll as well. Nonetheless, many Baby-boomers have assets for now and that’s giving many of them a false sense of security. With advances in medical science being what they are and what they promise to be, it’s not going to be long before living well past 100 is common. If a person retires at 65 and lives to 100, he or she will have to stash away 35 years of living expenses, taking into account the rate of inflation and the rate at which long-term healthcare costs are increasing. That’s a lot of money to sock away, particularly if the things this person has invested in over the years have failed to produce the additional income expected or the person has actually suffered investment losses. Well deserved motor home trips, vacation timeshares, and cruises to exotic locations may seem affordable now, but as some of these folks continue to spend on the fun things in life, or even if they’re just spending down their savings on day-to-day living expenses, at some point, a certain percentage of these folks are going to experience a medical situation that ends up wiping them out financially and then, in the most medically fragile state of their lives, they’ll go broke and end up dependent upon the Medic-Aid system at taxpayer expense in some Godforsaken nursing home for the remainder of their days. This may not be a huge percentage of the Baby-boomer population, but we already know that, statistically speaking, some percentage of our elderly have been ending up in this kind of a situation for a while now. Even if the percentage stays relatively the same, the sheer numbers of the Baby-boomers means that their percentage will translate out into a whole lot of people. This is going to place a tremendous burden on the taxpayers. At the same time, autism is occurring now at epidemic rates. With some sources insisting that we’re at an autism occurrence rate of 1 out of every 144 children at this point, we have to acknowledge that we are starting to get slammed with a need for increased spending in special education services. While there are certainly shining examples of how things should be done, there are also horrible travesties that most people don’t even know exist. We are a long way off from having a well-functioning special education system. Over the next 10-15 years, we’re going to see our workforce continue to shrink, particularly relative to the amount of people who will increasingly qualify for publicly funded services. Young people will become less and less?able to afford to have families and each generation will get smaller than the ones before it. The smaller generations that come after the Baby-boomers are going to end up bearing a significant share of the financial burden for the Baby-boomers’ care during their elderly years.? With each generation getting successively smaller, combined with the fact that so many jobs are going overseas that there is less domestic work to be done, what we’re going to increasingly see is a shrinking pool of taxpayers having to support an increasing pool of tax-dependents. Before this spirals hopelessly out of control, we need to pull out all stops and do as much as we can to educate all of our children well, including those with disabilities, so that we can produce as many competent taxpayers as possible and decrease the number of tax-dependents they will have to support. That means we need to invest in special education now, when these young minds are still malleable and ripe for learning. Unlearning bad habits once these kids reach adulthood is a nearly impossible task, particularly for more severely handicapped children. I don’t think you can appreciate that, really, until you’ve had a 23-year-old woman with cognitive impairments and hyperphagia lay down on the pavement in front of a city bus and refuse to move until you promise to take her to McDonald’s for french fries. I’ve had that experience and it was the direct result of a horrendous failing on the part of the agencies that were responsible for her in childhood to address her problem behaviors in a constructive way. At the time, it was my job to teach her more appropriate positive replacement behaviors to those she was engaging in, which meant teaching a person with a serious brain injury how to do something she didn’t necessarily understand or appreciate instead of what she had been doing all of her life. Whereas, working with children who have not yet formed very many bad habits can be a lot more fruitful. Children are simply more receptive to certain types of new learning than adults. While local education agencies may be operating out of a “not out my budget” mentality, they fail to appreciate (or don’t care about, or feel entirely powerless against) the bigger issue, which is the long-term cost to society on the whole that failing to provide special education services appropriately to eligible students now will cause. The costs of incarceration are exorbitantly high and generally fail to prevent recidivism. When you look at who is populating our prisons, you will find an enormous number of learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, mentally ill, and developmentally disabled people, most of them not getting any of the kinds of attention they need to pull their lives together, if that’s even possible for a number of them. And, while some areas are pushing to see state run mental institutions shut down and their inhabitants placed in the community with supports, there is also a push by the unionized workers of many of these facilities to keep these places open just so they can secure their jobs at taxpayer expense, not because their patients couldn’t handle a community-based placement.? We’re just warehousing our “broken” people or otherwise subsidizing them to maintain meager, unproductive existences rather than investing in eliminating or decreasing their need for publicly funded services and benefits. The cost of special education is nothing compared to the costs of taking care of disabled adults who can’t take care of themselves. It is unconscionable to rob children of their futures in the first place. But it is also reprehensively unethical of the public sector to short-change the taxpayers by creating a bigger expense through failing to fund a smaller expense, particularly while asserting the argument that the smaller expense wasn’t funded because they were trying to save money. When it comes right down to it, in every dispute over services for children with disabilities that I’ve been involved in, money has been at the heart of the matter.? Part of the problem, and it’s high time we do something about it, is that while the federal government has committed to funding up to 40% of each local education agency’s special education programs, it has not lived up to even half that in all the time that the laws have been in place that provide for the funding. The other disturbing thing I see, though, is that some local education agencies will gladly throw over $700K at legal expenses to deny $23K worth of services. And, then they shriek because they don’t have any money. I would far rather see public education agencies committing their legal resources to securing the federal funds they’re due than fighting parents over services the schools are required by law to provide. I hope I’ve made a compelling point here that this is one of the many serious issues troubling our nation and it’s a costly problem to solve. But solve it we must! The consequences of failing to do so are becoming increasingly dire. Additional Reading Recommendation: Futurecast by Robert J. Shapiro.

Category: Public Policy Topics

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