Online Trolls, Mental Health, & Social Justice

For the benefit of the majority of Americans who are capable of understanding what I’m about to say, I appreciate the opportunity to share some insights with you that might help you better frame how you think about current events and other people’s behaviors. For those of you who struggle to understand what I’m about to say, just know that the point is to find a way for you to still be included in the public discourse with as much understanding as can be achieved. We want everyone making thoughtful, informed decisions and not just reacting emotionally to things they don’t understand, which requires patience and understanding on everyone’s part.

Recent events have inspired this post/podcast, and they arose around other online content I’d already published and then promoted through Facebook Ads, which was probably just asking for it. Facebook has become a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories abound as they are passed around among our least informed and/or least emotionally stable members of society and boosted by Facebook’s algorithms.

Even though our content was supposed to be targeted to pro-democracy users, enough people on Facebook are apparently hate-searching the same hashtags as those used by pro-democracy activists and then posting hateful messages full of misinformation, which likely feeds the algorithm information about their user habits that increases their ability to engage with pro-democracy content without regard for how they are actually interacting. The algorithm is looking at the frequency and duration of a user’s involvement with content, not the qualitative nature of what that involvement looks like.

Hateful comments are just comments to the algorithm. Clicks are just clicks, regardless of the beliefs or intentions of the users doing the clicking. These algorithms are configured to increase the exposure of frequently clicked- and commented-on content based on its popularity with users, regardless of why it’s becoming popular.

This is how social media has been weaponized by bad actors to feed lies and misinformation to unsophisticated users who have no idea that their behaviors are being reinforced for all the wrong reasons, which effectively manipulates them into behaving in hateful ways with increasing intensity over time. My working theory about what reinforces trolling behaviors is that it’s automatically reinforcing because there is an internal adrenaline rush that users get when their posts and comments gain popularity and get shared, which gives them emotional validation. It’s a protest behavior that gets reinforced and maintained by attention from others.

It is only people who are starved for emotionally validating attention from others who seek it out online and fall into the deep well of online trolling behaviors to get it. If that’s the only source of validation and feeling “successful” in their lives, they’re going to do it. The solution is to give them a more appropriate functionally equivalent replacement behavior that still allows them to express their wants and needs such that they are validated with attention, but more importantly, that are met with more powerful reinforcers than the ones they receive by trolling. We’ve got to give them something more rewarding than what they get from spewing hatred while still giving a voice to their wants and needs, as well as access to appropriate solutions.

These are not our brightest problem-solvers. These are the people with arrested emotional development and limited coping skills who resort to name-calling and hostile behavior because that’s the best they’ve got. They feel trapped in a life they can’t handle where their wants and needs go unmet and they don’t know how to appropriately advocate for themselves. Emotionally speaking, they are simply very old children.

Thankfully, only a handful of trolls found our online content. All of them were adult males, mostly middle-aged or older and white, based on their Facebook profiles. All of them were triggered by a single word in the title of the program being promoted, which is our Social Justice group on Meetup, in which I conduct live events and share content with group members who are interested in learning how to participate in the advocacy processes of publicly funded programs to enforce their rights as program beneficiaries or the rights of other eligible beneficiaries who need help advocating for themselves.

In our Meetup group, I take my experiences working in special education, regional center, rehabilitation, and other publicly-funded programs for people with disabilities and generalize them to the same processes and procedures that exist within other publicly-funded programs that exist to benefit citizens with other other types of need than disability. Many of these other programs address social welfare issues, like housing, food, and healthcare.

Americans pay into these programs so that they are there for them if and when they need them. If we’re going to pay taxes to pool our resources as the Public to achieve economies of scale and efficiencies that we otherwise wouldn’t have on our own as individuals, then those resources and economies of scale better provide for us when we need them.

There is nothing un-American about expecting the American government to work and being worried and angry when it doesn’t. What is un-American is failing to abide by the rules already in place and making excuses instead of improvements as a public servant or a voter. If the existing rules create more problems than they solve, then responsible leaders in local publicly funded agencies raise these issues with their legislators and don’t stop making noise until the problems get fixed. They don’t go, “Oh, well. That’s just the way it is in the ‘real world,'” and fail to solve the problems.

I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again, here, that Project 2025, which articulates the literal plan for a white “Christian” nationalist take-over of all the bureaucratic mechanisms of government, is nothing new. It’s what I’ve been up against since I first started working as a lay advocate in 1991. It’s what I was up against when I participated in the most litigation of my career in the mid-2000s through 2012 as a paralegal, supporting attorneys in special education mediations and due process hearings, as well as court trials in venues ranging from state superior courts to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal. It’s why I went back and got my master’s degree in educational psychology in 2013; I knew I needed to come at these issues from a more informed, expert position to be more effective.

The anti-everything-not-like-themselves by some of the least competent members of society who, through privilege and cronyism, have managed to acquire power, is nothing new to me. There is nothing more reckless than giving someone with low intelligence and emotional instability access to a whole lot of money. I’d have to go through the whole origin story of the public education system and how other public programs were modeled after its administrative design to explain how we got here, and that’s enough information to create an entire college course titled, “The History of American Public Education.”

Let me just cut to the chase and say it’s been a political shit-show from the beginning and that all of the laws that prohibit discrimination in the public sector are there because these knuckle heads have been in there undermining and sabotaging the system from within all along. They have been doing this so that they and their like-minded collaborators can point to the failures of the system they caused as “proof” that this system of government is a failure and should be replaced with something different, like giving them total control with no accountability.

These are the people who want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and make it so that only wealthy elites can afford to educate their children, while depriving the general public of access to information and learning that will allow them to participate with understanding in our representative democratic government. There is a reason that the pre-Civil War slave owners didn’t want their slaves to learn how to read; a literate, intelligent, and informed group of slaves was capable of planning and executing an escape or even an overthrow of their masters.

By depriving the American public of a sound, responsible public education system these hostile elites would hoard all the knowledge and only use that of it which would give them an even greater unfair advantage over everyone else, while ignoring anything that potentially highlighted any errors in their thinking. This would prevent the public from knowing how to take back its own power, live freely, and thrive for its own benefit rather than only for the benefit of the elites, while elites choosing to only acknowledge the facts that suit their purposes run everything into the ground by failing to abide by reality.

It is the least educated and/or least emotionally stable among us who become the most useful idiot minions of the anti-American elements in this country, which are fueled by money from self-serving domestic billionaires and foreign enemies, and facilitated by domestic and foreign influencers using online propaganda to exploit social media algorithms, radicalize these people, and turn them loose on the rest of us like ticking timebombs. Our current-day lone shooters are our domestic version of the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era.

Statistically speaking, a certain percentage of the human population has disordered thought to such a marked degree that their participation with social media brings on the worst manifestations of their symptoms possible. In the special education arena, I’ve got one student on my caseload who is so screen-addicted that she engages in property destruction with full-on screaming rages at home if she’s expected to put down her device and go do something with her mother in the real world. I’ve got another student who impulsively, without fail, will immediately gravitate to any social media app that has a chat feature and start trolling strangers because she thinks she’s being funny and she’s cracking herself up, but then they come back at her with equal venom and she has a mental health crisis that can escalate to actual self-harm or attempted suicide.

These are real issues that I’m dealing with right now in the real world, and these two students are hardly the only ones. These are just the only two cases on my caseload right now with these issues, but this has become an ever-increasing issue for a lot of students who I’ve represented over the last 15 years as internet use has become more ubiquitous throughout public education. For the student with the chat app issues, the school district hired a cyber security expert to figure out how to block any of the kinds of content that she might misuse on her district-issued devices, while still giving her access to the online content necessary for her classes and without a human being having to actively monitor her device usage throughout each school day.

All of that is great for understanding the nature of the behaviors and the challenges faced by those who engage in them, but what does one do about it? For me, that’s still a work in progress, but I can tell you how I’ve handled it so far and whether I think it’s working or not. It’s early days with me and the fascist trolls, and there have only been a handful, but I’m already seeing trends in the data emerging, not the least of which is the older white male observation I mentioned previously.

I’m totally using Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) to inform my responses to the trolls, as well as legal strategies I’ve learned from lawyers and judges over the years that can be generalized to other situations and contexts that align with the principles of ABA. One of those strategies is what I like to call “Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu,” in which I take control of the narrative by using their own language to defeat their own points, then redirect everyone’s attention to what my originally posted content is actually about and encourage people to join our group and participate in our live events.

In Jujitsu, there is a move whereby the enemy throws a punch, but you lean to one side, grab their arm at the wrist just below their fist, and pull them forward and down to the ground, using the inertia of their own punch and their own momentum against them while side-stepping the punch altogether. In “Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu,” with these trolls, I’m taking the energy of the insult or slur, mocking the ridiculousness of it as politely as possible by pointing out the truth in a friendly manner, providing immediate forgiveness to the offending party, following it with an analysis of why this person is engaging in this behavior and why everyone else should feel bad for the offending party rather than revengeful, and promising to pray for the offending party’s poor tortured soul or otherwise blessing their heart.

None of the trolls have replied back and no new hate posts have come in since I replied to the last one, though that could change. I’ve posted my replies to each troll’s posts almost immediately after they were made. None of my replies took their bait. They were looking to pick a fight with people who are just as emotionally dysfunctional as they are, and they’re not going to find that here. Engage in maladaptive behavior like that in front of us, much less in writing with a hot link to your profile, and we’re going to offer personalized forgiveness and explain why, then redirect readers back to the original point of our posted content.

We work with mental and emotional health issues and challenging behaviors every day. Trolls aren’t scary to us; they’re pitiful. They are victims of our country’s mental health crisis. They warrant our pity because they are so terribly troubled and broken and they deserve our effort because we need to keep them from becoming unsafe to themselves or others.

Trolls are mean to strangers online because that’s the best they’ve got. That’s a tragic way to live, and it’s not hard to see how people from this segment of society are easily radicalized into acts of violence over things that make no sense, particularly when the information they receive is manipulated to limit their understanding and provoke their anger through their strongest connection to the world: the internet.

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The other data point that emerged from how the trolls responded to our posted content about our Social Justice group on Meetup, was, as I stated above, a single word. That word was “Social.” The tiniest minds think that this automatically means “socialism,” which they then equate with “communism,” the definitions of neither being known to them, which explains why one of them referred to me as “comrade” in his disparagement of our post.

Here’s the thing: The point of the post was to promote our pro-democracy group and teach people how to participate in the mechanisms of democracy at the local level, all in the pursuit of a just society in conformity with the Constitution of the United States. None of them actually read about what we were doing. They saw the word “Social” in the title and were immediately triggered. The irony was totally lost on them that they were using “social” media to spew their moronic hatred towards our use of the word “social” in the title of our online events.

For people who think anything that uses the word “social” automatically means “socialism,” and you oppose socialism, then you need to get off of “social” media! And, God forbid you attend the Sunday Ice Cream “Social” at church after service, or the commies will start kicking in the front door of your house before you even get home. It’s a freakin’ word with multiple uses, depending on context. The title of our group is also a play on words with a “social” justice education initiative being carried out using “social” media and online meetings to interact in a “social” way to talk about how to uphold democracy at the local level. Tinier, fragile minds didn’t get the pun or the point.

Those of us who are not so badly compromised as that have a responsibility to take care of those of us who are, not ignore or exploit them. We are our brothers’ keepers and it takes a village. Humans are social animals by nature, so we need to figure out better ways to socialize with each other than what we’ve got going on right now. We have plenty of existing psychological, sociological, anthropological, and historical information to make wise, informed decisions as a populous, but that information is not equally available to everyone and educational equity is necessary for the survival of our species.

We can’t figure out how to work together if we’re too busy being pitted against each other by those in leadership for their own selfish purposes. Looking out for each other and collaborating for the mutual benefit of everyone is consistent with the teachings of every great religious leader the world has ever remembered, and none of them preached hatred or violence. These same values are also consistent with the rules of our democracy.

One piece of advice that I can give to sane, rational people dealing with trolls is to not look at what they post as an overture to start an actual conversation and engage in any kind of legitimate debate. Don’t take their bait; they’re just looking for someone to disagree with them and call them names back. That’s their idea of two-way conversation and social engagement, but it’s all one-sided and they’re too impaired to see it for what it really is. They approximate and mimic conversational behavior, but they can’t actually hold a real conversation, at least not while they are triggered and escalated. The adrenaline rush of a heated exchange is often as close to getting emotionally engaged with other people as they can get.

Troll posting is a ritualized behavior that includes scripted speech, which is not the same thing as a two-way conversation. Two-way conversations require both parties to listen with comprehension and think about how what each person says relates to what the other person says, and negotiate in some kind of way to reach a mutually agreed-to conclusion about whatever is being discussed. Troll posts are nothing like that. Troll posts are one-sided cries for help from mentally and emotionally anguishing people.

What has made all the difference for me when I encounter these kinds of behaviors in any social context is to recognize that this isn’t a conversation, it’s a ritualized behavior that includes words, at which point I can’t take whatever is being said seriously because it’s only function is to get an emotional rise out of me and engage me in a dispute. I’m only interested in a real conversation. I have no reason to reinforce that behavior by giving the person what they were looking for and engaging in a heated dispute with them.

That would give them my sustained attention in the form of an attempt to convince them they are wrong, which they would never do, which would make them feel powerful and leave me drained and exhausted with time I’ll never get back wasted on the whole endeavor. If I took the bait and wasted time I can’t spare to argue with a troll, then I’d be kicking myself afterwards for letting myself go there, and the troll is still living rent-free in my head. Hell, no!

By understanding that the function of the behavior is automatic reinforcement by way of making the troll feel powerful when they bully someone into submission, you can redirect them to a more functionally appropriate way to feel powerful without acting like an asshole. If I took the bait, it would be an open invitation for them to visit their wrath upon me, so I’m not taking the bait. However, I will take the opportunity to reclaim the narrative and redirect other people’s attention back to what actually matters. I can turn a troll post into a marketing opportunity for my event by using their drama to get other reader’s eyes on the back and forth, and further pique their curiosity about our live online Meetup events.

One of the motivating ideas behind trolling behavior is to come on strong so as to presumably present as a strong person. But, truly strong people don’t actually act like that. Truly strong people don’t give a shit whether people are impressed by them or not; it takes too much energy to care and there are far too many other more important things to worry about in life than that. Truly strong people just take care of their business and don’t have a need to come on strong when they disagree with other people.

These trolls are weak people acting how they think strong people act, as seen through their eyes as people who are regularly ignored or exploited by others who are stronger than them. They can’t actually conceptualize what stronger people must be thinking or feeling; they can only observe the outward presentations made by stronger people and attempt to emulate what they think they are seeing.

People who are lacking in competencies have historically found themselves on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing more than once in their lives for making mistakes that a more competent person would never make. From their perspective, it may seem that yelling at people and accusing them of being deficient is what being in charge is all about. Therefore, according to their logic, if they go around yelling at people and accusing them of doing bad things, they should be put in charge.

This strategy sometimes actually works for them in the short-term, but their actual lack of skills dooms them to ultimate failure. They can’t actually handle the responsibilities that come with the power they manage to acquire and their efforts to fake it until they make it blow up in their faces because they are literally faking it and have no idea what they are doing. Dressing for success is pointless if you don’t have actual job skills.

A good public-facing example of this is Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is being investigated for financial improprieties with public funds and who, with each new investigation or investigative finding being reported in the media, passes new statewide executive orders that violate the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States by banning the use of certain “woke” terms like “Latinx” or “pregnant people” in State documents. She’s apparently getting all the “mam-maws” and “pap-paws” riled up over nothing so they don’t notice her robbing them blind.

It has been alleged that some of the taxpayers’ money in Arkansas was used to send Governor Huckabee Sanders to Paris, France with her girlfriends to party and charged off to the State as a credit card purchase in an amount just shy of the $20K reporting limit on State employee credit card purchases as an allegedly fraudulent purchase of a customized speaker’s lectern that has yet to make a public appearance or ever be used to anyone’s knowledge. This alleged “Lectern-gate” matter is still being investigated, given that over $19K was spent by the Governor on a lectern with no actual lectern to show for it, the Governor allegedly bought it from a company owned by one of her girlfriends who went with her on the Paris trip, and said friend’s business does not sell lecterns as part of its normal course of business.

The abuses of authority alongside Arkansas’ long-standing low performance statistics as a state, such as with poverty, healthcare, crime, and education, reveal an entirely dysfunctional state government that is dependent upon other, better managed states that produce more tax revenues than they need to supplement Arkansas’ own tax revenues in order for Arkansas to function in any capacity at all. By contrast, for example, California has the 5th largest economy in the world and could function as a self-funded nation-state, if it had to. If Arkansas were cut off from the tax revenue it gets from states like California, there wouldn’t be enough money in the till for the Governor to steal.

Broken people may briefly attain power, but they usually don’t have the skills to hold onto it for very long. It takes a fleet of broken people working together from positions of power to do serious harm over extended periods. We generally regard these kinds of folks as being part of a conspiracy when they collaborate with each other to achieve dysfunctional ends on a large scale. But, as with “Lectern-gate,” these folks really aren’t all that good at covering their tracks and tend to leave a wake of destruction that serves as a mile-wide evidence trail. We’re seeing it happen right now with all kinds of folks from what’s left of the Republican Party, a great many of them being attorneys.

They’re banking on the rest of us being too exhausted to deal with their bullshit and just letting them go do whatever so we can stop and rest for a minute. Those are the moments they seize to do real harm. They wear us down to create exactly those kinds of exploitable moments. It’s like an emotionally abusive partner who always picks a fight right before bedtime that goes on for hours into the night, night after night, leaving the other person too exhausted from sleep deprivation to make rational decisions. A sleep-deprived person is inclined to cave in on everything just to keep the peace and impaired beyond thinking clearly about getting out of the relationship. This is also how unethical employers trap people in high-stress, physically demanding, low-paying jobs for decades on end.

Abusive people tend to do poorly in unstructured situations. The more the environment is configured to discourage abusive behavior by imposing structure, the easier it is to keep people busy doing things that are productive and healthy. One doesn’t have the time or motivation to go rob a bank if one is happily employed and well paid, for example. Not everyone handles unstructured time well and, when given too much freedom and left to their own devices, some people use their employer’s credit cards to go party in foreign cities with their friends.

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The bottom-line take-away from this post/podcast is that everyone deserves to live in a just society that treats them fairly, no matter who they are, and not everybody is healthy enough to appreciate what that means. We can’t take it personally when someone else doesn’t have the ability to get it, and we serve ourselves by looking out for that person and helping them meet their needs instead of shunning them and cutting them off. We need to take a serious look at the wants and needs of the people who pose the biggest threats to our democracy and then figure out the most appropriate ways to see their needs met so that they aren’t feeling “othered,” ostracized, and vindictive towards the rest of us.

Trolls’ behaviors seek attention for a reason and we’ve got to give them more appropriate ways of calling attention to their wants and needs without causing harm. I suggest we start by responding to the hateful comments left by trolls in the most loving ways possible, without being afraid to poke fun at how silly they are making themselves look with their hateful comments. React the same way you would to a 4-year-old who didn’t get what they wanted for lunch, and now they’re packing a bag in their bedroom while crying and threatening to run away.

Acknowledge their suffering because they’re upset, but be willing to chuckle at how silly it is to be running away from home over cucumber slices. You’re laughing at the behavior, not the underlying reason why it happened. It’s okay to hate the behavior, but try not to hate the person. You need to mentally separate the person from the behavior because they are two different things. They’re totally related to each other, but they aren’t one in the same. If trolls were better equipped to deal with life, their behavior wouldn’t be so bad. Nobody is awful on purpose just to inconvenience you. No matter how much Hell they visit upon you, it’s infinitely worse for them living in their skin. You can get away from them, but they are stuck with themselves forever.

Trolls only come on strongly because they are lacking the amount of strength they are attempting to project; it’s a lie and they are actually cowards. Standing up to them with logic and facts generally shuts them down. Your alternatives are either ignoring their comments and leaving them to poison your posts, or getting baited into a heated, emotional exchange intended to exhaust you and wear you down. Shutting them down quickly with logic and facts appears to achieve a respectable degree of damage control and refocuses other people on the actual messages that you’re trying to convey.

That isn’t to say that an entirely deranged hothead won’t resort to stalking someone who dares to shut them down online, but these kind of people aren’t the majority of the people spewing hatred online and even the stalkers usually leave an evidence trail a mile wide. Most of the online haters are cowards who will never show themselves offline to the same degree they expose themselves online. Name-calling and profanities are the best they’ve got.

I’ll save my name-calling and profanities for my private conversations with clients and colleagues, as well as occasional comedic bits in my online content, about the characters in public office we encounter who are obstructing the legitimate functions of our democratic government every day. We all need to vent and there is a time and a place for everything, including venting.

What you will never see us do is go out on the internet and post hateful comments on other people’s content. We may disagree and provide our reasons for disagreeing if we come across something that jumps out at us, and we may point out the potential adverse consequences of acting according to another party’s online advice if we think that advice is bad, but that’s not the same thing as name-calling and hate speech. There’s polite, informed dissent and there’s raving like a lunatic.

I hope this has helped you organize your own thoughts around how to work with people who don’t quite get it with a little more compassion, which has greater chances of helping you achieve healthy outcomes for everyone involved than ignoring them or attempting to argue with them about the flaws in their logic. Proactively, going forward, I encourage you to frame things with “I-statements” when presenting an opposing point of view, such as, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’ve always understood it to be the case that XYZ, and what you’re telling me doesn’t really explain that. Why do you think that is? What am I not understanding?”

When you put a single unaccounted-for variable in front of them and ask them to account for it, whatever faulty logic they were trying to assert falls apart and they realize they’ve left something out of the equation. When you see that they’ve realized they don’t know how to resolve what you’ve pointed out, that’s your chance to continue with your logical explanation for XYZ with language like, “Aw man! So, what I’ve been thinking this whole time is that, because ABC and 123, XYZ happens. Does that make sense? Am I missing something? I thought I had it figured out, but maybe I’m wrong. Am I wrong?”

At that point, you take ownership of the doubt they are unwilling to let themselves feel about their own perceptions of things, and the troubled troll starts to put things together logically in their own mind based on the simple explanation you’ve given in an effort to remain the voice of authority by giving you an answer. This allows them to arrive at the correct conclusion on their own by thinking it through without being told they are wrong and getting emotionally triggered.

If you impose structure on the thought process by identifying only the variables that matter and leaving out the extraneous fluff in an emotionally neutral way that shifts the element of doubt onto you, then ask for their opinion of what you’ve just said, you’re just asking for feedback on what you understand to be the case and correction where you’re wrong. There’s no reason for them to feel threatened by that and a lot of times it actually buys trust because then they’re able to say, “Well, when you put it that way, you’ve got a point,” or “I hadn’t thought about that, but now that you mention it …” and a rational conversation is more likely to happen.

One of the trolls who posted on my content asserted that it isn’t justice if it’s prefaced by an adjective like “social,” there’s only justice. That made absolutely no sense, but I was willing to entertain the idea, so I replied with, “Fascinating perspective! What evidence supports that argument?” and never heard back. That’s not a hostile response, but I’m also pretty sure there’s no actual evidence to support that argument. I’m willing to be wrong on that, but I guess only time will tell if he’s going to come back and educate me with some real evidence that proves me wrong.

In the meantime, I hope you are able to cope with trolls better after reading this, whether they show up in your life online or in person. All of this can be generalized to dealing with nasty people everywhere, but for our families who rely on us for advice about special education and disability resources, generalize it to every nasty person who stood in your way when you tried to get appropriate services and supports for your loved-one with special needs.

Ronald Reagan is given credit for saying, “Trust, but verify,” when it came to dealing with other heads of state and government officials. I think using that approach whenever anyone attempts to convince you of something. particularly if they are emotionally passionate about it, is always a best-practices way of dealing with them.

Ask for evidence in support of arguments that seem unlikely. Ask for their advice as to how to weigh contradictory information against what they’ve just told you. Don’t accuse them of anything or call them names. Treat your exchanges like dignified conversations, set the behavioral example, ask pointed questions about their assertions, and sincerely express interest in understanding their point of view. They do have a communicative intent to express an unmet want or need, but it can be difficult getting to the actual underlying message through all the behavioral chaos and word salad.

One of the parents I used to represent called the scripted speech from her daughter’s emotional outbursts “throw-up words” because they were just verbal barf that came with all the other out-of-control behaviors, not a real conversation. In the moment, she didn’t know what the Hell she was saying, and she usually felt terrible about it afterwards. The moment you can discern “throw-up words” from real conversation and stop caring about what is being said and then focus on why it’s being said, that is the moment you regain control of the conversation. The words are the symptoms and you need to treat the underlying disease, metaphorically speaking.

Express caring for their welfare and forgiveness for their crude behaviors. Forgiveness means they aren’t living rent-free in your head once you’re done responding to them; it’s for your benefit, not theirs. Let them stew in their own juices if that’s what they really want to do, but that shouldn’t affect the quality of your life.

Sometimes, all you can do is say, “Bless your heart, you poor tragic creature,” and move on to your own bliss without carrying the dead weight of their opinions or the living with the consequences of their behaviors. There’s no reason to feel bad about that. Love is doing what’s in the best interests of everyone involved, including yourself. And, so, on that note, thank you for hearing me out and, until next time, peace be with you.

Locus of Control in the Classroom & the World at Large

I watch the news and read up on a lot of court cases and pending legislation these days because all of it is related in some way with the work I do in special education as an advocate, paralegal, consultant, and direct services provider. Congressional spending, public policy changes, new litigation, and all kinds of other world events have direct bearing on special education and the individuals I assist and protect. Similarly, how the powers that be respond to the legally protected needs of the individuals I serve speaks volumes to the state of our democracy at the local level and the degree to which State and federal oversight is effective or not.

The concept of locus of control is not widely known or understood, but it should be. It’s a fairly simple developmental concept to understand for adult-level problem-solvers. It’s one of those things that, if the majority of intact adults understood it, it would contribute to what could effectively be psychological herd immunity against the fringe ass-hattery that is taking up way too much political and cultural space right now in our modern day societies, and help us restore and repair things to a more equitable equilibrium.

Locus of control describes a person’s understanding of the degree to which they have agency over their own lives. A person with mostly an external locus of control believes that life is something that happens to them and some other external force beyond their control is responsible. Having an external locus of control is normal for babies, but dangerous for adults. Conversely, a person with mostly an internal locus of control will assume responsibility for everything that happens around them, engaging in controlling behaviors as well as delusional thought, often to a narcissistic degree.

Living at either extreme of the locus of control spectrum is unhealthy. At one extreme is the willing victim and the other is the predator. As with most of these kinds of things in psychology, what is considered “normal” when it comes to locus of control can be expressed through statistics using normal distributions. Here, “normal” means the majority of people who fall along the locus of control spectrum between the two far extremes, with some mix of both internal and external loci of control depending on the unique circumstances relative to the individual developmental maturity of each person.

I don’t want to focus on the statistical outliers on that spectrum here. I want to focus on the majority of us who fall along the locus of control spectrum between those two extremes and how the relative ratio of internal versus external plays out in each of us such that it affects our behavior and how we raise our children to become intelligent, empathetic, responsible independent thinkers or not.

In order for us to apply the science successfully to the classroom and beyond, we have to first apply it to ourselves. We need to understand our own perceptions of locus of control before we can start thinking about other people’s individual perceptions of it and how that affects their behaviors and relationships.

A healthy concept of locus of control is somewhere in the middle between fully external and fully internal. The reality is that some parts of life are beyond our immediate control and other parts of life are entirely within our control. Rather than applying the concept of the locus of control spectrum to the person as a uniform monolith, one’s standing is better understood by applying this spectrum to a specific situation and asking, “How much of this immediate situation is actually within my control?”, and “How many things are actually within my control that can change this situation for the better?”

There is a commonly used prayer among Christians called the Serenity Prayer, which goes: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is the essence of the locus of control self-assessment in day-to-day life. I can think of no better tradition that captures how reality works with such scientific simplicity than this. Science doesn’t compete with religion, it measures the truth of Creation. When used responsibly, it reveals miracles that can teach us a great deal.

Sometimes the miracles are more magnificent than previously realized and only known once more data comes in, such as when Galileo asserted that the Earth revolved around the Sun rather than vice versa, which contradicted the teachings of the Church at the time. Unfortunately for him, he was found guilty of heresy and had to choose between 1) pleading innocent totally knowing that he would be found guilty and would have to spend the rest of his life in prison, or 2) taking a plea deal and spending the rest of his life on house arrest, even though he was totally right. The miracle is actually greater than what the Church was teaching, but it was afraid of losing the trust of its followers if it admitted that it had been wrong about the Earth being the center of Creation with everything in the Heavens revolving around it, so Galileo died a convicted criminal for asserting the truth of God’s actual Creation.

We’re seeing the same kind of thinking right now when it comes to climate change. The miracle is bigger and more magnificent than previously realized. Sadly, our abuse of the knowledge we’ve gathered as a species thus far has been to the detriment of the environment all around us. The harm we’ve done is now proving to us how things are supposed to work and what we’ve misunderstood in the past. The Creator speaks to us through our errors and lets us know when we’re failing to abide by the terms of Creation. We have invited harm upon ourselves through our own behaviors and now we have to change our behaviors to save ourselves. This goes directly to every person’s unique concept of their own respective individual locus of control.

There are now corporations whose very existence depend on us believing we need them. They don’t want to lose our dollars, so they can’t afford for us to lose faith in their businesses and they’re attempting to conceal the fact that what they are doing contradicts the larger miracles that have been revealed by science. I’m thinking of processed foods, farming-related dust bowls, and fossil fuels, here, and the amount of money spent on marketing and lobbying by these industries to influence how they are perceived by the public versus what they are actually doing.

These industries abuse the science to manipulate the masses with specific messages targeted to specific audiences, using algorithms to spread their messages online, and relying on normal human word-of-mouth discourse to take it from there. These are the same tactics used by political propogandists, and there can be a blurry line between corporate marketers and political propogandists. An informed public recognizes the attempts at manipulation for what they are and rejects them outright; an uniformed public becomes more easily radicalized and brand-loyal.

All of that goes to how locus of control operates on the larger scale. Understanding that, the next question here is, “How can that knowledge be applied in the classroom?” My response is that it depends on the ages and developmental levels of the students involved.

If you’re talking about young children or older students with developmental delays, these concepts need to be explicitly taught and the students need to be given clear, succinct, easy-to-understand descriptions of what they have the power to do for themselves and what requires the authority of others. Visuals, including classroom artwork and graphics, should be placed where students can see them during the school day to reinforce the messaging from the explicit instruction.

Honestly, if School House Rock were to make a new video teaching kids about locus of control, that would be amazing. Until then, it’s up to parents and teachers to learn about it and incorporate it into their parenting and classroom management practices, respectively.

With our older kids, my go-to is always Project-Based Learning (PBL). If the project is to assemble an Ikea cabinet using the instructions as a small group of three or four students, then it’s a great way to teach locus of control concepts. The students can’t change the physical features of the cabinet being built, the parts that come with it, or the instructions provided. That’s beyond their control. What they can control is their own behavior in response to these uncontrollable facts. How they go about putting together the cabinet is a choice. What they are putting together is not. This is a balance of external and internal locus of control to fit the situation.

It doesn’t have to be Ikea furniture. It could be anything. In our sister program, the Learn & Grow Educational Series, I’ve embedded this locus of control instruction into PBL lesson plans that require students to create self-watering gardening containers from 5-gallon buckets and use them to grow food. Anything that is project-based will come with fixed parameters that go to an external locus of control, and students will have to make choices and act upon them, which goes to internal locus of control, to achieve the intended outcome. For most people, having at least a little bit of external imposed structure helps them organize their thoughts and get things done.

Products that provide at least part of the solution by their very nature will impose some structure on the situation that limits the number of choices a person has to make to get the job finished. For example, simply having shopping carts available by the front door of the supermarket immediately solves a problem for shoppers that makes gathering what they need to buy without a huge hassle more accessible to them than if they had to figure out how to carry around their stuff while shopping on their own.

This can be equally applied in the classroom. A teacher can use a desktop office tray for papers and folders, perhaps several stacked upon each other. Each tray could serve a specific purposes, such as one for turning in completed work, one turning in notes from home and permission slips, and one for suggestions for making the classroom better, for example. The system could be designed to support the teacher’s classroom management strategy and impose some external structure on students’ classroom behaviors.

Simple organizational strategies that set the stage are often enough externally imposed features for our typically developing learners to develop effective and efficient learning practices, particularly if these practices are modeled by the teacher in the beginning and by other students once they adopt these practices as the school year progresses and these strategies are being regularly used. These strategies eventually become part of the routine because they work, freeing up mental energy that can then be invested in troubleshooting more complex concerns.

Routines are convenient because they relieve us from having to think too hard about what we need to do in the moment, which allows us to then think ahead about what else we can take on now. When we have a lot of actual thinking to do about other things, reducing the things we always have to do in the moment to simple, thoughtless routines is an efficient use of time. Routines that can be memorized using music can become some of the most relied upon routines in a person’s life, because music seems to amplify the strength of the routine -for most people when they are paired together. This has implications for day-to-day life, as well as classroom practices. It’s just a good strategy for life for most people, though everyone processes information differently and not all strategies will work for all people.

It appears that, generally speaking, it is normal for humans to strive for some kind of equilibrium that strikes a balance between external and internal locus of control. In general, we want enough external controls to limit the number of choices we have to make in a given situation, but not so many limits that the only options for us to choose from are bad ones. Too many choices and we can’t decide what to do. With somewhat limited choices, even if its the lesser of all evils, at least you can make the best of what you’re given to work with. With extremely limited choices, it really doesn’t matter what you decide because you’re screwed no matter what.

Creating a safe and nurturing classroom that fosters functional independence among its students requires the same kind of thought and planning as does creating a safe and nurturing society that encourages individual freedoms. An understanding of locus of control can go a long way towards improving both, and I’m encouraging you to invest the time to learn more about it, contemplate your own perceptions regarding your own locus of control, and consider how other people’s choices are influenced by their own perceptions of locus of control. It gives you a new dimension by which to consider other people’s behaviors, but it only makes sense once you’ve learned to understand it about yourself.

From there, you can begin to think about what someone else’s concept of locus of control might be. You must have a relatively healthy self-concept of your own locus of control in order to be able to conceptualize and empathize with someone else’s. You basically have to walk a thousand miles in your own moccasins before you’re able to walk a mile in someone else’s with understanding.

All of this goes, then, into a larger analysis of the function of a person’s behavior, which requires a behavior analytic approach. When you’re trying to figure out where another person is coming from, whether as a parent trying to understand your child or as an IEP team member trying to understand another member of the team, having a fairly accurate understanding of that person’s sense of locus of control about whatever is being discussed goes a long way towards understanding whether that person is going to seek solutions or make excuses for a problem you need solved.

In applied behavioral analysis, the function of the behavior is ascertained by determining what antecedents triggered the behavior and what consequences rewarded its use. Ecological factors are examined to further determine if anything specific in the environment, such as a specific noise or person, and/or any other specific circumstantial factors, such as time of day or disruption in routine, increased the likelihood of the behavior occurring in the presence of the antecedent. These exacerbating factors are referred to as “setting events” or “motivating operations.” Many professionals use the term “M.O.s” to refer to these exacerbating factors.

Some antecedents arise from internal body and/or mental states experienced by the individual that no one else can observe, which are referred to as “private events.” In other instances, the antecedent may be an externally observable factor, but there are private event M.O.s involved. Locus of control is an internal, private event, that often influences how a person responds to antecedents in their immediate environments, and it can often be deduced by observing the person’s behaviors. How someone reacts to external stimuli can reveal a great deal about how much control that person believes they have in a given situation.

Whether you’re talking about working with learners or participating in important meetings, understanding where another person is coming from in that regard can be an eye-opening experience that better informs how you need to respond to their efforts to work with or against you. It also tells you just how much of the situation is within your control and how much of it isn’t, so you can choose your actions wisely. It helps you discern that which you can control from that which you can’t so that you can exercise the courage necessary to achieve what is actually realistically within your reach, making as much positive progress as you are able and creating opportunities to create even greater improvements later on in time.

As much as I hope you are able to use this information to create and implement good IEPs, I equally hope you can incorporate it into your understanding of yourself and others and you progress along your own journey of self-discovery and growth as a person. The more we understand each other, the easier it becomes to relate with each other and work more collaboratively than competitively. I believe it is the responsibility of those of us who study these sciences to explain what we know about healthy human development so as to help humanity develop in healthy ways as time goes on. We need to be getting better as these kinds of things over time, and that can’t be achieved by withholding the professional knowledge from the general public.

I’m happy to democratize that knowledge to the degree that I am able, and I encourage you to do your own additional research into the science around locus of control and related psychological concepts. I hope this helps you develop a healthier understanding of yourself and others, and contributes towards your successful efforts to make the world a better place. I think this is critical knowledge for any and all parents participating in the IEP or 504 process for their children in the public schools. It’s relevant to understanding your child’s individual needs, as well as where everyone else on the team with you is coming from and how to respond to them in ways that are most likely to protect your child.

From an advocacy standpoint, it is important as a parent in one of these meetings to know if you’re being shut down by a bureaucrat agency loyalist enforcing an internal policy that violates the law because they believe they lack the authority to buck the unlawful policy, and are thus acting according to an external locus of control. Someone like this is incapable of legitimate problem-solving and it’s a waste of time arguing with them. This is when you, as a parent, may find it necessary to file a compliance complaint with your state’s education department, a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a due process complaint with your state’s special education hearing office, or some other legal action.

In a situation like this, once they’ve said, “No,” and blamed agency policy in spite of the language of the law, go straight to accountability. You’re wasting time trying to convince them they are breaking the law once you’ve made the record about it the first time. You may still end up resolving things through a confidential settlement agreement, but the offending agency may not be willing to make things right by you until you file something that gives it the opportunity to settle with you in secret. Sometimes, a governing board of a public agency will not authorize the costs of resolution unless it gets rid of a legal action; as a policy, they will not do the right thing unless/until they are forced to by a legal action of some kind taken by the parents.

When you’re talking about locus of control, such “leadership” starts out by laying heavy on the internal locus of control by choosing not to comply with the law, but shifts to external locus of control once a parent actually takes some kind of formal, legal action to resolve the matter. The only way the agency can regain and restore internal locus of control to the point of functional equilibrium at that point is usually to settle the matter by way of some kind of confidential agreement by which it gives up all kinds of considerations to the family but admits no fault on the part of the offending agency.

When you can understand the power dynamics that revolve around locus of control, it makes you a more savvy and practical negotiator. It makes you better at assessing other people’s credibility, as well. Most importantly, as a parent, it makes you a more compassionate teacher and cheerleader for your children as you help them navigate all of the situations and relationships they will experience throughout childhood in your care. You are better to yourself and everyone else being as whole as you can be. I wish you nothing but the best as you become increasingly healthy and whole throughout your journey through this life, and thank you for the support you provide to my efforts to bring this kind of information to you. Peace be with you, my friends.

Trauma-Informed Special Education Evaluations & Programming

Photo credit Kelly Short (colorized photo from circa 1936)

Attention is finally being given to the effects of childhood trauma on childhood development and learning, but it’s still not fully incorporated into the mainstream as common knowledge. Only when trauma-informed education becomes the norm can childhood trauma be prevented and responded-to with greater efficacy.

Because trauma often begets mental health issues, not the least of which being Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and can also result in permanent physical disabilities, depending on the nature of the trauma, individuals with such impairments can become eligible for protections under disability-related laws. This includes Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

For this reason, one would think that the special education community is conducting trauma-informed assessments and considering the trauma-related needs of its students with IEPs. One would be thinking incorrectly, however. I’ve lost count of the number of special education assessments I’ve seen that are entirely silent regarding the unique traumatizing events of a student’s past, like they just didn’t happen or are entirely irrelevant to the assessment process, including in mental health evaluations.

I’m dealing with one of those, right now, as a matter of fact. The very signs of trauma and the historical events that likely contributed to them were described in detail to the mental health assessor, and none of those details appeared anywhere in her report. So, basically, what I took from the situation was that some ding-dong baby doll who fell out of the lap of luxury and into a master’s degree in social work was dispatched to assess a student with some pretty significant symptoms who had previously lived for 11 months with her mother in their car and who had also witnessed her mother getting mowed down in the street by a car while they were crossing the street together at a protected cross-walk, leaving this student as a young child to scream for help in the middle of the street. None of these past traumatic events were discussed in the assessment report, nor were any of the symptoms that had been brought to the assessor’s attention. She interviewed the student once via Zoom and noted that the student wasn’t very forthcoming, and relied on classroom observations conducted by a school psychologist, who is not a mental health clinician.

Thankfully, once it was brought to his attention, the involved school district’s special education director was just as taken aback as I was and immediately agreed to fund an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) in mental health at public expense, which is basically a second opinion conducted by an outside, uninvolved provider, that is funded by the District. We’re in the process of finding an outside assessor to conduct it, but we expect the situation for this student to be resolved once it’s done. However, this was just the latest of several cases we’ve worked in this same District over the last 15 years in which trauma and mental health issues are not being properly considered, and it’s a problem that is not unique to this particular district. It seems to be a fairly systemic problem in cases we encounter from around the country.

So, I want to focus on what trauma-informed special education assessments and programming look like in actual practice, and how the applicable science and law come together around trauma-related special needs that require 504/ADA accommodations and/or IEPs. I first want to direct you to the peer-reviewed research, starting with the article, “Considerations for Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care Content within Special Education Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Programs,” which appeared in Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021) of the Journal of Special Education Preparation, the full text of which is available for free online.

I think this article does a good job of explaining what it means to incorporate Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) into special education, so I’m not going to do a lot of rehashing, here. One of the things I like about this article is that it doesn’t just speak to special education as a stand-alone entity; it discusses the application of trauma-informed care within an evidence-based Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), such as that found with Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which are meant to catch students before they fall too far behind and provide them with whatever types of supports they need to be successful, whether through special or general education. This naturally lends it to speak to the related “child find” issues.

This article cites other researchers by saying: “… adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; Felitti et al., 1998) … are all common experiences for students with emotional/behavioral disorders (Cavanaugh, 2016).” Certainly, one way to identify children who may need special education as per “child find” is to look at those already known to have experienced ACEs to determine if they are showing any signs of emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The moment it is known that a general education student has survived a traumatic event, a special education assessment referral should be made and it should include sufficiently comprehensive mental health evaluations to accurately capture any impact the traumatic event has had on the child’s ability to access and participate in education. Even if the child ultimately does not qualify for special education, Section 504 relies on the special education process to gather its own assessment data to inform appropriate 504/ADA accommodations for children with disabilities who do not require special education.

If the child is unavailable for learning due to extreme trauma, then the interventions have to restore the child to the point of being available for learning again, unless the child is medically incapacitated. If medical interventions are first necessary, those obviously come before any special education or 504/ADA accommodations. A child has to be physically medically stabilized before they are available to participate in education and anyone can know what to do for them at school. New assessments will have to be done to determine the student’s new baselines once physical medical stability is achieved.

If the child is psychiatrically incapacitated, it may be necessary for that child to be placed in a residential psychiatric treatment facility with an onsite school in order for the child to become available for learning. I’m not a huge fan of residential placement, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I’ve had a number of students benefit tremendously from a special education residential placement for these kinds of severe mental health needs, though I’ve also had students on my caseload molested and assaulted in some of the residential programs, so this model of intervention is hardly a monolith or panacea.

The above-cited article makes the following recommendations: “Considerations for special education professional development includes teachers undergoing an extensive training that addresses the following components:

Understanding Trauma and ACEs: School site staff who do not have a professional understanding of what trauma is, what ACEs are, and how they affect student performance are at a gross disadvantage when it comes to actually serving the public good. The pervasiveness of trauma in everyday life, anymore, is something we all have to consider when dealing with each other. We should certainly be able to expect our professionals who encounter it in the field daily to have an intelligent plan of action for how to respond to it appropriately in their professional capacities. We shouldn’t be ending up with privileged ding-dongs with fancy degrees who can’t recognize what they’re looking at when they encounter childhood trauma in the field.

Challenging current thought processes vs. TIC attributions: Long-entrenched policies and practices that fail to meet the needs of certain populations are effectively institutionalized biases against them. In professional settings in which no policies and procedures exist to appropriately respond to the needs of students who have experienced ACEs and trauma, there is no institutionalized response to proactively address the situation, which becomes an institutionalized proactive effort to ignore it. When people feel powerless to help someone being hurt by something, it’s a natural psychological defense mechanism for them to blame the victim for deserving mistreatment rather than live with feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, cowardice, or whatever else feels bad that goes along with not helping. Victim-blaming is meant to offset feelings of guilt for not helping.

Too often, adults in the public school setting become angry at children for manifesting the symptoms of trauma and ACEs, punishing them instead of helping them and making a bad situation worse. There is no excuse for this kind of conduct in a professional educational setting, and certainly not in this day and age when there is plenty of peer-reviewed research capturing strategies and approaches that actually work. As I’ve said in other posts, however, there are no real mechanisms in place in public education at this time for the consistent promulgation of the peer-reviewed research among the educators to equip them with the resources to translate the research into actual, practical classroom applications.

Where parents really need to get vocal at their school board meetings is in advocating for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of public education. It’s not like we don’t have evidence of what works. Education research continues to compile and accrue over time into an ever-enriching body of knowledge that can be used to solve so many of the world’s ills that it should be a crime that it’s not already being actively applied by competent professionals throughout the public education system on the regular.

Identifying ways educators may be trauma-informed: It seems that using logic models has been the most effective way to communicate concepts around identifying ways that educators can become trauma-informed. The School District of Philadelphia has created a logic model that serves as a useful example, which is illustrated below.

You can look at this logic model more closely by clicking on the images or the link in this post. What you can see once you look at it is that the District’s MTSS incorporates TIC into its design. I can’t speak to the fidelity with which The School District of Philadelphia actually abides by this design or the degree to which it works. I can only show it to you as an example of how to create this kind of a design, which requires staff to be trained on how to implement it in order for it to actually work. By creating this kind of operational framework and training everyone within the school site on how to carry it out, staff become informed on what to look for and what to do when they see it, when it comes to trauma and its potential for undermining student learning.

Direct overview of MTSS: The above example shows how TICs are woven into an existing MTSS. Very often, special education personnel don’t understand where they fit into the overall tiers of intervention, and usually because the rest of their co-workers and superiors have no idea, either. None of these MTSS designs will work if staff don’t recognize themselves in all of the pieces of the design for which they are each actually responsible. It’s not enough to create a pretty logic model on paper. The logic model has to actually be executed according to its design or it’s worthless. To that end, it is imperative that both general and special education staff understand where the lines are drawn between their two universes and a child needs to be referred for special education assessment.

I actually have a case from my past that I can refer to as an example. In this case, the district had some kind of MTSS but it had failed to work in special education and the “child find” process in any kind of meaningful way. As such, staff didn’t know their roles when it came to “child find” and made mistakes all over the place. This was a case of multiple ding-dongs who had no idea what they were doing, trying to fake their ways through the MTSS design process and botching it royally. What’s worse is that the involved student in this example was being raised by his grandmother, who had been a teacher for this same school district for over 30 years at the time of this hearing, and her daughter, the student’s mother, had gone on to become a teacher of the same district, as well. The employees of this district were doing this to each other’s families, and purely out of ignorance and a grotesque leadership failure.

When done correctly, a school- or district-wide MTSS that incorporates TIC will naturally lend itself to helping those children who need special education mental health supports for any reason. Investing in developing a high-quality MTSS that incorporates TIC will appropriately funnel the children who need special education mental health services into the appropriate levels of intervention relative to their unique, individual needs.

That said, it’s not enough to simply refer children suffering from mental health issues related to trauma for assessment. The quality of the assessments conducted matter and leaving out critical information about the trauma a child has already experienced and how it is affecting that child’s learning is a fatal flaw that compromises the validity of the assessment and gives the parents a legitimate reason to disagree and request IEEs at public expense.

Administrators looking to cut corners will often try to minimize costs by having school psychologists do some basic social/emotional assessments instead of having proper mental health evaluations done by licensed mental health providers. This is no place to be cutting corners. First, it saves no money in the long run. Pretending the problem isn’t as bad as it actually is will blow up in your face, eventually. The longer the problem goes untreated, the harder and more costly it will become to address later on. Secondly, it’s heinously unethical. What kind of a person do you have to be to deny necessary mental health services because you don’t want to spend the money? Any school district administrators who think their budgets are more important than the lives of their students shouldn’t be employed in public education. The budget exists for the benefit of the students, not the administration. For that matter, school district administrators exist for the benefit of students; students do not exist for the purpose of lining administrators’ pockets with unearned tax dollars.

I know the technical issues of how to integrate TIC into a schoolwide system of successful interventions is a topic worthy of a full-day workshop and I’m not doing justice to the entire issue, here. But, I’m hoping that I’ve given you enough to think about TIC in special education and some pointers towards some resources that can help you as a parent, educator, and/or concerned taxpayer to address these kinds of challenges. We need to appreciate the degree to which special education can be a tool to protect our local communities and national security from unstable individuals responding to their personal traumas in ways that can hurt many other people in addition to themselves. In this day and age of mass shootings by people suffering from significant mental health issues, we can’t neglect to preempt these behaviors where we can by intervening in the lives of children who experience trauma and/or have mental and emotional health needs that affect their access to learning and behaviors. It takes a village to raise a child, and this is how it’s done when the child has experienced trauma.

Legitimate Parent Advocacy vs. Conspiratorial Movements

As much as the work we do at KPS4Parents focuses on social justice issues that include parents’ legal rights in the special education process and related areas of public agency regulation, I’ve been hesitant until now to say anything about what has been charading as a parents’ advocacy movement, lately. This is mainly because of the most recent developments involving the leadership of one such faux parent advocacy organization, Moms for Liberty, which pretty much speak for themselves and eliminate the need for me to work that hard at supporting my arguments with evidence.

I’m busy. I don’t have time for deep dives into the world of politics when I’m already doing deep dives into the peer-reviewed research and case law during the regular school year. I see every bit of stupidity and ineptitude in local government as we see in Congress on the daily. Idiot politicians are the reason why lay advocates and civil rights attorneys are needed in a democracy. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards.” It’s not like any of this is new.

I’ve got over 20 students on my lay advocacy caseload, at least two of those cases are going to due process, several of those cases have outstanding remedies due to them from a federal investigation of their local school district that have not yet been negotiated, and others are requiring me to work with families at the local agency level to hopefully resolve their concerns, all the while also making the record just in case formal complaints or litigation become unavoidable. I’m not going to stop all of that to write a blog post/podcast episode unless the moment is right, and it’s now right.

I’m won’t rehash the Moms for Liberty scandal, here. You can read up on that on your own time, if you don’t already know about it. What I’m focusing on here are the social and psychological sciences as they interact with the rule of law in our democratic republic, and what that means for this country to have a government that is “of the people, for the people, and by the people” with respect to legitimate parent advocacy.

We’re meant to have a representative government and it isn’t representative of most of “the people” when a tiny minority of whack-job conspiracy theorists and con artists with prefrontal cortices made of cottage cheese or something close to it, are put into positions of authority, or otherwise have influence over those with authority, and have access to taxpayer resources with no effective systems of oversight or accountability. Once in power, people like these then attempt to bend reality to fit their whacko notions of how things should be, regardless of what the majority of their constituents want or need or the actual facts of the situation, usually for their own financial gain and without regard for any harm done to others. Berkeley Breathed referred to such an individual as a “tax-fattened hyena,” in one of his old Bloom County cartoons. I find the term eternally apt.

I find that these are “the people” employed within the public sector who are the most opposed to any kind of data collection that could be used as an audit trail and enforcement tool, which is why the backend business automation of most publicly funded agencies at the local level is such garbage. It’s really hard to misappropriate public funds when you’re leaving digital footprints right back to yourself in the process. Effective office automation on par with what has been happening in the private sector for decades has been limited in the public sector for supposed budgetary reasons, but the reality is that the ROI on a good system would make the upgrade pay for itself in no time. It’s not costs that are being avoided, it’s audit trails.

Because “the people” are expected to hold their government accountable according to the rule of law, it is necessary for “the people” to know how to do so and be given access to public agency information through various client’s rights, freedom of information, and public records laws. Because of our laws regarding public access to public agency information and the mechanisms of accountability that are built into the regulations that describe how our public agencies are supposed to operate, our democracy equips us with powerful tools that allow us to advocate for appropriate outcomes as regular members of society, including as parents for our children in programs for which we pay taxes to serve their needs as a matter of law.

Keeping parents in the dark about their rights and the proper paths for recourse and distracting them with pointless displays of anger and hostility are all parts of a strategy to undermine legitimate parent advocacy, not support it. It drains parents’ energy, time, and resources to pursue legitimate remedies by wasting it all on displays of emotion that rarely change policies and create more problems than they solve. The actual processes and procedures afforded to parents as per their lawful parent rights in the public education setting are the only mechanisms of democracy that are designed to address meritorious parental concerns.

No matter how many fits at a school board meeting a parent may throw, until they file a formal complaint of some kind, there’s not much anyone can do. When parents bring their legitimate concerns to a school board meeting, the proper response is for someone from the school board to help the parent exercise their rights, including helping them file a formal complaint. When parents attempt to argue for things outside the scope of what their public schools can legally do, the schools are obligated to explain how the rules actually apply and what can legitimately be done to address such parental concerns.

In the case of special education, this is specifically regulated at 34 CFR Sec. 300.503, which mandates the provision of Prior Written Notice (PWN) to parents whenever a change to a child’s special education program is proposed or denied by the public education agency. If the public education agency’s explanation doesn’t make sense for why it is proposing changes or refusing changes requested by parents, parents have a right to use whatever cockamamie excuse they’ve been given in their PWNs as evidence against their public education agencies in regulatory complaints or legal proceedings. Our democracy protects parents with rules like these, but knowing how to use them and enforce them isn’t something most parents know how to do.

One of the methods of depriving people of their rights is to deprive them of any knowledge of past successful efforts to secure the rights of citizens, such as with the litigation and legislative history of special education law, and the processes and procedures by which everyday people can now assert their rights under the law because of how past cases were successfully argued and won and how legislators have responded to the relevant scientific and legal developments over time. This is why these organizations are so strongly opposed to any curriculum that accurately describe the effects of slavery on American society and governance, and don’t want to acknowledge the growing body of science that better explains gender and sexual orientation than what the science of the past was able to tell us because it challenges behaviors that have been learned and practiced over generations according to religious and political beliefs that don’t always abide by observable reality.

For example, during the 1600s, the astronomer Galileo died under house arrest for heresy after daring to assert that the Earth rotates around the sun based on his observations using telescopes and calculating the movements of the stars and planets, because this contradicted the Church’s position at that time that the Earth was the center of the Universe and everything in the skies rotated around the Earth. Galileo was right, of course. He witnessed the actuality of God’s miracle, but rather than revel in its realization, the Church rejected it because it contradicted a long-standing myth that was being knowingly perpetuated by the Church so that it was not contradicted in the eyes of the people, lest it lose their trust and obedience. The Church did not acknowledge that Galileo was right and absolve him of heresy until more than 300 years later during the 20th century.

A fact-based discovery that contradicted the Church in such a significant way would have cost the Church a great deal of credibility among its believers if acknowledged as true, or at least that’s what the Church apparently feared, so it tried Galileo for heresy and gave him the choice of being found guilty and thrown in prison for the rest of his life or accepting a plea deal and spending the rest of his life under house arrest. He took the plea deal.

Whether you’re religious or not, the Universe functions according to set rules that can be measured, analyzed, and understood with enough time and resources. There may be a difference of opinion as to why that is and who or what caused it to happen, but what has actually happened with respect to Creation is an observable fact that simply has to be studied in order for the design’s function and purpose to be understood.

For example, humankind just spent seven years flying a space craft to an asteroid that is due to smack into the Earth in about 150 years so that we can start figuring out now a way to prevent it from hitting us by the time it gets here. We just flew this thing over millions of miles of space, right up to this asteroid, punched the asteroid using a mechanical arm, captured chunks of debris and dust that flew up off the surface of the asteroid from getting punched, then flew the debris and dust all the way back to Earth so we can analyze it and figure out what the asteroid is made of, which will help us figure out how to prevent it from hitting us. You cannot tell me that our species is capable of doing that and yet we can’t apply science to improve the quality of life for every human on our planet without destroying the world around us.

I help everyday families of learners with disabilities acquire the necessary knowledge about the processes and procedures that apply to their disability-related needs and rights so they can successfully advocate for their loved ones according to the applicable science and the rule of law. I understand the regulated processes and procedures that give my clients access to what the law promises them. I use the applicable sciences to identify each learner’s unique needs so as to inform the requests I make of publicly funded agencies and programs on their behalf. I understand what it means to facilitate “the people’s” participation in democracy at the local level, including participation in state and federal investigations, as well as due process hearings and disability-related litigation in local, state, and federal courts.

I understand that the only way to uphold democracy is to participate in it according to its rules and regulations. Anything that undermines the democratic process by violating a student’s constitutional rights, down to a shoddy triennial evaluation or a garbage IEP, is fair game for citizens knowledgeable enough to understand what they are looking at and the remedies available to them to fix anything wrong. Keeping people ignorant of what has worked in the past is a deliberate attempt to undermine people’s advocacy for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities in the present. People who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, thus learning their lessons the hard way from trial-and-error rather than from the example set by those who came before them, which wastes time and slows down the rate at which society becomes smarter.

The first step of preventing people from advocating for themselves is preventing them from knowing about past efforts of advocacy that were successful, hence the book bans, altering curriculum standards to promote misinformation and omit important accurate information, protesting community-based pro-literacy and historical accuracy efforts spearheaded by minority groups, and attempting to control any other literary outlet that could expose children to facts that make these individuals uncomfortable. Keeping people ignorant is a powerful tool of oppression. That’s why American slaves generally weren’t taught to read. A literate oppressed class can communicate and collaborate more effectively to rise up against their oppressors.

People forget that America went through upheavals similar to what we are experiencing right now, back in the 1980s and 90s with some people freaking out over mandatory seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws and “no smoking” laws in restaurants and bars the same way some people freaked out about vaccines and masks during the worst of COVID. Back then, the Cold War had all the doomsayers expecting everyone to die in an unavoidable nuclear holocaust. Tipper Gore was coming for everybody’s rock music lyrics and Larry Flint, who once ran for president on the Republican ticket, was defending his first amendment right to show exploitative photos of consenting models to consenting purchasers of his published works, thereby effectively defending the first amendment rights of all pornography publishers.

Ironically, many of the men who I remember from back then supporting Larry Flint’s first amendment rights have since taken considerable issue with Colin Kaepernick’s first amendment rights when he peacefully protested murderous police violence against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequalities in America in general, by silently kneeling during the national anthem before the start of professional football games. Games! Grown men running around in matching outfits chasing balls and each other, like that’s somehow more important that the fact that we have a national epidemic of people on our local police forces terrorizing and murdering certain groups of people at will and getting away with it. It rather makes clear that they were willing to defend democracy when it meant they could look at pictures of sexually exploited models, but when it comes to protesting homicidal abuses of police authority against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequality in general, that is “a horse of another color,” which is disgusting.

My point is that the whacko minority has always been around, hypocritically asserting itself when it sees the opportunity to cite the law in support of its own agenda while denying the same protections to others with whom they disagree, before retreating into the corners and staying silent for a while until circumstances provoke them into coming out of the woodwork again. With each periodic re-entry into the mainstream, the whackos, at least temporarily, recruit others to their cause until their actual motives and sheer stupidity become evident to their recruits, who then abandon them as they begin to recede back into the woodwork. It’s a predictable cycle and now people are living long enough to see it repeat in their lifetimes.

When you realize it’s a predictable cycle, each new “Groundhog Day” moment leaves you better prepared for when the cycle repeats itself again. The benefit of learning from history is not having to waste time repeating past mistakes through trial and error to eventually arrive at the same conclusions. It’s Vygotskian scaffolding realness. It allows you to step into the problem-solving at a much later stage in the process, building upon the knowledge that was gathered by those who came before you, instead of starting from the beginning with nothing.

Here’s what I can tell you about having to interact with the crackpots that have infiltrated the public sector or otherwise raise pointless hell that interferes with the legitimate functions of government at the local level, as well as my childhood growing up in the middle of the still butt-hurt losers of the Civil War who have just been waiting for as long as I can remember for Dixie to rise again so they can get a re-do of the Civil War: I’m not kidding when I say their prefrontal cortices are made of cottage cheese, or the neurological equivalent thereto.

I’m entirely willing to believe that this is due to environmental deprivation of developmental learning opportunities throughout childhood and being raised by uneducated, usually deeply religious, authoritarian parents who supported slavery or descended from people who did, remained bitter and deeply chagrined about losing the Civil War, and relied on corporal punishment as their primary parenting method. I don’t think most of them were necessarily born without intact cognitive hardware to begin with. I think an awful lot of perfectly normal humans born into that culture have been deprived of developmentally appropriate environments during childhood that prevented the full development of their brains due to cultural beliefs that strictly controlled their lifestyles and environments.

There is a famous case study of a poor woman named Genie who was grotesquely neglected and abused by her family, and then subsequently exploited by the scientific community to study the effects on her development of spending the first 13 years of her life either strapped to her bed on her back or strapped into a toilet chair, always alone in her room with almost no human interactions. She spent most of the first 13 years of her life alone in that bare room with no toys, no language, and no intellectual stimulation. As a result, her brain failed to develop and she will always be intellectually, communicatively, and physically disabled and require constant care.

There were a lot of ethical concerns around how the research community handled Genie once she was rescued from her family. That said, her situation provided tremendous insight into what can happen to the brain of a developing child when necessary environmental stimuli are not present to trigger the brain to grow and develop. Play is learning, and formal education only adds to the learning that a child is naturally inclined to pursue independently in a developmentally appropriate environment. When children are deprived of developmentally appropriate environmental stimuli, the parts of their brains that are most ripe for learning are given nothing to learn and will atrophy from lack of use.

Genie’s uniquely terrible situation made clear that, once developmental milestones were lost due to environmental deprivations during childhood, they could not be recovered. This has since informed a great deal of science designed to understand how environments that contain some developmentally appropriate stimuli but not others affect human development across the lifespan, starting in childhood. In attempting to understand why the whackos are acting so whacky, it helps to understand that a fair number of them can’t help it.

This is how we’ve come to understand how It is entirely possible for a person to get just enough input from their childhood and adult environments to learn how to do accounting, cook dinner, and fly a plane, but still have failed to developed in other areas necessary to functioning as a fully capable member of society. Intellectually capable people with under-developed social/emotional functioning can pose a danger to themselves or others, particularly with respect to domestic violence and disgruntled employees.

What we are now starting to understand about the effects of children being raised in environmentally deprived environments explains a lot in hindsight, but creates a whole new set of challenges about how to ethically address this as a threat to domestic tranquility going forward. Our current societal problems with mass shootings are strikingly similar to the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era. Radicalization is a lot easier to achieve with people who have “holes” in their development from inborn disabilities and/or being raised in developmentally deprived environments. Parents who were raised as children in developmentally deprived environments are more likely to perpetuate the deprivation with their own children because they don’t know that something is missing, much less what it is, so they don’t know to add it to their children’s environments.

Education that includes developing critical thinking skills, such as those promoted by the Common Core, is necessary to create a public that is educated enough to participate in our government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” with any success. So, when these groups start coming for our public education system to remove content and control what facts our students are allowed to be taught and which facts will be withheld from them, that’s censorship, not first amendment freedom of speech or evidence-based instruction. It’s entirely unconstitutional, and it violates best practices.

That is not legitimate parent advocacy. That is an organized effort to undermine our democracy by groups of radicals looking to cloak themselves in the language and superficial appearance of a cause people can support – here, parents’ rights in the public schools – so they can infiltrate, undermine, and profit from running our public systems in a broken way. As someone who does the job for real, I resent getting lumped in with these kooks by public education agency officials and their representatives when I attempt to help a family avail itself of the actual rules and regulations as a legitimate function of democracy. I deal with enough “Karens” employed within the public schools; I don’t need to also be associated with the “Karens” high-jacking the legitimate cause of parents’ rights and using it as a dishonest cover to pursue undemocratic ends.

In the special education context, which serves as a good example of the kinds of regulated mechanisms of democracy that exist at the local level, parents have federally protected rights to, 1) informed consent, meaning they fully understand any special education-related documents to which they are asked to sign their consent, and 2) meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, including a voice in educational placement decisions. This means that a parent’s input has to be seriously considered by all the other members of the IEP team, and it’s understood that the parent is automatically a member of the IEP team as a matter of federal law. The public schools are not permitted to unilaterally decide what goes into a student’s IEP without parental input and parents have recourse if they ever disagree with the public schools about what their students with disabilities require.

There are all kinds of rules and regulations that describe how parents of children with disabilities can avail themselves of the rule of law and enforce their children’s educational and civil rights. The problem is that the rules and regulations are complicated, the science that applies to their children’s unique educational needs is complicated, the processes and procedures take way too long for comfort, and there are usually at least some unrecoverable economic costs to the families that take time to pursue appropriate remedies from the public sector for their loved ones with disabilities. It’s not fair to the person with the disabilities when the people responsible for advocating for them, usually family members, know less than the people from whom they must make these requests.

The power imbalance is significant and is only further complicated by the reality that the public sector employees have millions of taxpayer dollars to tap into to pay lawyers to keep them out of trouble. Think: “pre-conviction Michael Cohen.” These are often high-priced fixers paid by tax-fattened would-be oligarchs who view their publicly funded agencies as their own little personal fiefdoms, and their consumers as just a means to their own personal financial ends, as though public program beneficiaries solely exist to justify the publicly funded paychecks of public agency administrators.

Every state has adopted standards by which all of its public schools must abide for the purposes of providing America’s K-12 students with what each state considers appropriate for students to have learned by each grade level across all core subject areas. These whacko book-banning conspiracy theorists and their dog-and-pony road shows at school board meetings, public libraries, and community-based literary events are taking their arguments to the wrong venues if they don’t like what is being taught in their states.

Most of these folks tend to favor the idea of reduced federal government and increased state rights, so I don’t understand what their argument is, here. They have an existing state right to establish their curriculum standards at the state level, and if they don’t like those standards, they can put forth proposed state legislation or a bring a lawsuit against their state that proposes to change their state’s standards, but their local school districts are still responsible for satisfying their state’s then-current standards until such time as they are changed, as a matter of law because this is a democracy, and that’s how you change the rules if you don’t like them in a democracy. If attempts to change the curriculum at the state level fail, one’s recourse could include filing a lawsuit or running for public office to effect policies directly, not book bans and death threats.

This brings me to the actual strategy that is at play here, which is something I call the “Anger & Fear Engine.” This goes to something that most people understand, which is the fight/flight/freeze mechanism. For many years, people only thought of the fight and flight aspects of it, and I suspect that’s because they rhyme and it’s easy to remember, but in all actuality, when an organism is threatened, it will actually either run away, fight to defend itself, or freeze and get either ignored or attacked. Plenty of people know what it’s like to automatically freeze in a moment of surprise, especially if it’s scary. The fight/flight/freeze mechanism is a very primitive neurological response that is normal in human development, and something humans share in common with almost all other living creatures.

Anger is generally a secondary response that puts one on the offensive after something has initially put one on the defensive. One gets mad when made to feel afraid, vulnerable, betrayed, insulted, offended, disrespected, rejected, inferior, etc. All of those things instantly make people feel bad about themselves, at least until they’re done processing what is going on, at which point the fight/flight/freeze mechanism kicks in. Anger occurs along with the adrenaline rush that hits when that “switch” is “flipped” from feeling compromised to going on the offensive.

If you opt for fight, you’ve taken that defensiveness and flipped it to going on the offensive. If you opt to flee or freeze, the problem is likely to remain unresolved, at least temporarily. Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup before you know how to most effectively go on the offensive and fight back. Flight can serve a constructive purpose if it buys you the time to figure out what you need to do and what tools you will need to fight back and win. This is the primary reason why most of my clients do not sign agreement to any important documents when they are presented; we take our time to review them outside of any meetings when we have time to sit and focus on what they actually say before responding to them in writing with any signatures. Freezing may buy time if it doesn’t result in getting attacked; if anything, it can buy time until an opportunity to either fight or retreat presents itself.

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Those words entirely capture the amount of time it takes to do a good job of gathering the necessary data and documents to inform an appropriate program of instruction for a student with disabilities, much less engage in any enforcement mechanisms that might also be necessary to make that happen.

British film producer Peter Brook is quoted as saying, “Violence is the ultimate laziness.” His point was that negotiations and adult-level problem-solving require a lot of serious thought that is based on a comprehensive-enough understanding of the underlying facts, which can take a long time, but bashing people over the head can take just a few seconds and you don’t have to think that hard to do it. Violence is lazy because it doesn’t include all the hard thought and collaboration that is required for peace. Have you noticed that the people who do the most complaining rarely have a workable plan to fix whatever they’re complaining about? They exist to grieve, not resolve.

Fear can become anger very quickly, and becoming angry can instill fear in others, which can prompt them to become angry as well, hence the “Anger & Fear Engine.” It’s a common psychological response to threats, but uncontained anger and violence towards societies or specific members of society are the methods of barbarians. They are the methods of the lazy or incapable. Successful strategists can manipulate environmental factors according to best practices and the rule of law such that other people’s behaviors are shaped and changed into something more conducive to a healthy, thriving community without any fighting at all, such as when policies and practices actually meet the needs of the people. Sun Tzu asserted in The Art of War that the most successful war is the war you prevent and never have to fight.

The problem, however, is that the dangerously large minority of people whose prefrontal cortices are something akin to cottage cheese literally lack the neurological hardware to understand how to participate in the adult-level problem-solving necessary to seriously address society’s challenges. Legitimate parent advocacy requires a lot of research and writing according to science and law, not screaming in school board meetings, blocking the entrances of public libraries, or disrupting community-based literacy programs. Any organization that purports to engage in standing up for parents’ rights should be actually participating in activities that involve the actual mechanisms of democracy, or they are just fundraising off the backs of people in need without offering real solutions and telling them the only solutions are harassment and/or violence. They are selling the lazy alternative to people who don’t know how to engage in the real solution.

Moms for Liberty and organizations like it are not legitimate parent advocacy organizations. They do not assist parents in participating in the legitimate democratic processes and procedures that already exist to help parents uphold and enforce their rights. If anything, there is an effort by these groups to obstruct and/or subvert democracy at the local level by passing bigoted, unconstitutional local school board policies and aggressively attempting to uphold and enforce them, even if they are unlawful and unethical. The legitimate complaint and due process mechanisms available to parents are not utilized by groups like these, very often because they would not be successful on their merits for the types of undemocratic culture-war claims they want to assert.

It is so very important for parents to make sure that any outside providers they turn to for support are acting according to best practices and the rule of law, and are legitimately taking the needs of client families into account. Parents should be asking a lot of “how” and “why” questions as they learn how to exercise their rights under the law. The first question any parent should ask when embarking upon an effort to exercise their rights is, “May I please have a copy of my parent rights?” Start there and keep digging for more information if something doesn’t make sense. Call your state’s department of education and ask for explanations of things you don’t understand about the rules and how you can legitimately participate.

If you think your local education agency needs better board leadership, run for school board yourself or support candidates who agree with you about compliance issues that affect your children and local community. The only way to preserve democracy is to participate in it, which means voting, running for office, and availing yourself of complaint and due process procedures as appropriate to each circumstance to create the changes in the world you want to see. Throwing a fit and demanding that everybody else force reality to bend to your will isn’t democracy at all.

Technology and the Intersectionality of Larry P.

Based on the professional peer-reviewed research, intersectionality can be understood as the phenomenon in which an individual person’s social position relative to more than one socially defining characteristic, such as race, language, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, etc., come together to simultaneously impact a person’s status in and access to society at large. Where a person fits into the world is a matter of multidimensional considerations.

When looking at the question of whether the current mechanisms of our system of government, and the behavioral rewards inherently built into them, truly serve the good of the people according to the will of the people and the rule of law, the importance of intersectionality to the accuracy of our analyses cannot be overstated. There is no “silver bullet” that will eliminate all of our social challenges with a single shot. Solving our complex, interconnected problems takes complex planning and execution.

Society is a complex system of inextricably intertwined considerations that all have to be accounted for in order for everyone’s needs and rights to be equally met. There are no cutting corners, and we now have the computing power to stitch together effective systems of equity for all into the ways our government functions, if the technology is just used the right way. The fail-safes that can be built in and the audit trails that would be automatically created would prevent and capture any attempts at abuse just as a matter of normal functioning.

We aren’t there yet, but the application of enterprise-class computing technologies to the delivery of publicly funded services is inevitable, and it will streamline a lot of inter- and intra-agency operations, trimming the administrative fat within a lot of State and local publicly funded programs. Eliminating human error and dishonesty from a public agency’s administrative processes prevents episodes of noncompliance that puts the agency in legal jeopardy.

I’ve told the story in past posts of the case in which one of my students went for months without a needed piece of equipment ordered by his Occupational Therapist (OT) as an accommodation for his sensory needs in the classroom, which meant he was up and out of his seat disrupting the instruction, because of an interpersonal feud between two mean old ladies who hated each other in administration. One of the mean old ladies worked at the student’s local school site in the office, processing purchase requisitions and submitting them to the school district’s main office to be processed into purchase orders.

Now, this was back in the day and all of this was done using paper and the district’s own internal courier service, commonly referred to as “brown mail,” because most things came in those big brown manila envelopes. There was no email. If things needed to move faster than brown mail, it was done via fax. So, context.

The other mean old lady in this situation worked in the accounting office at the district offices. I’m not exactly clear on the details of why they hated each other so much, but I do recall that it had something to do with either a green bean casserole or a three-bean salad – I can’t remember which – at some kind of district holiday party. Like, maybe both of them brought the same thing and it turned into a feud over whose was better, or something? I don’t entirely recall the details, I just remember it was something to do with beans and a holiday party and that it was totally dumb.

The mean old lady at the district offices would sit on the purchase requisitions submitted by the mean old lady at the school site just out of spite, without any regard for the people who had submitted the requisitions to the mean old lady at the school site or any students who may have been impacted by her behaviors. The mean old lady at the school site wasn’t willing to call over to the mean old lady at the district offices to find out what had happened to her requisitions, so she’d become hostile with the school site staff who would ask her where their stuff was. They became afraid to ask her where their stuff was, and just took it as a given that the average purchase would take at least 60 to 90 days before it came in.

Computers don’t do any of that! As many concerns as we have about computers processing things correctly, that comes down to how they are coded. They aren’t going to fight with each other over three-bean salads at a Christmas party and then undermine each other professionally to the detriment of the constituents they are being paid by the taxpayers to serve.

So, knowing that the implementation of the technology is inevitable, our job as informed voters and taxpayers is to understand what that technology needs to be able to do in order to truly perform according to the principles of democracy and the rule of law. That technology must account for how intersectionality impacts every person, whether staff, vendor, or constituent, who must participate in the execution of the government’s responsibilities to the people.

This brings me to a very specific issue within special education in the State of California that has affected way too many families in a detrimental way, which is the intersectionality of the African-American experience with special education in the public schools. This is an under-researched and poorly regulated aspect of our current modern society, here in California, and as the State seeks to shore up democracy in spite of the many forces presently working to undermine it, I believe this specific instance of intersectionality particularly deserves the State’s attention.

I’m speaking specifically of the long-outdated and now inappropriate Larry P. requirement. To quote the State:

The Larry P. Case

In 1972 in the Larry P. case, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California found that African American students in the San Francisco Unified School District were being placed into classes for “Educably Mentally Retarded (EMR)” students in disproportionate numbers, based on criteria that relied primarily on the results of intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that were racially and/or culturally discriminatory and not validated for the purposes for which they were being used1. In 1979, the court permanently enjoined LEAs throughout California from using standardized intelligence tests2 for (1) the identification of African American students as EMR or its substantial equivalent or (2) placement of African American students into EMR classes or classes serving substantially the same functions3.

The court held that court approval would be required for the use of any standardized intelligence tests for African American students for the above purposes. The court laid out a state process for this. 

The EMR category no longer exists. The court has never held hearings to determine the “substantial equivalent” of the EMR identification or placement, or whether IQ tests are appropriate for assessing African American students for identifications or placements other than the substantial equivalent of EMR. The state process to seek approval has not been invoked.

Although the law on assessment has evolved, as described above, the Larry P. injunction remains in place, and the court retains jurisdiction over its enforcement. The Larry P. injunction does not apply to tests that are not considered standardized intelligence tests.


Footnotes
1 Larry P. v. Riles, 343 F. Supp. 1306, 1315 (N.D. Cal. 1972).
2 The court defined a standardized intelligence test as one that result in a score purporting to measure intelligence, often described as “general intellectual functioning.”  Larry P., 495 F. Supp. 926, 931 n. 1 (N.D. Cal. 1979), affirmed in part, reversed in part, 793 F.2d 969 (9th Cir. 1986).
3 Larry P., 495 F. Supp. at 989.

Here’s what everybody needs to get, and which way too many school psychologists and other special education assessors in California’s school districts do not: Larry P. only applies to norm-referenced intelligence quotient (IQ) tests that result in a full-scale IQ (FSIQ) score. It doesn’t apply to the Southern California Ordinal Scales of Development (SCOSD) Cognition subtest. It doesn’t apply to any standardized speech/language assessment measures. It has nothing to do with OT. It has nothing to do with measuring academic achievement using standardized assessment tools.

Unless the assessment measure is designed to produce an IQ score, Larry P. does not apply. But, I’ve now handled a half-dozen cases in the last couple of years in which the whole reason why the students’ IEPs were poorly developed was because they’d been poorly assessed by people who didn’t score any standardized measures for fear of violating Larry P. because they didn’t actually understand the Larry P. rules. The professional development on this issue throughout the State is atrocious.

More to the point, the State needs to invoke its process to seek approval to now use the current, modern, unbiased IQ tests in the special education process, because the assessment failures caused by poorly trained cowards who don’t have the sense to go onto Google and look up the rules themselves and/or push back against administrative supervisors steering them in a non-compliant direction are causing a cataclysm of disastrous consequences at the intersection of the African-American experience and childhood disability in the State’s public schools. This just feeds these kids into the gaping maw of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

I want to take it one more step further than that, though. I want to encourage more representation of the African-American community in special education assessment. I want to see more college students of color going into school psychology, speech/language pathology, OT, assistive technology, etc., so that they can be there to advocate from an informed, expert perspective within the system for the children from their own community who are at risk of being otherwise misunderstood by people who lack the perspective necessary to appreciate the long-lasting impacts of their assessment errors.

People who don’t actually understand the rules can over-interpret them in an over-abundance of caution. They will not do more than what’s actually been prohibited for fear of doing something they aren’t supposed to, to the point that they’re not doing what they are supposed to be doing. They go from one extreme to the other. In an effort to avoid committing a State-level Larry P. violation, they commit a violation of federal law by failing to appropriately assess in all areas of suspected disability according to the applicable professional standards and the instructions of the producers of the standardized measures used.

It’s currently a “from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire” situation for the State that is wrecking lives and creating special education violations left and right. The State is setting up its public schools to fail at this particularly significant intersection of social factors, at the same time that the State is seriously considering reparations to the African-American community here in the State.

I promise you that none of the assessors I’ve encountered in the last few years who have been committing these Larry P. violations are actually trying to be hurtful. None of them know what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re making dumb errors in judgment, often under pressure from authoritarian administrators who don’t know an IQ test from a roll of toilet paper.

I’m advocating, here, for both the development and implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies that will automate as much of the public sector’s administrative functions as possible according to the applicable regulations, including mandated timelines, as well as for the State to request the court to reverse Larry P. so that schools are no longer enjoined against using current, valid, appropriately normed IQ tests in the assessment of African-American children in California for special education purposes. These two things matter to each other.

Larry P. is no longer a solution, it’s a problem. It’s not that assessors couldn’t work around it; it’s that they don’t know how to work around it and they commit more errors trying to than anything that could possibly go wrong actually using an IQ test on an African-American student in this modern day and age. Further, the specific ecological factors that contribute to the success of students who are impacted by the intersectionality of their disabilities with other traits that can affect their social standing, such as ethnicity, need to be understood as specific data points worthy of intense administrative and policy-making examination.

As a matter of civil rights and monitoring its own internal compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, one would hope that a public education agency would want to know if particular classes of students are somehow being under-served and need more attention from the adult decision-makers involved in their educational experiences. Who is monitoring each school district’s compliance with Larry P., right now? Is that the job of each district’s 504 Coordinator? How is Larry P. compliance in the field such an issue, still, after all of these years and, more to the point, why is it even still a requirement after all of these years?

Analyzing data from an enterprise-class computing solution regarding intersectionality among special education students would help public education agencies recognize trends of noncompliance and programming failures. This would include rampant Larry P. violations producing shoddy assessments that result in poorly crafted Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) that fail to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits according to the current Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) standard pursuant to the 2017 Endrew F. Supreme Court decision.

Issues of intersectionality can be captured by competent data analysis, which can be greatly facilitated by properly coded enterprise-class computing technologies, and used to ensure that all students, pursuant to Endrew F., receive an IEP appropriately ambitious in light of their unique, individual circumstances. A properly configured system would be spitting out reports detailing the instances of noncompliance to the inboxes of the key decision-makers so they could respond as quickly as possible.

Had such a system already been implemented, the Larry P. violations I’ve encountered all over the State over the last couple of years would have been caught among all the others I haven’t encountered and either rectified or prevented altogether by the State realizing what a colossal disaster Larry P. has become in the field and executing the process outlined by the Court to put an end to it. Were the State monitoring the right data points, it would have realized that Larry P. needed to be ended a long time ago and that it causes infinitely more problems than it solves because it forces assessors to assess African-American students differently than everyone else, which is not equal access.

Frankly, this lack of equal access is more discriminatory than using an IQ test could ever possibly be and becomes even more so when the quality of the assessments are compromised because the assessors don’t know how to comply with Larry P. and they jack up their entire evaluations in the process. Jacked up evaluations lead to jacked up IEPs, which lead to the denial of educational benefits and all the consequences that these children will experience over their lifetimes as a result of being deprived of a FAPE.

The people who make these kinds of errors will be among the first to engage in victim-blaming once these students end up in the justice system, acting like it was unavoidable and inevitable, because they can’t recognize or accept the degree to which they had a hand in making it happen. The people who do it on purpose hide among the people who don’t know what else to do, fueling the victim-blaming, which becomes part of our current, exhausting, ridiculous, ongoing culture wars.

I would rather see Larry P. ended so that it’s no longer creating confusion among assessors in the field and technology implemented that will identify when things like this are going on so they can be stopped early on. I would much rather monitor digital data as a compliance watchdog as I get older than have to go in, one kid at a time, to hold the public education system accountable to its mandates under our democracy’s rule of law. So long as there is transparency in how the system operates and all the real-time data, other than anything personally identifying, is accessible to the public to be analyzed for compliance failures, technology stands to enhance the functions of democracy. But, it all comes down to how its coded.

I expect that watchdogs and advocates in the future will spend more time analyzing system-generated data than necessarily representing individual students, and that a healthier partnership between the public sector and the citizenry can evolve in which the user feedback shared with system developers and operators can be used to enhance its functions and allow each agency to serve its mandated purposes in a compliant manner that is both cost-effective and substantively effective.

The more that social and behavioral science is integrated into the policies, procedures, and applied technologies in the public sector, the more effective and efficient they will be. The more integrated the technologies among all of the public agency stakeholders, the more cohesive the communications and execution of time-sensitive tasks. I see a future in which systemic violations, such as rampant Larry P. failures, will trigger an examination of the intersectionality of disability and other social factors, such as ethnicity, on compliance and help identify when something like getting rid of Larry P. needs to happen sooner rather than later.

I see this Larry P. mess as yet another compelling argument for the implementation of enterprise-class computing technologies within public education administration. I hope the State is listening.

OCR Complaint Results in District-wide Compensatory Education

Click here for full text

I’m long overdue to post new content to the KPS4Parents blog, podcast, and social media, but it’s been a busy school year. The continuing fallout from COVID-related school closures that disrupted the educations of most children, and had even more profound effects on our learners with disabilities, has kept me busy.

It’s one of these COVID-related cases that brings me back to the blog and podcast today, because after over two years of waiting for a complaint investigation to get done that was only supposed to take 180 days, the United States Department of Education (USDOE), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), finally concluded an investigation of Oxnard Union High School District (OUHSD) and how it handled its students with disabilities during COVID-related school closures. To say I and the student’s family now feel vindicated is an understatement.

You can read OCR’s findings and the resolution agreement that OUHSD entered into with OCR to resolve its violations by clicking here. I’m not going to belabor every little thing in those documents because they speak for themselves and you can read them at your own convenience, but I will summarize them, here. In short, not only did OCR find that the District violated my client’s civil rights, it likely violated the rights of its other students with special needs by refusing, as policy, to provide any in-person disability-related supports and services during campus closures, even if they were necessary in order for the student to access learning.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when the schools were first closed down here in California, the Governor’s office understood immediately that our special needs students were going to be disproportionately affected by the school closures. With the new budget during the summer of 2020, the Governor committed $1B to cover compensatory education costs for students with disabilities who lost educational benefits during the school closures because they couldn’t access the disability-related supports they needed in order to learn.

Back in the Spring of 2020, right after the pandemic hit and the schools shut down, both the Governor and USDOE reminded the public education system that its legal obligations to its students with special needs had not changed in spite of the pandemic and that local education agencies should do everything possible to continue implementing services and supports to students with disabilities during campus closures. But, there was also that extra money set aside by the Governor to compensate students for learning they lost due to unavoidable losses of educational benefits and, presumably, if their local education agencies otherwise botched their pandemic response to the detriment of their kids with special needs.

I’ve been negotiating Informal Dispute Resolutions (IDRs) to claims like these ever since in-person learning resumed, and I’m still dealing with the residual effects of the school closures across my caseload. Which brings me back to this most recent OCR investigation outcome.

What OCR and OUHSD are now doing is working together to repair the harm done to all of the OUHSD students with disabilities at the time of the COVID-related school closures who did not get the services and supports they needed such that they are now owed compensatory education. This is a very big deal!

According to the Resolution Agreement entered into by the District with OCR, OUHSD must send letters to every potentially impacted student and offer a meeting to determine if any compensatory education is owed to them and, if so, document how it will be provided. OUHSD is not being left to its own devices to determine whether it has met each affected student’s needs; OCR will be overseeing OUHSD’s implementation of these remedies to make sure they’re done correctly. OCR will provide the technical assistance to OUHSD to help it clean up this mess and set things straight.

In theory, my work here is done, other than to work with the family of the student for whom I’d filed the complaint to make sure she gets the compensatory education that she is now due. But, for all of the other OUHSD students and former students impacted by this outcome, I still have concerns.

None of the other affected students and their families knew about this complaint. They’re going to get a letter in the mail that they weren’t expecting with an offer to meet with the District to determine if their kids are owed any back-due educational services and not necessarily understand what it is, why they are getting it, or how important it is.

Today’s post is about making sure that the other students who are impacted by this outcome get what they need and are due. I know that OCR will be working with the District to make sure that the families who avail themselves of the offer to meet regarding their possible compensatory education claims have a fair shot at getting the right stuff. I’m not as worried about those families.

The families I’m most worried about are the ones who don’t understand English and/or their rights. We have a fair number of households in the District in which the parents may not be educated sufficiently to understand what any of this is about. Unless they actually take the meeting with the District to learn more, OCR is not in a position to help make sure their kids actually get what they need.

So, my goal with today’s post is to make sure that all the affected OUHSD families are fully aware of what that letter inviting them to meet with the District to discuss compensatory education really means and that they take those meetings and get the remedies that are due to their children. We have to remember that we already paid taxes so these kids could get these services, and then that money was never spent on serving them appropriately during campus closures.

This is about belatedly delivering the services that had been previously purchased by the taxpayers but never actually delivered to their intended recipients. The only part of this that brings new costs into the picture is all of the extra work that will now have to be done to help these kids recoup lost learning and catch back up after having been deprived of what had already been paid for in the first place.

After all of the OUHSD students who were impacted by this outcome, my next concern after that is all of the other students throughout the County whose school districts also refused to provide in-person services during the COVID-related campus closures who were not similarly held accountable by their regulators. The California Department of Education (CDE) has done a shoddy job, in my experience, of addressing these exact same concerns in other area school districts.

None of the school districts in Ventura County, to my knowledge, provided in-person services to any students with disabilities during the campus closures. In fact, I fought tooth-and-nail throughout the period of campus closures with a number of school districts throughout the State to address these same concerns. This instant OCR complaint was just one of many efforts I made to protect my kiddos during campus closures.

One family was able to use their health insurance to get in-home ABA services so their child had 1:1 behavioral supports during distance learning, which was the only reason he was successful, but that was an isolated incident. Another family was able to negotiate a settlement agreement with their district to reimburse the parents for paying for a private aide to come to their house to support their child during distance learning, but that was, again, an isolated incident. Most of my students sat at home with their moms as their 1:1 aides, which either worked or didn’t, depending on the student.

If you look back through the content I created for KPS4Parents during the COVID-related campus closures, you’ll see a lot of what I published back then had to do with the mandates that special education and other disability-related services were required to continue without reductions in services and supports. It’s nice to know that the United States of America has our students’ backs on that point, but they can’t investigate the case of every student with disabilities in America. It took over two years to investigate just this one, although systemic violations were uncovered in the course of it doing so.

I sincerely hope that the outcome of this investigation benefits not only the students of OUHSD who failed to receive appropriately ambitious educational benefits because of the COVID-related campus closures, but also similarly impacted students in all the other school districts that used the pandemic as an excuse to cut corners and not pay for services that were so seriously needed by so many students with disabilities. This outcome needs to impact more students with special needs than just those within the OUHSD attendance area. It needs to set an example.

I find myself frequently telling people that the measure of whether a society is civilized or not goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, and that special education law is the canary in the coalmine of American democracy. If we can’t respect the civil rights of our children with disabilities, what does that say for the civil rights of the rest of us?

School districts are not for-profit private businesses; they are government agencies funded to execute the functions of our society for the benefit of the public. We should be able to trust our local government agencies, including our local school districts, to abide by the rule of law.

KPS4Parents is currently reaching out to various stakeholders in Ventura County to make sure that the other families affected by this outcome understand exactly what this is, how they are affected, and how to make sure their kids get what they actually need. If you are part of an affected family and need assistance with this process, KPS4Parents will do everything we can to support you, including putting you in touch with other advocates and attorneys if necessary to handle the sheer volume of families who may need this level of assistance.

If you are part of another organization or agency that also serves students with special needs in Ventura County and/or their families, and would like to help area families navigate this process, please contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can. It’s exciting to be part of the solution, but the work is just getting started and our agency can’t do it all alone.

We’re part of the larger community of loving, democracy-minded people who advocate for social justice issues. We need the help of our social justice partners to make sure all of these affected families are properly supported and served, and to help us generalize these remedies to benefit other similarly affected students in other communities. It takes a village, so I’m asking for the rest of the village to step up and help me help all of these other affected families, and for the families who are already experienced with this kind of stuff to help other families who might not be so savvy.

This is an exciting time for systemic change, and I want families of children with special needs to feel empowered by this and set the example on how to participate in our democracy at the local level in a meaningful and impactful way. Bottom line, screaming at school board meetings about their personal beliefs and feelings gets parents nowhere, but regulatory complaints filed to enforce the rule of law can be everything.

Interview of Rose Griffin, SLP & BCBA

Rose Griffin, SLP & BCBA


Anne Zachry
Welcome to Making Special Education Actually Work, an online publication presented in blog and podcast form by KPS4Parents. As an added benefit to our subscribers and visitors to our site, we’re making podcasts versions of our text only blog articles so that you can get the information you need on the go by downloading and listening at your convenience. We also occasionally conduct discussions with guest speakers via our podcast and transcribe the audio into text for our followers who prefer to read the content on our blog. Where the use of visual aids legal citations and references to other websites are used to better illustrate our points and help you understand the information, these tools appear in the text only portion of the blog post of which this podcast is a part. You will hear a distinctive sound [*] during this podcast whenever reference is made to content that includes a link to another article, website, or download. Please refer back to the original blog article to access these resources.

Today is September 27, 2022. This post and podcast is titled, “Interview of Rose Griffin, SLP & BCBA,” which was originally recorded on August 29, 2022. In this podcast, I interview Rose Griffin about her past work in the public education system and the work she is doing now to educate professionals and parents to support children with special needs to address their challenges at the intersection of communication and behavior.

We’re here with Rose Griffin, who’s a speech language pathologist as well as a board certified behavior analyst. Correct?

Rose Griffin
That’s right, yes, less than 500 of us in the world. So …

Anne Zachry
Yeah, you’re a … you’re a rare species, and you’re very valuable. The crossover between your disciplines is really very valuable. I have another colleague, relatively local to me, who’s an OT and a BCBA. And …

Rose Griffin
… oh, yeah, that’s very rare. I probably know them. There’s not many of those at all.

Anne Zachry
Yeah … and, and so you know, her whole thing is, you know, kids, especially on the autism spectrum, that have sensory integration issues. And the degree to which that interferes with behavior, or it creates sensory-seeking behaviors that interfere with learning in the school setting, or whatever the case may be, but that sensory-behavior connection is where, you know, she really knows her stuff. And that’s very rare that I run into people who have, you know, those dual disciplines and understand the connections. And I think when you and I first started communicating about doing this podcast together, you know, my mind immediately went to functional communication. Because …

Rose Griffin
Yeah!

Anne Zachry
… because we have a lot of kids who … they have the speech and language services to teach them, you know, often in a small group or an individual one-on-one situation, sometimes pushed into a classroom situation, but most often not in my experience, and then somehow they’re supposed to generalize that to the world at large. And …

Rose Griffin
Right! It’s supposed to miraculously happen. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
Yeah, it’s just gonna be osmosis or something. And so, you know, there needs to be that explicit reinforcement of the behavior in the in vivo context, in order for them to make the connection between what you’re talking about in a therapeutic situation and real life. And that’s where the the behavioral supports come in, where functional communication skills are used as behavior strategies in an ABA based program. And so that in my mind, that’s that was where everything immediately went when I saw your qualifications, because I’m like, “Oh, she’s in that nexus of, you know …”

Rose Griffin
Heh, heh – yeah.

Anne Zachry
… where the … because all, all communi-, what is, what is the saying? “All behavior is communication”?

Rose Griffin
Right. There’s that saying. They say that a lot. Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And all language is a learned behavior. So you know that the language-behavior, there really is no divide. And …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… it’s just … it’s more as … it’s different nuances of the same thing parsed out and, and so what have been your experiences? Because, I’m assuming you go into the schools or you do work with the schools as well.

Rose Griffin
Yeah, so, for 20 years, I worked as a school based speech language pathologist …

Anne Zachry
Okay.

Rose Griffin
… and I started my own business called ABA Speech five years ago. And I actually just decided in May to step away from the schools to focus on my business where I offer courses, and I have a podcast called Autism Outreach, and we have products, but I still love to be in touch with the schools. So it looks a little bit different now. Now, I’m just kind of seeing a handful of a private clients. But yeah, for 20 years, I worked as a school-based SLP. And I really loved being able to provide therapy in that natural setting. And I really did a lot of push-in therapy into the classroom and some students that I needed to see in my office, but you know, I worked in middle school/high school, so maybe I had kids with selective mutism. Or maybe I had a kid who was stuttering or maybe the classroom was really loud and I needed to pull a student …

Anne Zachry
Right.

Rose Griffin
… into my office to give them a break from the classroom.

Anne Zachry
Right!

Rose Griffin
But I’ve definitely tried to push in and do like a group so I can model therapy strategies for the teacher and one on one staff and things like that. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
Well, and the push-in model is so much more supportive of generalizing those skills from a pull-out situation to real life that gives you the opportunity to go into the real life classroom and say, “Okay, here’s where you need to do this, bro,” you know?

Rose Griffin
Yeah! No, absolutely!

Anne Zachry
You’re coaching people on the pragmatics, you know, people who have a hard time reading the room?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, that’s always … Yeah, that’s what … that’s hard. That’s ever-changing for everybody. I had some students that had more direct instruction, more traditional type ABA services, and I would go into the classroom and see them in their teaching area. And every student was just so individualized.

Anne Zachry
Exactly!

Rose Griffin
But, I tried to do whatever works for the student.

Anne Zachry
That makes sense. That totally makes sense. And that’s really how it should be done. It is supposed to be individualized.

Rose Griffin
Yeah!

Anne Zachry
I just … I think it’s a, it’s a fascinating overlap that a lot of people fail to appreciate … that, that connection between language and behavior, and how much …

Rose Griffin
Oh yeah.

Anne Zachry
… how much, you know, how often do we say, “No hitting; use your words,” and yet, that connection still doesn’t get made in people’s minds? You know, it’s like, well, after they’re toddlers, that doesn’t count anymore. It’s like, “No, it always counts! …”

Rose Griffin
Right!

Anne Zachry
“… That never goes away!”

Rose Griffin
That’s my own kids. Yeah, they’re like, you know, in upper elementary school and middle school …

Anne Zachry
Right. Well, and I have to say, you know, I mean, I use these skills just as much to navigate the politics of the IEP process, as …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
I’m using the same skills to deal with the adults in the situation, and to try …

Rose Griffin
Yeah. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… and get an IEP to say what it needs to say,

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… without ruffling feathers, and without people getting their feelings hurt …

Rose Griffin
Oh, yeah!

Anne Zachry
… and taking things personally, when it’s about the construction of a legally binding document and not anybody’s personality, and …

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, yeah.

Anne Zachry
… and so it’s, you know, having to dance around all of that, I find that … I mean, that my … I have my master’s in educational psychology. I’m qualified to go in and do school-based …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… you know, behavior assessments, but I don’t go in as an outside assessor. I’m there as the lay advocate. And so I keep that hat on.

Rose Griffin
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
But I’m going in as an informed lay advocate, and I’ve also paralegaled all the way up to the Ninth Circuit of the Court of Appeals. So the only place I haven’t gone yet is the US Supreme Court. And so, so I … I’m coming at this from both a compliance standpoint, and from a science standpoint …

Rose Griffin
Uh-huh.

Anne Zachry
… that the law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special ed.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
But we don’t have any mechanisms in place to really truly facilitate that. And so when I find people who have extraordinary qualifications, who have worked in the school setting, who have like, “Okay, I found my work-around.” You know, it’s you’re having to drag the science into a setting that really isn’t designed for it …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and, and trying to implement it in a situation where you’re having to sell everybody on the inside of the legitimacy of what you’re trying to do …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… because it’s not how it’s always been done.

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
And so, there’s a lot of politics and culture, you know, internal district culture issues that have to be overcome before … you know, sometimes … the science will be legitimately applied. And so I see varying degrees of success with kids who have IEPs that call for certain things, but they jump from one school district to another. And what that looks like in one place to a different place are two totally different things. And the child does better in one setting versus the other with things that say they’re … identically described on paper.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And it really does come down to quality control at the individual school sites. And what I one of the questions I wanted to ask you was about fidelity and data collection …

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
… because one of the biggest issues that I’ve run into in any aspect of special ed is the validity of how the data is being collected, basically going to the measurability of the goals, whether or not they’re legitimately measurable.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
Because, back in the 90s, to backtrack a little bit, there was some kind of workshop for teachers somewhere, and I’m not sure who the entity was that put it on, I have my suspicions. There’s organizations out there that tend to disfavor special ed …

Rose Griffin
Oh, okay.

Anne Zachry
… as something no government should be doing.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And there’s a number of those individuals, certainly not the majority of people in public education, but there are a number of them who are employed within public education, who truly do not believe that this is how government resources should be expended. And they’re in the camp of Betsy DeVos, who wants to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
So, they’re there to undermine it from within and prove that somehow government doesn’t really work. “Well, yeah, not when you’re there, doing that kind of stuff!”

Rose Griffin
Uh-huh.

Anne Zachry
And so there’s people of that ilk who are peppered throughout the system, who are trying to prevent anything that’s going to produce a system of accountability, anything that’s going to create an audit trail. This is why you haven’t seen all of the business automation technologies that were perfected in the private industry over the last 30-40 years. They still have not been deployed throughout all of our public agencies …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… because then you … the people who are misappropriating funds and doing illicit things, they have no shadows to hide in anymore.

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
And similarly, when ABA showed up in the special ed arena with all of the data collection and doing it according to a scientifically valid method …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… well, that meant that you were going to take data on everybody blowing it …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and you were gonna … you were gonna create evidence that families could use to hold their school districts accountable if you actually took data on what was really going on. And you know, as … as a BCBA, I know you know this, that it’s not just … when you’re doing a truly scientifically rigorous ABA program, you’re not just taking data on how the individual responds to the intervention, you’re also taking data on how the implementers are implementing the plan with fidelity. You’re taking fidelity data on how well the plan is implemented, because it can only fail for one of two reasons: either a design flaw or an implementation failure. So you’ve got to have data on “Is the design working?”, which you only know, if you’re trying to implement the plan, according to its design. We have seen a huge, huge push against taking fidelity data as part of any child’s behavior intervention plan in an IEP because of the audit trail it will create, and the fact that it will capture people not doing the job rather than you know, using it as a quality control measure. And so it seems to … in my experience, what I’ve run into it, you know … and bearing in mind that I only get contacted by people whose kids IEPs are just gone off the rails, and it’s a horrible situation.

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
Nobody calls me up to tell me how great is going. So I’m only coming into the worst of the worst. But stepping into the worst of the worst, what I find are concerted efforts to cover things up when things have gone wrong, and then try to create a some sort of legal defense that shifts the blame away from the school district. And, you know, one of the preemptive legal defense strategies that their lawyers will, will have them do is like take as little data as possible. And, and so you have this … this energy against valid data collection and fidelity measurement that undermines the integrity of the process, even though the law mandates the application of the science. And that’s not the science, you know. And so, families … but families are the enforcement arm of the law, because you know, we’re a government of the people. So if … there’s no, you know, special ed police running around to make sure everybody’s doing it the way it’s supposed to be done. The only way the law gets enforced is when somebody breaks it and a parent reports them.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
And so, we have parents having to bear the burden of understanding what the science is to even be able to know that it hasn’t been applied. And we have people in the schools who don’t know the science, much less how to apply it. And so we’ve got a lot of changes coming up on the horizon that we see are inevitable in that regard, but having worked for 20 years in the public schools having tried to apply the science to the benefit of children, what have your experiences been of trying to stick to the … to the fidelity of the science that’s behind what you’re doing? Has that been a challenge for you?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, I’ve had great experiences. Yeah, I’ve been a school-based speech therapist and have worked really hard to build rapport with families and teams, and, yeah, we really help students and support them in that natural environment of a public school. So yeah, on my end, it’s been really, it’s been really positive for my students to get those services within public school. It’s been great.

Anne Zachry
Have you had a hard time, though, with respect to the peer-reviewed research and being able to bring in the current research into the school setting and implement the new stuff?

Rose Griffin
No, and it might just be where I live, you know, I live in Cleveland, Ohio, a suburb of that. And we have a lot of really great providers here. And, yeah, I’ve just had really great experiences. And haven’t really had …

Anne Zachry
That’s fabulous to hear, because I’m telling you this, this is my uphill battle all the time. And I’m in California, which is one of the most progressive and heavily regulated states in the country for special ed.

Rose Griffin
Oh yeah. Wow!

Anne Zachry
I mean, we kind of set the tone for because we have more special ed due process cases every year …

Rose Griffin
Oh, I’m sure.

Anne Zachry
… that I mean …

Rose Griffin
It’s so big.

Anne Zachry
Yeah, some states go for years without having any at all.

Rose Griffin
Right! Lucky them!

Anne Zachry
And, and so it goes to the degree that the parents don’t know their rights …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… or things are going successfully and you don’t have the kinds of challenges that you know, that other districts run into. And I think it goes to quality of leadership. So it sounds to me like you’ve been in a very blessed situation where you haven’t had to contend with those kinds of situations, which are just, you know …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… more, more common …

Rose Griffin
Yeah!

Anne Zachry
… than people would like to think. I mean, you know, we have…

Rose Griffin
Right. Um-umm.

Anne Zachry
… our organization was actually founded in 2003, following the death of a classmate of our founder’s nephew, who was …

Rose Griffin
Awww!

Anne Zachry
… was smothered to death by his teacher in front of everybody in the classroom during an unlawful prone restraint. And …

Rose Griffin
Oh dear!

Anne Zachry
Yeah, and …

Rose Griffin
No wonder!

Anne Zachry
… and it was horrible and … and he never went back to school after that. It was a class for emotionally disturbed children, and this teacher was …

Rose Griffin
Oh dear!

Anne Zachry
… supposed to be there to help all these children with these mental and emotional health needs get better. And, instead …

Rose Griffin
Umm, oh dear!

Anne Zachry
… she was this authoritarian monster who just bullied them. And … and so, you know, these things do happen. And it’s not as rare as people would like. That case actually ended up being included in … and I’ve got written in the blog post that goes with this podcast, I’ll include links for it …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… we have an article about this from a while back, but that just explained our history and how this all happened. But this particular child’s family, he was a foster child. And so the moment his life was terminated, so was his foster mother’s parental authority. And so she couldn’t do anything to hold anybody accountable, because she no longer had parental rights at that point. She had no authority and no standing.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
But, a few years after that, Congress had commissioned a study on the use of seclusion and restraints and special ed in the public schools. And, it was public schools in general, but it turned out that special ed kids were the ones who are most commonly restrained and secluded. And, this young man’s case was in part of the that federal investigation.

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
We were shocked to see it, because it’s the reason why we founded our organization. It was the, you know, the final straw …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… that made us pull that plug. But, to see that in the federal report, and it was actually, like, one of the feature cases, and they actually had the foster mother go to Washington, DC, and testify before Congress about what had happened.

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
And, what they determined was the teacher had never been held accountable, that she had never received any kind of negative consequence for any of this, and was able to leave the state of Texas and go to Virginia. And, at the time of the hearing, when this foster mother was testifying, this teacher was only 45 minutes away running a special ed classroom in Virginia from where Congress …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… was hearing testimony about how she had murdered this child and got away with it. It’s a failure of multiple systems. But this goes to our whole thing that special ed is really … the work that we do in advocacy to address these kinds of problems is really part of a larger social justice issue. Because …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… it wasn’t just the special ed system that failed.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
It was the foster care system, it was the criminal justice system, it was the teacher credentialing system, it was … there was all kinds of parts of the system that broke down that allowed this to happen. And a lot of it goes to the bureaucracy and the lack of communication. And if all of these agencies were actually interconnected in a wide area network, enterprise-class computing environment, the way that, like Walmart, or Sanyo, or UPS Freight, or any of these big global organizations that have these huge computing environments … they overcame these obstacles decades ago, but we don’t have the same consistency of flow of information. And because of that, we’ve got consumers having to go to 15 different agencies and applying for 15 different types of service, you know, and maybe you’re talking about somebody in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, who has to go trucking around all over the place, instead of the money following the consumer, the consumer has to go chasing after the money. And so we’ve got a lot of organizational defects, you know, when you start looking at … you talk to … start talking about a plan and looking at a behavior plan versus a plan for the operation of an entity, it really isn’t that remarkably different. And does this plan actually support the functions of the behaviors that you know … do these behaviors support the function of the organization? Are we rewarding …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… are we reinforcing the right behaviors in this organization? And so for me, I think that there’s also a carryover of what you do into the organizational structure of, you know, in the organizational cultures. I know that ABA is used very much in an industrial sense, by private industry, but to create …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… you know, positive workplace environments. And do you see a value of your profession and people in your profession, you know … crossover between both, really … of going in and doing professional development and positive culture building and in help healing the cultures of some of these environments where people are not invested in their constituents?

Rose Griffin
You know, yeah! There’s a whole branch of ABA called OBM. Organizational Behavior Management, I think it’s what it’s called.

Anne Zachry
Yep.

Rose Griffin
I don’t have any experience with that. But I think it makes a lot of sense to use the science and there are people that specialize in just doing that. And they’re doing … going into organizations helping with the culture, helping streamline workflows, and I think that is definitely something that’s positive. There’s so many different things that you can do with the science of applied behavioral analysis …

Anne Zachry
Oh, I know!

Rose Griffin
… autism is just one very small area. So …

Anne Zachry
That’s what I tell people!

Rose Griffin
People make mistakes about that, as well.

Anne Zachry
I tell people that. I’m, like, look! ABA is a science; it is not an autism service.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm!

Anne Zachry
It’s the science behind certain autism services that address behavior, but it is not an autism service, per se. And a lot of people don’t realize that I’m like, no ABA applies to crustaceans and computer code …

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, yeah!

Anne Zachry
… you can analyze anything that behaves and there’s always a cause for everything, you know, and everything serves a function, and so that’s something that I think that there needs to be more discussion around and more research done into of how that organizational aspect of ABA can be used as part of the healing process of all of these things that we’re dealing with in our culture right now. I mean, all of the conflicts and the dividedness, and the fights and, you know, it just I think that ABA sort of takes the temperature down because you’re doing nothing but black and white neutral statements of fact …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and only things that are objectively observable, like this is what we know to be true. And I think that bringing the conversation back to … I mean … getting away from the hysteria and coming back to the rule of law and back to scientific method, both of which are evidence-based, you know … you have to use logic statements … they are very similar in to how you execute both … that calmer heads can sit there and do that kind of black and white analysis and like, “Okay, let’s get to the to the bottom line of what is, and then we can decide how we’re going to emotionally react to it.” But right now …

Rose Griffin
Hmm! Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… we’ve got everybody reacting to the data rather than to the outcome of the analysis.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… that, you know, people are pre-judging what a piece of data might actually mean rather than putting it all together and reaching a logical conclusion, “Okay, here’s the story is told by the evidence.” And I think that we do our young people a huge disservice by not teaching them to think that way, as just simply part of curriculum. I think that there’s a huge value in teaching people about ABA as part of like a high school psychology class, I think that it’s a skill that is …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… all it is, is the ability to see what is without cluttering it up with a bunch of other superfluous details. It’s about how to prioritize your data and focus on what’s the most important thing …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and engage in that neutral fact-based decision-making. And I think that if that were taught as a skill just in, in general, for all kids, I think that would help develop them, especially in high school, when that prefrontal cortex is starting to come online, and they’re starting to think more abstractly, and they’re looking for that kind of structure to structure their thoughts. I think that that’s something that we need to start really thinking about, as we we try to … to develop tomorrow’s leaders and problem solvers. That ABA, just as a skill, as a science …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… is valuable, just as much as it is to learn about the law of gravity.

Rose Griffin
Heh, he, um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
You know, I think that we focus on the physical aspects, and we consider the hard sciences more legit than the soft sciences. And I’m like, I don’t see how you think that ABA is not hard science …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And so I’m, I mean, what are your thoughts about making the science just more part of a mainstream part of the human experience and making it more part of the … of just common knowledge? How valuable do you think that is?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, I mean, you know, with my business at ABA Speech, I disseminate information daily. And I don’t always even say that it’s ABA. But I just talk about the way that I use the science of applied behavior analysis is by helping autistic learners find their voice and increase their communication skills. And so everybody that is a BCBA definitely has the opportunity to disseminate and to share how they’re using the science to help support students or whatever facet, they are included in. So I think that being able to share that is important. And that’s what I do through my online business. So it’s important to me to share that.

Anne Zachry
Yeah, I think the more that the folks I work with understand the science that is being applied to their kids, the more comfortable they are with it, and it logically makes sense to them. And I have moms who will … are like Goddesses at coming up with goals and how to track the data …

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha!

Anne Zachry
…. and how you know which method, you know, “I’m gonna do DRI or a DRA.” And I’m like, “Okay.”

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha!

Anne Zachry
And they’re like, you know, honorary BCBAs after a while, and I …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… it’s because all it really does is measure what already is.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
It’s not like you made up something new. you’re just trying … it’s a way of documenting what’s happening in the environment, and then what to make of that data once you’ve collected it. So it’s not like you’re making something new out of what is or, you know, inventing a new chemical or something. It’s looking at, “Okay, here’s what’s going on in this actual real world environment,” you know, and then to the degree that language plays into it, which is always, you know, usually part of it.

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
And so to circle back around to the school and the speech and language and the ABA overlaps, do you find that it is more efficient for you to be able to wear both of those hats? Or do you find that it can be equally effective to have a team where you’ve got a BCBA and a speech-language pathologist working together? I mean, what do you … how do you see, you know, all the different ways to still come up with the same information that a team might need with respect to behavior and communication?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, in a school setting, you’re typically going to have one person that’s a speech therapist, and one person that’s the BCBA, and they can work collaboratively together with the students, the family, the teacher. Even though I’m dually certified, my role on the team in this particular job setting was as a speech-language pathologist …

Anne Zachry
Got it.

Rose Griffin
… so we actually had an outside consultant that we would work with. And it’s so much easier for me to work with outside consultants, because I’m a BCBA, so I understand all the different things that they’re talking about. So is it easier for me to work with consultants, and to make that a cohesive team? It absolutely is. But you know, being dually certified, allows me to work with ABA providers that want to offer speech therapy or offer consultations, or I help different ABA providers with professional development about communication. And so being dually certified is a very special niche area. And I can help businesses and families and individuals in a very specific way. But if you have a team and you have a few therapists, and you have a BCBA, and they’re able to collaborate, that’s just as impactful.

Anne Zachry
Yeah, it does … I mean, it’s sort of like, well, you have all your eggs in one basket on the one hand …

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha.

Anne Zachry
… but at the same time, you’re also got a more efficient a … you know, a faster machine and in a manner of speaking, because you’re not having to do the … everybody on the team coming together and collaborating. It’s all in one brain and they can just, “Blech, there it is.”

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha.

Anne Zachry
So, I mean, I, you know, and I totally get that. And I mean, I’m in a similar situation in that I’m in the nexus between the legal side of it as a paralegal and a lay advocate …

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
… but also coming from the scientific side of it with my master’s in educational psychology and all the work that I’ve done in that regard …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and so I’m straddling that nexus between where normally you would have to have an attorney who brings in an expert to tell them …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… the science part of it. So you’ve got the expert who knows the science, and you’ve got the lawyer who knows the law, but sometimes there’s things they miss, because they’re talking apples and oranges. And they don’t, you know … and it’s not quite the same, because I think the connection between speech and language pathology and behavior is like way closer. I mean, it’s really just, you know, two sides of the same coin.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
Whereas, what I’m doing, I’m really having to straddle two different universes and trying to get these people to understand each other’s professional lingo, because, you know …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm. Yeah!

Anne Zachry
… you know the educators have their their jargon. And, the lawyers have their jargon. And, a lawyer may be able to identify that, you know, a timeline was violated, or, you know, “Well, this kid’s nonverbal and you didn’t do a speech and language assessment at all. How is this possibly a comprehensive triennial evaluation?” You know, it’s like … when it’s really over the top egregious stuff like that, a lawyer will recognize the failure.

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
But, when you’re talking about, “Well, this child has the potential to make X amount of growth in reading ability over the next year, but you’re not targeting an outcome that’s that aggressive; you’re low-balling this kid on his IEP goals,” a lawyer is not going to look at an IEP and be able to recognize that.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
You’ve got to have somebody who’s an expert in the data and the assessment stuff to be able to look at, “Okay, well, what did the assessment data say about this child’s capacity to learn? And how …” you know, “… and where their baselines were at the time everything was written, and how aggressive is this goal relative to their baselines based on what we know about their capacity to learn?” So you’ve got a scientific analysis that has to happen that a lawyer is not going to be able to do, but then you have educators who come into it and don’t know the legal side of it. And so they’ll see that discrepancy, but they don’t know how to advocate for the right thing. And a lot of times, if they’re going to a school district administrator who doesn’t know that, either, they’ll just “Oh, I guess that’s just the way it is.” It doesn’t occur to them that there’s something that can be done, or that the law requires more …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and they … and it comes down to professional development. It’s not because anybody has ill intent. It’s not because somebody is trying to hurt a kid. More often than not, what I run into, when I run into the challenges that I run into, it’s not because somebody’s mean and they want to hurt somebody. It’s because they don’t know …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and they don’t have the resources, and nobody told them. You know, I think it’s exciting for me to hear from professionals who come from schools where that’s not so much the case. That you’re … you’re in a situation where you’ve got a really progressive team. And I’ve talked to other educators who come from really progressive public schools and school districts where, you know, everything is evidence-based, and you’ve got a really amazing people who are pushing forward, really progressive and collaborative types of projects that include the families and don’t vilify them. But, you still got some really weird, old, cronyistic, “Boss Hogg/Roscoe P. Coltrane” kind of stuff going on out there, too.

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha.

Anne Zachry
And so it’s a mix, you know? Iit’s a mixed bag. And I think that where you are has a lot to do with it. So it’s exciting to hear. And you said, you’re in Ohio.

Rose Griffin
Yes, I’m in Ohio. So yeah, I’ve had really positive experiences. It’s been … it’s been really wonderful. I was sad to step away from the schools after 20 years, but I just … my business has grown so much at ABA Speech that, you know, it’s just what I needed to do. So …

Anne Zachry
That’s exciting to hear too. Because you know, all growth is just part of life. You have to grow and evolve into something else.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And whatever skills you acquire in one situation, and the benefit you serve to people while you were there just equips you to serve other people in a different kind of way better, stronger, you know. And so it sounds like that’s what you’re doing. So with your practice, now, you’re mostly working with private families, and then consulting with organizations?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, so I divide my time. My podcast, Autism Outreach, is a big part of what I do. Yesterday, I batched three episodes. And so we have monetized my podcast. And so we offer it for continuing education units for … geared towards speech-language pathologists.

Anne Zachry
Nice!

Rose Griffin
And then I do some therapy. I see a couple clients privately, and then I do some telehealth. I’m actually licensed in Washington State.

Anne Zachry
Nice!

Rose Griffin
And so I act in the capacity of helping ABA centers sometimes provide speech therapy. And then sometimes I just do consultations for complex communication cases. And I do a lot of presenting. I do a lot of speaking about working on autism and communication and how to help students at various levels along their communication journey. And we offer courses. That’s the biggest thing that we do is we offer courses about autism that are geared towards professionals and parents that are a little familiar with the science of applied behavior analysis, would probably be the best way to describe it. And we’ve just had a great chance and opportunity to be able to reach people through our courses. That’s been really something that’s been very rewarding.

Anne Zachry
That speaks to the concern I was having before about, you know, just how difficult it is to get the science pushed into the schools.

Rose Griffin
Really?

Anne Zachry
So, people who are doing the kind of work that you’re doing …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… and be able to reach through to them through the internet and nonetheless get the information out to these people. So they have access, I think that is so incredibly important. And that’s going to be such a huge part of what makes things better is people like you doing the kind of work that you’re doing, because you found a workaround.

Rose Griffin
Right!

Anne Zachry
It’s like, “Okay, well, maybe I’m not gonna go down to the local school district and hold a workshop today. But I don’t have to,” you know? “I can do it myself …

Rose Griffin
Right!

Anne Zachry
… and put it out there, and people can get their continuing ed units.” And then, you know, Bob’s your uncle, there it is.

Rose Griffin
Yeah! Yeah!

Anne Zachry
And so I think that that’s very encouraging,

Rose Griffin
Because our courses are offered for speech language-pathologists for their CEUs. Also, for board certified behavior analysts, they’re called ACEUs. And then also, we do general certificates for teachers and parents. And that’s been really great. So it’s really just a mix of I do live presentations. But then I also have these courses that are usually on Evergreen. And we have a new course coming out in September, that is called The Advanced Language Learner. And that is going to be about students who are using two to three words on their own, and how to help them go beyond basic communication skills. So I’m very, very excited and have been working diligently on that launch. So that will happen mid-September.

Anne Zachry
That sounds really exciting! All of that sounds amazing and wonderful. So, well, I’m excited to be able to share that with our audience, because I know there’s gonna be a lot of families out there who will benefit from it. I mean, by no means are our entire caseload, you know, kids with autism. That’s some, you know … a good fair percentage of our caseload.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
But, you know, and that’s … they’re not the only kids who would benefit from something like that either. And then I have lots of kids with other types of issues …

Rose Griffin
Yep. Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… that that would really speak to their needs as well, and that knowledge being out there for the professionals in their lives, as well as their parents. The parent education piece is really important. And I … so here’s a thought …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm?

Anne Zachry
The implementing regulations of the IDEA include in its description of all the different things that can be related services … like speech and language, or transportation, or OT, or whatever …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
parent training and counseling is also listed. And …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… and so some … and the purpose of that being as a related service is so that parents can understand their children’s disability better and be more effective participants in the IEP process and understand the IEP process … because they have federally protected rights to informed consent and meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, and they can’t participate meaningfully if they don’t understand.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
So, the parent counseling and training component is to help the parents get up to speed on what’s going on with their kid based on what the assessment … help them understand the disability, and also, you know, how to support and be part of the IEP team.

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
And, be able to be a collaborative member of the whole process …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and have that meaningful parent participation where they’re not in there, just you know, having hysterical fits, because they don’t understand and nobody can get anything done, you know? Because that can happen. And so, I’m wondering how easy it would be for a parent to be able to get the cost of doing training through your program covered as an IEP cost?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, you know, I actually did have somebody reached out from California …

Anne Zachry
Where I’m at.

Rose Griffin
… where they wanted to sign their parent up for this parent training. That they wanted to know if I was a provider, which I think is something that’s very specific to California and the region.

Anne Zachry
Right, you have to be …

Rose Griffin
I have a friend that is an SLP.

Anne Zachry
Um-hmm. Yeah.

Rose Griffin
And I was, like, “Oh, I’m not covered on that.” So, I mean, if there’s any way that I could be covered on things like with that, she said that I would have to have a physical location in California …

Anne Zachry
No, no, no, no!

Rose Griffin
… which I’m not going to do from Ohio.

Anne Zachry
Here’s what you do. You do it as a reimbursement model. The parent pays you directly …

Rose Griffin
Oh!

Anne Zachry
… and the parents simply gets reimbursed.

Rose Griffin
Yeah!

Anne Zachry
That’s how you work around that requirement.

Rose Griffin
Okay!

Anne Zachry
Because, what you’re talking about is in California, in order for an agency to contract with the school district to provide anything special ed-related …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… they have to be a non-public school or a non-public agency. There’s a license you have to get from the California Department of Education.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
And you have to have all this, like, this behemoth of a red tape process. It’s almost not even worth it for a lot of people …

Rose Griffin
Okay. Right.

Anne Zachry
… and which is why it’s so hard to find people to do it.

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
The workaround is if you have someone in private practice, and the parent simply pays and then gets reimbursed. If they have the means to do that, then a reimbursement model is the workaround for those kinds of things in special ed and that’s … you can write it into the IEP that way, or sometimes it will come up as part of a settlement agreement. And …

Rose Griffin
Okay, because I’ve had some people reach out to me that way, from California, but I’m just I’m not there. I’m not licensed in California. And …

Anne Zachry
You could do it remotely. And yeah, I mean, there’s your answer. So, if that helps you, you know, serve families in my state, that would be great! Ha, ha, ha!

Rose Griffin
Okay, good to know.

Anne Zachry
Yeah, no! There’s absolutely a work-around.

Rose Griffin
We definitely have courses that parents really, you know, enjoy, so … and just helps them feel like they have a better understanding of what’s going on in therapy, even if they’re not going to be the therapy provider themselves …

Anne Zachry
Right.

Rose Griffin
It just gives them more of an overall …

Anne Zachry
Well, yeah. That’s the whole point of understanding what’s really going on and why these things are important …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and why it’s important for them to …

Rose Griffin
Yeah.

Anne Zachry
… you know, facilitate it and, you know, be part of the team to make it happen. You know, I would say to any parents who may have already paid for your services, especially if it’s been within the last year or two, you know, and a lot of people coming off the pandemic have had to go out and privately fund a lot of stuff that they wouldn’t have otherwise expected to have to do …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… that, they might want to save those receipts and their proofs of payment. And if they are …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… in any kind of dispute with their school districts trying to get services that they’ve otherwise had to get from you, that …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… if they were out of pocket for that, that that could be a reimbursable expense. And if they are going down that route, they do have an attorney or someone helping them with that process to have that person to look at the situation, the facts of their case, and how much they’ve had to spend on that, to see if it’s recoverable. Because you know, in very … a lot of instances, I would think that not just the speech and language or the ABA or any of this … that stuff you’re doing, but also the parent training could be a recoverable expense, because of that provision under the IDEA a that provides for parent training and counseling. So, just something to keep in mind. It could get get written into a kid’s IEP, and then, you know …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… if it’s not California, the district could potentially contract with you directly. Yeah, because we’re regulated …

Rose Griffin
Right.

Anne Zachry
… we’re so regulated. And you know, it offers a lot of good protections that the federal law doesn’t offer. But it sometimes …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… also creates additional bureaucracy. It’s like “Really?” Yeah, in other states, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. And you could actually get your product and your services written directly into a kid’s IEP …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… and get funded by the district for that. Another …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… thing that I’ve seen with people doing similar kinds of programs like yours is that sometimes they will be able to get a contract with a school district to use the product, like on a licensed basis, where …

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
… you train the speech and language pathologist

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… to replicate your content in their setting.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
And, you know, any therapies or anything that you’ve developed or any strategies you develop that are branded to you then becomes …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… it’s like … it makes me think of, for pragmatic language assessments you have was Michelle Winner-Garcia, Michelle Garcia-Winner, I never can remember …

Rose Griffin
We really don’t use her that much anymore. I mean, I think …

Anne Zachry
Yeah, but back in the day, I remember that was…

Rose Griffin
… the test for pragmatic language is the CASL. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
Well, but the CASL is a standardized measure. So a …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… norm-reference test is not …

Rose Griffin
… not observation …

Anne Zachry
going to get you …Yeah, it’s not going to give you the exact same kind of a thing as an …

Rose Griffin
Right, right.

Anne Zachry
in vivo, authentic language sample.

Rose Griffin
We always do an observation.

Anne Zachry
Yeah.

Rose Griffin
Make sure that we’re observing in the natural environment. Yeah.

Anne Zachry
You want the language sample and … But her … the thing that I liked that she did was the “Double Interview.”

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm! In one of our podcast episodes, with Lisa Chattler. She’s actually a speech therapist. She lives in Orange County …

Anne Zachry
Oh, right on!

Rose Griffin
… and she talked about the double interview and asking questions. And, yes.

Anne Zachry
I think that’s really important, too. I mean, I think that there’s value in norm referenced standardized tests, but to us … especially when you’re talking about school psychology, because that’s more my domain, you could be a psychometrician and paint by numbers, and not understand what any of those tests do. You can go through the motions of administering and scoring that test, and that doesn’t mean that you appreciate what the data means. I actually had a case a few years ago, where we had an audiologist supposedly doing an assessment for an auditory processing disorder.

Rose Griffin
Hmm!

Anne Zachry
She was with … the district had the choice of who was going to do it. They didn’t have an audiologist on staff. And so they outsourced it to a non-public agency. And the young woman who was the licensed audiologist who administered the test, none of it made any sense. And she had transposed percentile rankings and standard scores on her scoring charts and whatnot. And I was like, I don’t think she understands what these numbers mean.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
And her report made no sense. And so we asked for a second opinion at public expense, an IEE … for the district to fund an outside second opinion. And they said, “No.” And so we had to go to due process to argue over whether or not they had done a good job, and we needed a second opinion. And she gets on the witness stand, and we asked her, “Well, what’s the difference between a standard score and a percentile ranking?” And she was like, I don’t know. I’m not a statis-, statis-” (she couldn’t say “statistician”). She goes, “I’m not a statistics person.”

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
And I could just feel the attorney for the school district die inside right next to me …

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
…. because this was his case. You know, he was the one arguing that she knew what she was doing. He was a lawyer. He had no way of knowing that she didn’t know what those things were because he didn’t know what those things were.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
So, he was just … she would say, “Well, of course I know what I’m doing!” So, he had her back. And, then we get in front of the judge and she just tanks! She couldn’t explain any of her data. And, then we had our own audiologist who came and testified who was an expert witness on how it should have been done, and, it was just night and day. And so, there are people out there who are going through the motions, who can administer and score a standardized assessment, but they don’t necessarily understand how to interpret the data. And they may not have even chosen the right test. In this particular case, she just used a boilerplate list of assessments that the owner of the company she worked for, who was also an audiologist, said, “This is what you do when you test for this.” And, so everybody was getting identical measures. None of it was individualized. And … I mean, for a large part, for that kind of testing, there’s only so many things you can do, but still. And so, she was just going through this list of tests that her boss had said, “This is what you do,” and listing the scores, but not explaining what any of it meant, and, in fact, she had her scores were all transposed and she had them jumbled up, and it didn’t mean anything. It made no sense whatsoever. And, so how can you trust that she even administered and scored them correctly? That does happen. For people who are thinking, “Oh, well standardized measures for pragmatic language …” If you know what you’re doing, you can go do an authentic language sample and the CASL, and that’s going to get you there. But, for people who are paint-by-numbers folks who really don’t understand, thinking they can do pragmatic language in a paint-by-numbers manner, you have to be able to engage in the act of pragmatic language of reading the person yourself in order to take the data necessary to read whether that person has intact pragmatic language skills. And, if you don’t know how to do that type of analysis, then you’re going to have … what I see is people falling more and more back on the standardized norm-referenced stuff and getting away from the observations … getting away from things like the double-interview, where they have to actually use judgment and there’s a professional level of skill that … and understanding and higher-level thinking and critical thinking skills that are required, that a paint-by-numbers, “Let’s just do a norm-referenced test and it will tell us what’s going on” … Up to a point, yes. But, that shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. I think there’s a lot of value in some of these other, maybe standardized but not norm-referenced, maybe more criterion-referenced kinds of measures. One of the tools that I’ve seen used out here is called the Southern California Ordinal Scales of Development

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
… and, it’s broken into a cognition, a communication, an adaptive behavior, a motor skills, and one other that I’m not remembering, but all these different aspects of development that you have these subtests in.

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
And, it’s based on a Piagetian model …

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
… where you’re trying to figure out what stage of Piagetian development the individual is in each of the different domains. Because, when you’re talking about someone with a developmental disability, in particular, there’s going to be scatter. That, they may be higher in cognition but lower in communication, if they have apraxia. They may be higher in cognition and communication, but lower in adaptive skills. It’s just, everybody’s different, right? And so, what it looks at, is it’s criterion-referenced, not norm-referenced, and you’re coming at, “Can this person do this thing in any kind of way, yes or no?” And, so, like, when you’re testing for whether they’ve mastered the concept of conservation, the idea that mass doesn’t change even if the way that the mass is arranged is different. So, like, if you have … or volume. So, if you pour water … a cup of water … you’re talking about, like, if you have a tall skinny beaker or a short fat beaker, and you pour a cup of water into each, and you ask the kid, “Which has more?” Well, neither, because it’s both a cup of water.

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
But, a kid who has not mastered conservation is gonna say the tall skinny one has more water because it goes up higher, and the short fat beaker has less because it’s shorter, relatively. And so, they’re only looking at it from one dimension. And someone who has mastered conservation knows it’s still the same amount of water. Or, you take a ball of clay and roll it out into a snake and you say, “Is it still the same amount of clay, or is it more or less?” And, a kid who hasn’t mastered conservation will say it’s more because it’s longer, but the kid who has will say, “It’s the same amount; I just changed the shape.” And so …

Rose Griffin
Hmm.

Anne Zachry
… when you’re doing things like that, sometimes what can happen is … when you’re talking about doing those kinds of things … sometimes, the example in the test … in the Ordinal Scales … will say, “Here are some ways you can test for this,” but it doesn’t obligate you to do it exactly that way, the way a norm-referenced test would … where you’ve got to administer and score it exactly the same way for everybody … well, the scoring is the same, but the administration is not the same on a criterion-referenced … because you’re trying to whether a kid has a skill or not, not how they display it. So, if you have to do something different, like if the ball of clay doesn’t work but the beakers of water gets you there, and they can still demonstrate they have at least, you know, emerging conservation skills. But, you only do one thing with the ball of clay and that’s where you leave it, and you don’t experiment with it, it’s like when you’re testing your hypotheses when you’re doing ABA. You’ve got to fool around with it to see if you’re actually … your hypothesis is right. So, for that kind of measure, what are the various different types of measures do you think are really the most reliable for giving you the broad, full picture of how someone … someone’s communication and behavior plays into each other?

Rose Griffin
Yeah, I think what’s most important is to … whatever you’re doing, it’s going to be dependent on your work setting. So if you’re in a public school, there might be a certain expectation of what type of evaluation tests you’re going to use versus being in a practice that is either private pay or is insurance led. Every work setting is going to have an expectation of what is going to be an assessment. But I think what’s most important with an assessment is to make sure that you talk to the student, you talk to the family, and that you observe the student in different settings. So observing the student in a classroom lesson; observing the student in a less structured environment, like gym or recess or lunch, to try to get a snapshot of the student’s skills. But I really think assessment is an ongoing process and that every time that you see a student, and you work with a student, you’re going to be assessing, “How is the student doing?”, “Are they generalizing their skills?”, and “How can I help support my students?

Anne Zachry
And that makes a lot of sense. I agree with you. I think … that’s music to my ears, because I think that that’s something that’s really important is the observation of students across various different settings, because you’re going to see different presentations …

Rose Griffin
Um-hmm.

Anne Zachry
… based on different environmental stimuli, and different social demands. So I think that that’s hugely important. I think that’s where a lot of the pragmatic stuff really comes out. I think that you coming at it from the perspective of both a BCBA and a speech and language pathologist … that your ability to see the function of the behavior and a moment where pragmatics are not working for someone has to be so much more informed and enlightened than, you know, different brains having to come together to piece together the same story. So I really, truly appreciate, you know, what you’re bringing to the table and your insights into this. This whole realm of how to, you know, help people who are struggling with these kinds of issues and all the different ways that can be done. And I’m excited to share your information with our audience as well so they can go to your site and your podcast and …

Rose Griffin
Ha, ha, ha! Well, it was really nice to connect. And yes, definitely feel free to reach out to me during the podcast, my free resources, and also the courses that I discussed today.

Anne Zachry
Absolutely! And I’ll be sure to include links to everything because a lot of my families are in, like, parents support groups and stuff they’ll benefit from it.

Rose Griffin
Yeah! That’s awesome! Yeah. so it was great to connect today. Thanks for having me on.

Anne Zachry
Thank you for listening to the podcast version of interview of Rose Griffin, SLP and BCBA. KPS4Parents reminds its listeners that Knowledge Powers Solutions for Parents, and all eligible children, regardless of disability are entitled to a free and appropriate public education. If you are a parent, education professional or concerned taxpayer, and have questions or comments about special education-related matters, please email us at info@kps4parents.org or post a comment to our blog. That’s “info” at “K” as in “knowledge,” “P” as in “Powers,” “S” as in “Solutions,” the number “4,” “Parents,” (“p,” “a,” “r,” “e,” “n,” “t,” “s,”) dot, “o,” “r,” “g.” We hope you found our information useful and look forward to bringing more useful information to you. Subscribe to our feed to make sure that you receive the latest information from making special education actually work, an online publication of KPS4Parents. Find us online at KPS4Parents.org. KPS4Parents is a nonprofit lay advocacy organization. The information provided by KPS4Parents in Making Special Education Actually Work is based on the professional experiences and opinions of KPS4Parents’ lay advocates, and should not be construed as formal legal advice. If you require formal legal advice, please seek the counsel of a qualified attorney. All the content here is copyrighted by KPS4Parents, which reserves all rights.

Is LAUSD Run by a Fascist Mafia?

LAUSD Main Offices – Downtown Los Angeles

The school year hasn’t even started yet and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest school district in the country, has already hit the ground running with illegalities left and right, not the least of which is the systemic policy issue that I’m focusing on in today’s post. It’s hardly the only violation, but its a systemic one that stands to continue hurting a lot of children with disabilities, particularly our kiddos on the autism spectrum.

What I’m about to tell you would sound far-fetched if it was not for the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a soft civil war in which right-wing extremists are attempting to change us from a democratic republic to a ethno-religious dictatorship. The evidence indicates these decades-long plans were started at the local level in city councils, school districts, and various county agencies, then percolated upward into our federal agencies before culminating in the January 6, 2021 insurrection against our democratic republic.

The reality is that I’ve been dealing with these kinds of behaviors from local education agencies for the last 31 years, and there is no end in sight for many families in local education agencies as large as LAUSD. It’s the Titanic, it’s been on a direct course for an iceberg for decades, and it will collapse and sink under its own weight before too much longer at the rate it’s currently going.

This is particularly the case as the pro-democracy backlash to recent fascist efforts to overthrow our system of government is gaining momentum as more and more high-ranking fascist individuals at the federal level face the consequences of their actions with the J6 Hearings and related Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations. When the example is finally set at the national level and all of those responsible for J6 are either behind bars or being pursued by the feds and Interpol after fleeing the country, the trickle-down of legal consequences to State and local government agencies that have been engaging in fascist practices all this time will be severe.

But, we’re not there, yet. The only way to really get there is to make public what the heck is really going on so that taxpaying registered voters in Los Angeles can make informed decisions about the people they entrust with the responsibility of educating their children, particularly their children with disabilities. So, let me get into the actual issue to which I want to call immediate attention, that being LAUSD’s unlawful and unethical method of conducting Functional Behavioral Assessments (FBAs), which it has implemented as a policy, district-wide, according to District personnel.

Title 34, Code of the Federal Regulations (34 CFR) Section 300.304 describes the parameters for how special education assessments are supposed to be conducted. 34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(4) mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education, which includes the assessment process. Taken together, these laws require that competent assessors acting within the scope of their qualifications conduct assessments according to the professional standards that apply to each of the various types of assessments being conducted, in conformity with the peer-reviewed research.

There is no standardized measure, like an IQ test, when conducting an FBA, though there are assessment tools and instruments that can help inform the process. Instead, the applicable science describes the types of critical thinking and lines of inquiry a properly trained behaviorist must apply when determining the function of a maladaptive behavior and the most appropriate ways of responding to it. The science used is referred to as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA).

ABA is not a special education service, per se. ABA is the science behind effective behavioral interventions. ABA services requires scientists to think independently in applying the known science to the unique facts of each individual person assessed. It’s not a paint-by-numbers, one-size-fits-all measure. It’s not psychometrics in the sense that norm-referenced standardized tests will be administered to the student. It requires more thought and higher-level critical thinking skills than that, and the people who are certified to do it must prove their abilities to function that way.

There are no formal criteria for FBAs, specifically, but they are based off the Functional Analysis (FA) procedures developed by Dr. Brian Iwata and his colleagues in their published research. While being certified as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) is supposed to confirm that a behavioral scientist is adequately qualified to analyze behavior, BCBA certification is not required in California for conducting FBAs in the special education context. Anyone who has gone to graduate school for a school psychologist credential should have theoretically been trained on ABA just as a part of their grad school education.

My master’s degree is in educational psychology and I had to study ABA more than once during my higher education. It is not typically part of a special education teaching credential program, other than to mention that other professionals are available in the special education context to conduct FBAs and provide ABA-based behavioral interventions.

That is, except, in LAUSD, which is using special education teachers to conduct its FBAs. It will hire Non-Public Agencies (NPAs) that specialize in providing ABA services through and under the supervision of BCBAs, but it will not allow the BCBAs to actually conduct their own FBAs to inform their own Behavior Intervention Design (BID) services, which then compromises the quality of the Behavior Intervention Implementation (BII) services. This is a district policy, according to various LAUSD employees with whom I’ve been speaking about this since April, and they don’t seem to understand why I have such an issue with it.

First, the 8th grade LAUSD student I’m currently representing in which this issue has come up has been “assessed” under this model since the 1st grade and he still has the same behavioral challenges today that he had in 1st grade. He’s made no improvements and now he’s over 6 feet tall. His toddler-like tantrums result in significant property destruction, which has only gotten worse as he’s gotten smarter and bigger over time, and he puts himself and others at risk of injury when he throws them. Not only does LAUSD’s method of conducting FBAs fail to comply with the applicable science and law, it does not work!

LAUSD’s solution is to offer yet another illegal FBA conducted by an inexpert special education teacher who must then hand off their “data” to a BCBA who is then supposed to somehow magically engage in scientifically valid BID and supervise a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) who is supposed to provide the BII in conformity with the plan designed by the BCBA. When I point out the epic failure of logic behind this practice to LAUSD personnel, I’m met with the Orwellian Doublespeak of corrupt District administrators and the blank stares of ineptitude and rote recitations of District policy from school-site personnel.

One school site administrator actually tried to get me to lie to the parent and trick him into doing something he otherwise was not inclined to do. I analyzed her behavior according to ABA standards based on what information I could gather and ultimately concluded that she’s as stupid as she is corrupt; her behaviors were automatically reinforcing and externally reinforced by her employer, which appears to employ the dumbest people it can find in positions of authority well beyond their critical thinking abilities and professional skills so that they can be the clueless, easily manipulated henchmen of the mafiosos at the main office on Beaudry.

Basically, what we are dealing with here is science denialism and unconstitutional conduct on the part of public officials to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. LAUSD is the government, regulated by the rule of law and answerable to its local constituency, but the people generally have no voice against this behemoth of a self-serving institution, which is why I’m talking about it, here.

LAUSD is long overdue for a reckoning regarding its systemic illegal conduct across all aspects of special education, and it’s probably safe to say that if the District is willing to compromise its most vulnerable constituents, that being children with disabilities, it’s likely equally comfortable violating everybody else’s rights, as well. I can’t speak to the other social justice issues in which the District might be in the wrong, but it has historically failed on the special education front ever since special education and related civil rights laws were first passed in the 1970s.

Disability-related civil rights law is truly the canary in the coal mine for American democracy. The measure of how civilized a society is can be determined by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, and children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable humans on Earth. If LAUSD is willing to treat children with disabilities this way, it’s top administrators should probably swap out their dress suits for animal pelts so that their lack of civility is adequately conveyed. Otherwise, they’re just wolves in sheep’s clothing, preying our our most vulnerable children.

The Chanda Smith Consent Decree came after decades of unlawful special education conduct and was in place for decades thereafter in an effort to end the District’s unlawful conduct, which it failed to do. The courts attempted to pull LAUSD out of the gutter with the consent decree, but LAUSD just pulled the courts into the gutter with it. An Independent Monitor was hired to oversee the consent decree until such time that LAUSD came into compliance with special education law, but that day never came.

Apparently, presuming that compliance would never happen, the Independent Monitor began engaging in equally corrupt behavior, assuming lifelong job security for so long as LAUSD continued to violate special education law and grifting the system by overpaying consultants who failed to make any kind of perceptible difference with respect to LAUSD’s compliance. The Office of the Independent Monitor was shut down and the consent degree was closed out following an audit that revealed excessive unnecessary spending by the Independent Monitor that could not be related to the District’s conformity with the consent decree.

Further, while it may be true that the District legitimately improved some of its special education programming, by no means had to come close to a reasonable degree of compliance, as evidenced by the number of families who have still had to file lawsuits to get services, and even that doesn’t guarantee they’ll get all of the right services for their children. Many get only some of the services their children need, making their IEPs as effective as watered-down penicillin in the face of a raging bacterial infection. For all the services they may actually get that they need, the absence of the other services they also need undermines any successes they may have in the areas in which they’ve actually received help.

Which circles back around to the question that serves as the title to today’s post/podcast, which is, “Is LAUSD Run by a Fascist Mafia?” From the outside looking in, this seems to be a legitimate question.

Let’s start with the fact that LAUSD hired computer coders to work with its in-house counsel decades ago to bastardize a piece of insurance software known as Welligent into its IEP software. As a result, LAUSD has basically bureaucratically obligated its school site personnel to break the law because of the software limitations of Welligent, or at least how it has been coded by the District, that fail to even offer compliant options to its users in many areas of special education.

For example, let’s look at the assessment plan, redacted for privacy, that was offered to my current LAUSD student, which was generated from Welligent, and compare it to another redacted assessment plan for another student on my caseload in a different school district who also needed an FBA.

Example 1, below, is the assessment plan offered to my LAUSD student, and shows the FBA as an “alternative assessment” to be conducted by a special education teacher. “Alternative assessments” usually refer to non-traditional assessment measures or methods from those typically used in the place of standardized testing.

For example, using curriculum-based assessments in the classroom to gather informal data on actual classroom performance can be a more reliable method of assessing academic achievement than a standardized measure like the WJ-IV or the WIAT-4. None of this assessment plan makes sense with respect to the FBA.

Example 1 – page 1

Looking at the table of “standardized” testing from page 2 of this assessment plan, which is referenced by page 1, FBAs are not listed. Item 7 targets “Adaptive Behavior,” but that goes more to independent living skills and self-care, like dressing, toileting, and navigating the school setting. FBAs do not fit that category and the LAUSD assessment plan has no category that FBAs would logically fit. This was a deliberate coding decision made in Welligent by the District that has absolutely nothing to do with adequately assessing children with special needs and offering them appropriate behavioral supports at school.

Example 1 – page 2

Example 2, below, shows a different student’s assessment plan from a different school district. This assessment plan offers the student involved an FBA to be performed by the school psychologist in collaboration with a district behaviorist. This actually makes sense.

In this student’s case, it turns out the special education teacher was the problem and she got reassigned to a different classroom. This student had gone without behavioral challenges until she was placed in this teacher’s class, and the FBA made clear that the teacher was the one provoking the behaviors. Objectivity is one of the most critical aspects of science that must apply to special education assessments. Can you imagine if she had been trusted to conduct the FBA?

I can assure you the quality of the outcomes using appropriately qualified people who actually care makes all the difference in the world. Whereas our LAUSD student has historically been assessed according to plans virtually similar to Example 1, above, and has now gone for over six years with next to no improvements in his behaviors, our student from whose case Example 2 was taken is now thriving in school with no serious behavioral challenges of any kind.

To be clear, it’s not like the student in Example 2 has never had issues with this school district. There were problems years ago when she was little that I had to deal with, but it had been smooth sailing until she ended up in that whacko teacher’s classroom, last school year.

Because the student’s behaviors were interfering with her learning, even though we suspected the teacher was likely the problem, we didn’t go in accusing the teacher of anything. We simply asked for an FBA to get to the bottom of the behaviors and the next thing we knew the teacher was gone. The FBA report we got back was very well-written and explained the facts without demeaning the teacher or doing anything else unprofessional.

We hit a huge bump in the road that had the potential to go really badly, but the District in that student’s case handled it professionally, compassionately, and responsibly. I’ve yet to see any of those qualities from anyone I’ve dealt with from LAUSD regarding my LAUSD student. The difference in handling is night and day, and I’ve caught both districts messing up before. The difference is that my other student was met with professionalism, while my LAUSD student is being met with science denialism and an utter abandonment of the rule of law.

It is this refusal to abide by science and law on the part of the second largest school district in the nation that raises the specter of fascism. It’s all very “Marjorie Taylor Green-ish.”

Consider that California has adopted the Common Core as its State Standards. The purpose of these standards is for our public schools in California to teach students how to use academic knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems, yet LAUSD doesn’t use academic knowledge and skills to solve problems. It denies science and breaks the law.

How can people who deny science teach our kids to use science to solve problems? How can people who have abandoned the rule of law credibly teach social studies, particularly civics, and educate our kids to become knowledgeable participants in American democracy? How is this anything other than fascism and when are the feds going to do something about it?

I tried filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), but it twisted my words into a narrower complaint than what I alleged and then declined to investigate its twisted version of my allegations, which is a first for OCR with me, I have to admit, and it makes me fear for our democracy even more, now.

If OCR is too intimidated by LAUSD to investigate such that it makes up lame excuses as to why it shouldn’t have to, how does that not also suggest the presence of organized crime within LAUSD so large and expansive that even the feds won’t touch it? DOJ is a little busy with the J6 investigations, but I suspect all of this stuff in inter-related as multiple spokes of a wheel-and-spoke conspiracy to overturn democracy in America.

Remember that Betsy DeVos tried to shut down OCR after she was appointed Secretary of Education by the 45th President until she had the snot sued out of her and subsequently reinstated it. She also admitted that her goal was to abolish USDOE as the Secretary of Education; she took the job with the specific intent of shutting down the entire agency from within.

How many people from the last administration continue to poison the well at USDOE? It’s the same question Americans have to ask about every single federal agency, but as pointed out in the above linked-to article from The Root describing DeVos’ desire to abolish USDOE altogether also describes the conference at which she recently shared her continued desire to shut down USDOE as teaching far-right parents how to build conservative-dominated school boards in their local communities, ban books, and a host of other undemocratic activities intended to deny the civil rights of children with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, students of color, and students from other protected classes.

It’s an anti-science, anti-democracy approach that includes anti-vax, anti-masking nut-jobs who are too dumb to know how dumb they are and/or are profoundly mentally ill, being manipulated by grifters like DeVos to vote against their own interests in favor of the interests of the grifters. It’s the “have-nots” falling for the tricks of the “haves” who know the only way they can have way more than what they actually need is to make sure others don’t have enough.

Today’s post isn’t about documenting how I’ve figured out a way to overcome whatever fascist mafia might control LAUSD. It’s about exposing what I’ve witnessed and adding my voice and the voices of the LAUSD students who aren’t getting what they need to the conversation in the hopes that it will spark others to also help hold LAUSD to account for its egregious violations of special education law.

I’m hoping that voters in LA will learn more about these issues, understand that special education social justice issues cuts across all other demographic groups, and no segment of society is safe for so long as our government is allowed to conduct itself in this way. If you are involved in any type of social justice issue in which LAUSD has engaged in discrimination and withheld services it is legally required to provide, consider getting involved with our Meetup Group, Social Justice Series – Everyday Local Democracy for All.

Our Meetup Group is not limited to people living within the LAUSD attendance area, but we certainly have Angeleños already in the Group. You can comment/DM us directly on Meetup or on our social media, or use our Contact Us form on our site with any questions/feedback. We don’t have all the answers, but awareness is the first step to solving a problem, so we’re starting there.

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 9th 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

An Appeal to My Colleagues

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 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.