Category: “Technically Speaking…”

This category is devoted to the nuts and bolts of the special education process.

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Understanding Assessment Data

The whole point of special education assessment is to identify what is preventing a child from accessing his/her educational opportunities and provide the data necessary to figure out a way to overcome whatever is getting in the way. Over the years, I’ve seen all kinds of things happen with assessments.

 

I’ve seen very good assessments performed by both education agency personnel and outside assessors. I’ve also seen horrible assessments performed by both education agency personnel and outside assessors. 

 

I’ve seen assessments that yielded valid data to the degree that assessment was done, but that, overall, were substantively lacking because assessment was not conducted in all areas of need. I’ve also seen assessments that were outright fabrications, which just makes me ill because, regardless of the assessors’ motivations to misrepresent the facts, no child is served when inaccurate data is presented as though it legitimately documents the child’s needs and how they can be met.

 

There are two varieties of assessments that are most commonly used to collect data on children for the purposes of special education: criterion-referenced and norm-referenced assessments. Each has unique aspects that bring value to the assessment process.

 

Criterion-referenced tests ask whether a child can perform a specific task. For example, can the child properly punctuate and capitalize a sentence, yes or no? Criterion-referenced tests are simply looking at whether or not a child can produce a specific outcome.

 

Norm-referenced tests are more complex. Norm-referenced tests that measure cognition (IQ), academic achievement, visual-motor processing, vocabulary development, etc. all have in common the way their scores are presented and interpreted.

 

When a norm-referenced test is developed, the producers of the test recruit thousands of people from all walks of life who collectively represent the population to take their test. These recruits are collectively referred to as the “normed group” or “sample” and it’s their job to establish what constitutes as “average” on the test. 

 

By having normed groups at each age and/or grade level take the test first and establish what is “normal” for a person of each age or grade to score on the test, the scores of people taking the assessment in the real world can be compared against something meaningful.? The purpose of norming a test before it’s put out for actual use is so the scores achieved in the real world can be compared against what should be expected by a particular age or grade.

 

The scores on norm-referenced tests are mathematically designed so that even though different tests measure different things, the scores can be compared to each other. This is referred to as “standardizing” the scores, which is also why these tests are referred to as standardized assessments.

 

In order to standardize the scores from many different kinds of tests, the producers of the tests use statistics to make the scores comparable by using normal distributions. Graphically, this is also known as a bell-curve.  I don’t want to make this overly-technical for folks with little to no background in statistics, but I don’t want to over-simply this so much that I’m not really telling you anything either, so I’m going to attempt to strike a balance, here.

 

One way to standardize the scores is to use what is called, appropriately enough, Standard Scores. By converting the raw scores of a given assessment into Standard Scores, they can be compared against the Standard Scores of another type of assessment. This is very commonly done when looking at whether a child has a specific learning disability using the discrepancy model, which calls for a significant gap between academic achievement and cognitive ability on standardized tests that measure each.

 

Let’s say that a student takes a standardized IQ test such as the WISC-IV and achieves the following scores:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 101

Perceptual Reasoning = 104

Working Memory = 99

Processing Speed = 96

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 100

 

Now, let’s say that the same student takes a standardized measure of academic achievement such as the WJ-III and, on the portions pertaining to reading achieves the following scores:

 

Letter-Word Identification = 78

Reading Fluency = 70

Reading Comprehension = 72

 

First, given that the subtest scores on the WISC-IV are so close together, the Full Scale IQ can be presumed to be sufficiently representative of the student’s cognitive abilities. ?An IQ score of 100 is dead-center average; in other words, it’s perfectly normal.

 

Reading scores in the 70s, however, are not normal for someone with perfectly normal intelligence. If you look at your PDF handout that you should have already downloaded, you will see that there is a big gap between achievement (the WJ-III scores) and ability (the Full Scale IQ).

This is one way to use standardized scores to understand the picture painted by the data. Another way, which many parents find a lot easier to understand, is Percentile Rankings. Percentile Rankings present the scores as comparisons against the normed sample, which is to compare the child’s scores against the general population.

Because of the nature of normal distributions, reliance on Percentile Rankings is more appropriate with scores that are fairly close to the mean, where Standard Scores are more reliable at the extremes of the distribution. For this reason, when you look at the PDF handout we’ve provided, you’ll notice that the scores don’t all exactly align from one illustration to the next.

 

Taking our Standard Scores from before and converting them to Percentile Rankings results in the following:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 52nd %ile

Perceptual Reasoning = 62nd %ile

Working Memory = 48th %ile

Processing Speed = 38th %ile

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 50th %ile

 

Letter-Word Identification = 7th %ile

Reading Fluency = 2nd %ile

Reading Comprehension = 3rd %ile

 

You need to understand that Percentile Rankings are not the same thing as percentages of correct answers. For example, if your child got 50% on his/her science test, you’d know that was an “F” grade. With Percentile Rankings, 50th Percentile (or “50th %ile”) means that half of your child’s same age or grade peers (depending on which comparison is being made) scored beneath your child and the other half scored above your child.? At the low extreme is the 0 Percentile and at the high extreme is the 100th Percentile.

 

If you averaged the scores of all the people who took the test, their scores should mostly cluster around the 50th percentile. A relatively small number of people gifted in whatever area the test measures will score at the high end of the distribution while another relatively small number of people will score at the low end. This accounts for the hump in the middle of the distribution and the skinny ends at the extremes. Most people’s scores will fall within the tall hump.

 

By looking at the Percentile Rankings, parents can know for example, that if their child scored at the 62nd %ile in Perceptual Reasoning, then he/she outscored 62% of his/her peers and was only outscored by 38% of his/her peers.

 

If, however, the same child scored at the 3rd %ile in Reading Comprehension, that means that 97% of his/her peers outscored him/her on this measure and only 3% of his/her peers scored lower. This puts things into perspective.

 

If a child is outperforming 62% of his/her peers in Perceptual Reasoning, but is being outperformed by 97% of his/her peers on Reading Comprehension, there’s a problem. Clearly something is interfering with this child’s reading that can’t be accounted for by low cognition. This is when you begin to dig for processing disorders that might be responsible for a learning disability.

 

All too often, parents go into IEP meetings where report data is presented and it all flies right over their heads. Unfortunately, some school agency personnel take advantage of that fact and will either skimp on their actual data collection or misrepresent what the data means. They may present only broad cluster scores, which are just averages of the subtest scores, without presenting the subtest scores themselves. This is dangerous because if there is a lot of scatter among the subtest scores – that is, they aren’t all close in number and you have a wide variety of scores falling along the distribution – then the averages represented in the clusters don’t tell you anything.

 

For example, if instead of the scores represented above on the WISC-IV, let’s say you have a student with the following scores:

 

Verbal Comprehension = 120(PR=91st %ile)

Perceptual Reasoning = 136(PR=99th %ile)

Working Memory = 93(PR=31st %ile)

Processing Speed = 82(PR=12th %ile)

—————————————-

Full Scale IQ = 108(PR=69th %ile)

You can see here that because of the diversity of the subtest scores, the overall average of the Full Scale IQ doesn’t really paint a clear picture of what is going on with this person. An IQ score of 108 is still a fairly middle-of-the-road average score. But, this is a person who is scoring in the above-average to superior range when it comes to Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning.

 

Because of the disparity among the subtest scores, the Full Scale IQ is not considered to be reliably representative of the student’s intellectual abilities and the subtest scores have to be looked at individually. I’ve seen WISC-IV subtest scatter like this with kids who have learning disabilities and/or ADHD. 

 

The topic of assessment scores and data interpretation is extremely complex and multi-faceted. People get Masters’ Degrees in school psychology just to be able to make sense of it all. There’s no way I can hit all the things you need to know in a blog posting.

 

But, understanding the scores well enough to read the assessment reports with any comprehension is critical for parents and educators alike. It’s been my unfortunate experience that some assessors either don’t understand their own data or even how to properly administer the assessments in the first place, which results in inaccurate data. I’ve seen reports in which the scores actually contradict the positions asserted by the reports’ authors. I’ve seen testing in which the assessor completely failed to adhere to the test instructions provided by the producers of the test, thereby rendering invalid scores.

 

The more parents understand about assessment scores, the less they are able to be misled by inaccurate and/or disingenuous representations of the data. The more teachers understand about assessment scores, the more able they are to put that data to constructive use in developing teaching strategies for their students with special needs.

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Understanding the Initial Assessment Process

The way special education law generally works is that the implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (“IDEA”) set the basic framework at the federal level and each state’s laws speak to how the federal requirements of the IDEA will be implemented within its respective state. Similarly, U.S. Territories, the District of Columbia, etc. have their own equivalents of state laws speaking to the implementation of the federal regulations within their respective jurisdictions. For the purposes of today’s posting, when I say “state,”? I’m also referring to the other types of American soil.

So, given that there is so much variation from state to state in how the federal regulations are implemented, I’m going to start at the top with the federal regulations. I’ll touch on a couple of the states’ regulations, but there’s no way to fit them all into one posting. You can research your own state’s regulations by going to its web site. The U.S. Department of Education has all the states’ web sites here: . If you can’t find it on their site, there’s a phone number for the special education division listed somewhere on their site and you can call and ask what the timelines are.

To start out, let’s define what exactly an initial assessment is. I will tell you that it is not necessarily the first special education assessment the child has ever taken. An initial assessment or initial evaluation (“assessment” and “evaluation” are used interchangeably in special education) is the assessment that determines if a child is eligible for special education. Sometimes children are tested at parent request every few years and are found ineligible. It doesn’t matter how many times the child was tested before; if the child’s fifth assessment finds him eligible for special education, then it is the initial assessment of his special education program that begins with his first IEP in which he is found eligible.

Sometimes kids exit special education only to later qualify again years later. Even under a circumstance like that, if the child wasn’t in special education at the time he/she was assessed and was in special education after the assessment, then the assessment that “re-found” the child eligible for special education would be considered an initial assessment.

This use of the term is meant to distinguish it from re-evaluations and triennial evaluations. We’ll talk more about those in future blogs, but for the purposes of distinguishing among these different assessments enough for the present discussion, a re-evaluation is any assessment conducted subsequent to the initial evaluation. It could be a year later, three years later, or ten years later. A triennial assessment is also called a three-year evaluation.

All evaluations are supposed to be sufficiently comprehensive in all areas of suspected disability to properly inform the IEP team. For initial evaluations, this is paramount because a child’s eligibility determination needs to be based on a rich body of data that includes scores on standardized testing and actual school work, as well as feedback from the adults interacting with the child throughout the day. The parents play a huge role in informing the IEP process.

But, initial evaluations aren’t supposed to be all about finding kids eligible. That’s only half of what initial assessment is supposed to achieve. The other half of the initial assessment is to identify the student’s present levels of performance. If the child is eligible for special education, this information is used to create the measurable annual goals.

If the child is not eligible for special education, he/she may still be eligible for a 504 Plan, in which case the present levels data would drive the content of that document. If the child is not eligible for a 504 Plan, then the local education agency would still have to provide regular education accommodations. In the very least, the child’s teacher should know about the assessment findings so that he/she can provide regular education accommodations to the degree they are needed.

Once a referral has been made for special education assessment, an assessment plan must be provided to the parents. While many school districts rely on 34 CFR Sec. 300.503 to issue denials of assessment referrals, in California, for example, whether or not school districts must conduct an assessment once a referral has been made is non-negotiable.

5 CCR Sec. 3021(a) states that all referrals for special education assessment <em”>shall initiate the assessment process. According to EC 56029, a referral for assessment is any written request by a parent, teacher, other service provider, or foster parent of the student to have the student tested for special education.

Georgia, to the contrary, has a very curious practice that I’d like to know more about. Its stance is apparently that while parents have the right to make referrals pursuant to the federal regulations at 34 CFR Sec. 300.301(b), local education agencies have the right to refuse those referrals pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.503(a)(2).

I’ve seen schools say the same thing in California despite the State laws that prevent it, but in this instance, it’s the Georgia Department of Education that’s taking this stance (see the Georgia Department of Education Special Education Implementation Manual

Gwinnett County (Georgia) Public Schools conveniently leaves out of its public information anything about how parents can make referrals for assessment as well. With the State Department of Education taking the position that it has apparently taken, at least based on what I could find, I have to wonder if there are local education agencies in Georgia that simply ignore parent referrals altogether without any consequence. I’d be interested in hearing from folks in Georgia about this. I really couldn’t find anything to help me out looking at the that have come out of Georgia.

Regardless of what state you’re in, once the referral has been made and assessment has been consented to by the parents in writing, under the newest IDEA regulations, local education agencies can’t take more than 60 days to conduct the assessment, write the reports, and hold the IEP meeting to go over the data. However, some states have imposed even shorter timelines. It is 30 days in Minnesota for the evaluation process to take place. While state law cannot diminish the protections offered to students under the IDEA, it can add to them.

The same federal law that specifies the maximum deadline also mandates that initial assessments be comprehensive enough in all areas of suspected disability to allow the IEP team make informed decisions about whether a child qualifies for special education services and, if so, what those services should entail. This is where things can get dicey.

There can be a great variation of opinions as to what constitutes as “reasonably sufficient” when it comes to assessments. At minimum, the assessors should be qualified for the types of assessments they are respectively performing, follow the instructions of the producers of any standardized assessments, and follow the “best practices” of their respective professions.

It is also important to know that, while those areas that were tested may have been done so sufficiently, that doesn’t mean that all areas of suspected disability were assessed. I can’t even begin to tell you how many children I’ve come across with huge red flags in the area of auditory processing who have never been properly assessed for it. Auditory Processing Disorder (“APD”) can only be diagnosed by an audiologist.

The quality of any evaluation is important, but the initial evaluation is the one that’s opening the Pandora’s Box of the child, the way he/she learns, and the nature of his/her disability. You need to go into that situation equipped to contend with whatever you may find because, typically, you have very little to go on regarding a child’s educational needs at the time of the initial assessment, other than the fact that the child is not being successful in school.

Our next posting will be devoted to understanding assessment data. If I can, I think I’d like to put it together as a screencast for you because there are statistics involved and, personally, I need visual aids to understand concepts like that. I can’t presume I’m the only one.

Please do post your comments, particularly parents and educators in Georgia. We’d like to hear people’s feedback regarding how long these assessments take in their experience.

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Understanding Child Find & When SSTs are Not Appropriate

Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Making the Record with Proof of Delivery

We’ve prepared a 12 minute podcast for you for today’s posting. Because of the file size, we broke down the entire program into two shorter segments for easier downloading.

The topic of today’s content focuses on steps that parents and advocates can take to make sure you have made the record in a professional way that protects student and parent rights and maintains your credibility. Please listen in and post your comments.

PodCast Part 1:Part 1 – Communications with LEAs
PodCast Part 2:Part 2 – Communications with LEAs

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Emotions Part 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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