Tag: disability

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Podcast: Emotions Part 1 – Parents

On November 12, 2008, we originally published “Emotions Part 1 – Parents” as the first in a series of text-only blog articles. As we begin to move into the new school year, KPS4Parents will be recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

We are starting with “Emotions Part 1 – Parents” and will continue through the series by recording and making available audio versions of many of our other text-only articles. As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click Here to download the podcast, “Emotions Part 1 – Parents.”

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KPS4Parents Interviewed by LRP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.