Tag: emotions

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Podcast: Emotions Part 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers

On November 19, 2008, we originally published “Emotions Part 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers” as the sixth 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.

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 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers.”

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Podcast: Emotions Part 5 – Extended Family

On November 17, 2008, we originally published  Emotions Part 5  Extended Family  as the fifth 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.

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 5 – Extended Family.”

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Podcast: Emotions Part 4 – Students

On November 16, 2008, we originally published  Emotions Part 4   Students  as the fourth 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.

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 4 – Students.”

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Podcast: Emotions Part 3 – Administrators

On November 15, 2008, we originally published  Emotions Part 3   Administrators  as the third 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.

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 3   Administrators.

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Podcast: Emotions Part 2 – School Site Staff

On November 14, 2008, we originally published  Emotions Part 2   School Site Staff as the second 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.

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 2   School Site Staff.

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Emotions Part 6 – Parents’ Employers & Co-Workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions Part 5 – Extended Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions Part 4 – Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions Part 3 – Administrators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions Part 1 – Parents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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