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Using ABA to Identify and Deal With Misinformation

Special education and disability-related areas of civil rights law are complex systems of law and science that require an understanding of how an individual person is impacted by their unique disabilities within the unique contexts of their unique individual lives. The whole person has to be taken into account in order to determine the degree to which their disabilities impact their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), which includes learning, employment, and community access.

In special education, the presence of disability alone does not automatically make a student eligible for special education, though it still makes them protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In special education, having a disability satisfies only one prong of a two-pronged line of inquiry that requires, upon evidence of a disability, further evidence that the disability interferes with the student’s access to education in some kind of meaningful way that requires specialized instruction of some form.

In some states, such as California, if a student demonstrates a speech and/or language impairment such that they satisfy the Speech-Language Impaired (SLI) eligibility category pursuant to the regulations, and require speech-language services but not Specialized Academic Instruction (SAI), the speech-language services can be considered SAI for the purposes of finding the student eligible for special education. This is because public school instruction is so heavily weighted on language that having intact language skills is necessary for accessing the instruction.

That said, many students, particularly those found eligible under the Autism (AUT) criteria, experience significant impairments in pragmatic language that many not interfere with their academics in most cases, but greatly interfere with their ability to interact in socially appropriate ways with others. This can impact their peer interactions during unstructured times like lunch and recess or passing periods, participation in group learning activities in the classroom, safe behavior during school drills or actual emergencies, etc.

Addressing these kinds of challenges through special education can be just as educationally necessary as addressing the academic needs of a child with an intellectual disability, profound medical condition, or learning disability. Figuring out who needs what, if anything, in special education requires an expert level of assessment and data analyses.

Furthermore, special education is a regulated process. Local education agencies have to abide by the rules attached to the federal special education dollars in order for their states to receive said dollars. Compliance with 504 is non-optional for any entity receiving federal dollars of any kind, such as public schools, and compliance with the ADA is mandatory, period.

Federal special education law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education, to the degree doing so is practicable. This means that approaches that have already been proven to work, that is, evidence-based practices, must be used when addressing the individual needs of each special education student pursuant to the applicable regulations. In theory, logic should prevail under the circumstances.

However, as the whole world is now seeing first-hand, the government in America has always been infiltrated by anti-democratic thinkers and morons who have no idea what they are doing. Sometimes these people are one in the same. Not to say, “I told you so,” but back when people kept comparing me to Don Quixote when I’d make a stink about special education violations as a matter of a departure from the rule of law by local government agencies, I kept telling people that special education was the “canary in the coal mine” for democracy in this country.

The measure of how civilized a society is goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members. If the civil rights of children with disabilities means nothing, no one’s rights mean anything. If one of us is denied liberty, all of us are denied liberty. There cannot be any class of humans who are excluded from human rights in a civilized society, but there are many mentally ill people currently in power who regard other people with disabilities as “useless eaters.” The irony that this is the mentally ill calling other people with disabilities unworthy of life doesn’t escape me.

Only broken minds do the kinds of things we’re seeing happen within American government at the federal level, right now. This is what I was up against for the first 25 years of my career at the local and State level. It’s now finally escalated up the food chain to the national level such that it’s now finally affecting everyone and not just marginalized populations. Police are now putting up barricades and blocking off streets so that white people can safely peacefully protest, instead of beating and arresting them like they have when black and brown people have peacefully protested in the streets.

White people aren’t being disappeared to El Salvador, yet, but the writing is on the wall if the American public doesn’t unite against what is happening, right now. It’s a lot to process, but for those of us who have been fighting this affront to democracy through official channels for decades, the narcissistic abuses of power by government officials are all too familiar to us.

Interestingly, at the local level, the energy has shifted in the last 15 to 20 years as more old, crooked cronies retire or move on  and more and more young people fresh out of graduate school come in to inherit the messes left behind by the crooked old cronies they replaced. These science-minded, pro-democracy young public servants are inadequately trained on how to apply the science in the field and the regulatory process that describes how they are supposed to do it. None of the systems they have inherited lend  themselves to complying with the law; they’re broken and fraught with decades of mismanagement.

I’m finding as I go to IEP meetings that I am a welcome member of the team because I’ve been around long enough to know the applicable science and law, and I’ve been trying to prevent the harm done by the old cronies since 1991. At this stage in my career, I’m spending more time helping IEP teams create legally compliant IEPs that deliver meaningful educational and therapeutic results as appropriate to the individual needs of the student, and far less time fighting with school districts over whether or not to assess a student, amend an IEP goal, provide a service, or change a placement.

It appears that the toxic energy that I was up against previously has moved on in the pursuit of power to higher offices where people are less familiar with contending with these types of behaviors. Part of what keeps people like this in power for so long is that they lie, withhold information, spoliate evidence, violate privacy rights, engage in gaslighting, and are often really good at finding someone else to be their scapegoat to take the fall if they get caught doing something wrong. It all catches up with them eventually, but there is a wake of destruction behind them 100 miles wide by the time that happens, and remedial, compensatory strategies that are eventually forthcoming never make the injured parties fully whole.

America is going through something akin to one of my worst-case scenarios in a special education advocacy case, which I’ve not had to deal with since 2005 to 2012. The worst-case scenario is when, despite my best efforts to keep things scientifically valid and procedurally compliant, I was unable to get an appropriate program for a student, at which point I’d pull in an attorney to file for due process to fight for an appropriate Individualized Education Program (IEP) for the student pursuant to the regulations and applicable peer-reviewed research.

Worst-case scenario, the losing party in the due process case appeals to the federal District Court in the student’s local area, which can delay some remedies for two to five years. If the District Court matter is appealed, it goes to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. If I never have to work on another table of uncontroverted facts again for the rest of my life, it will be too soon. The tedium and detail required is like trying to paint the Mona Lisa on a grain of rice with an eyelash. It can also further delay resolution by another year or two.

In short, litigation blows. I’ll do it if I have to because that’s the only lawful process to resolve violations of the law committed by government officials to the detriment of children with disabilities that I’ve got, but I’ll resent the hell out of everybody who has made it necessary for me to put forth that kind of effort to resolve a problem they created. It’s an act of patriotism and protectiveness of children with disabilities that I do it. It’s out of necessity because I can and most people can’t.

That’s got to change. More people need to know what I know so that they can be better advocates for democracy in their own lives, however it might uniquely manifest. There has to be a way for me to share the knowledge I have about how pro-democratic people can handle anti-democratic people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. A democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people is upheld when all the people work together in a manner that makes them woven together like fabric, to make up the fabric of the community in which they live.

Or, to quote guerilla gardener, Ron Finley, “To change the community, we have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil!” Community building is a lot like building up soil for planting and growing food. In order for people to weave together into a fabric that creates a healthy society, the people themselves need to be socially-emotionally healthy. If we are all collectively the soil, the soil needs to be amended because not everyone is getting the nutrients they need in order for us to all interact together in a mutually beneficial and healthy way.

To that end, I want to put it out there that I think there needs to be an “every person’s” version of basic Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) taught at the high school level as part of every student’s health curriculum, along with instruction regarding how to discern truth from fiction in media of all forms. Civics classes should also include examinations of propaganda efforts in the past and present around the world that are used to subjugate people and deprive them of their freedoms, and how that compares against the United States Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and our system of three equal branches of government at the federal level for the purpose of checks and balances.

With respect to ABA, this is something the general public should really understand and it honestly isn’t that complicated. For the purpose of educating the public and helping people equip themselves with a way of thinking about behavior that will serve them for the rest of their lives, I’m offering a basic breakdown of the applicable science, here.

The first thing to understand about ABA is that there is no trying to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling involved. You can’t observe what’s going on in someone’s mind or how their body feels inside, and you can’t make any informed decisions in ABA about things you can’t observe and measure. As such, only objective, observable behaviors can be used to inform an ABA analysis of any kind. Internal thoughts and feelings are referred to as “private events” in ABA.

This actually helps you be more methodical and less emotionally biased about your data, because you’re purely working from what anyone can observe and measuring it in meaningful ways. For example, what is the frequency, intensity, and duration of an inappropriate behavior that you are witnessing? All of those things can be quantified in some kind of way.

Another important data collection tool in ABA is called “ABC data collection.” Here, “A” stands for “antecedent,” “B” stands  for “behavior,” and “C” stands for “consequence.”

An antecedent is whatever happened just before the behavior that triggered it. The behavior is the behavior you’re analyzing. The consequence is the outcome naturally produced by the behavior.

ABC data is taken to determine the function of a behavior. The function of a behavior is indicated by the degree to which the consequence rewards the behavior and thus encourages it to happen again under similar circumstances in the future. The more often a behavior is rewarded, the more likely it is to occur again.

This rewarding of a specific behavior is called “reinforcement,” and can come in various forms. Many people misuse the terms “positive” and “negative’ with respect to “reinforcement,” and that really undermines their ability to accurately apply the science.

“Positive” and “negative” no more mean “good” and “bad” with respect to reinforcement as they do to the poles on a magnet or a battery. This is science. “Positive” and “negative” are neutral terms that have nothing to do with emotions or judgment.

In ABA, “positive” means “to present” and “negative” means “to withdraw.” Therefore, “positive reinforcement” occurs when something desired by the individual is received in response to a specific behavior, and “negative reinforcement” occurs when something aversive to the individual is taken away in response to a specific behavior.

One of the best research examples of that was B.F. Skinner’s experiments with rats. He created what came to be known as “Skinner Boxes” in which different tests were conducted with rats to study positive and negative reinforcement.

In one box, a rat would have a lever built into the cage that, if pulled by the rat, would dispense a food pellet, thereby positively reinforcing the behavior of lever-pulling. In another box, the floor of the cage would carry a mild electrical current that was unpleasant but not painful to the rat, which it could turn off by pulling a lever, which thereby negatively reinforced the behavior of lever-pulling.

In both instances, the rats learned to pull a lever, but in each trial in which this experiment was conducted, the rat who had been positively reinforced seemed to be better off at the end of the experiment than the rat that had been negatively reinforced. The conclusion was that reinforcing a behavior increases its likelihood of occurring again in the future under similar circumstances, but positive reinforcement is usually the more ethical form of reinforcement, and it’s highly effective.

In some instances, negative reinforcement can be a good thing. Removing something non-preferred in exchange for specific behaviors is negative reinforcement, and that isn’t always bad.

Reducing the amount of time a teenager is grounded for being behind in their homework according to how much of it they complete can reinforce the behavior of completing their incomplete homework. Reducing the number of math problems they have to complete if they can show mastery with just a few reinforces the behavior of diligent application of math knowledge.

I’ll gladly vacuum the living room if someone else scrubs the toilet. Let me escape the aversive task of scrubbing the toilet and I will engage in the behavior of vacuuming the living room. But, the science shows that working for rewards is a more powerful and emotionally healthy motivator than working to escape punishment.

The whole “positive” and “negative” thing applies to punishment, as well. “Positive punishment” is the presentation of something aversive in response to a specific behavior. “Negative punishment” is the withdrawal of something preferred in response to a specific behavior.

The effectiveness and ethics of punishment are a mirror image of reinforcement. Negative punishment can be far less harsh and more effective than positive punishment. In ABA, punishment is also referred to as a “response cost.” The intent of punishment is to serve up a consequence that is unlikely to reinforce the behavior from happening again under similar circumstances.

Negative punishment can be taking away the wi-fi by changing the password until all the clean dishes in the dishwasher have been put away and the dirty dishes have been loaded into it like some young person’s chores list says they’re supposed to do. Giving them the new wi-fi password once the dishes are done positively reinforces doing the dishes. There’s a time and a place for everything.

Positive punishment in its ugliest form is abuse. It is usually the least effective and ethical approach to use. However, as I said, there is a time and place for everything. Sometimes consequences have to hurt badly before the lesson is learned, as a lot of pro-47 investors are starting to realize these days.

Another ABA concept that people need to understand and master is that of the “Extinction Burst.” There is misinformation about what this term means floating around out there and it doesn’t simply refer to the death throes of a behavior on its way out. That grossly oversimplifies the whole situation.

An extinction burst occurs when a behavior that was previously reinforced is no longer being reinforced. The individual escalates their behavior in an effort to force the reinforcer to nonetheless come.

For example, if you put money in a vending machine and a candy bar comes out every time, the candy bar consistently reinforces the behavior of putting money in the machine. If, however, the candy bar gets stuck in the machine and won’t come out one day, we don’t walk away sad never to use the machine again; we kick the crap out of the machine until the candy bar falls out.

We only give up on the machine if kicking it doesn’t work. After that, we’ll stop using the machine, and the machine-using behavior will become extinct. We might replace that behavior with another behavior, like using a different vending machine or buying snacks at the store, but we won’t go back to the machine that stole our money and candy again.

A lot of the insane behaviors we’re seeing at the federal level are an extinction burst of a sort on behalf of old, rich, white men who have gotten away with horrible things their entire lives and are just trying to maintain until they die. They are pulling every last desperate stunt they can think of to hold onto the power they managed to acquire over time through unscrupulous means in what was never an indefinitely sustainable plan due to its inherent flaws and departure from morality as their house of cards finally starts to fall. And, they don’t care who they hurt in the process, least of all children with disabilities who they regard as “useless eaters.”

What we cannot do is reinforce their behaviors. We have to starve their behaviors of rewards and mete out response costs where appropriate, which seems to be in a whole lot of cases. This is going to burden our judiciary for a long time to come, but it will also likely make the careers of up-and-coming attorneys and judges who come down on the right side of the rule of law, save democracy, and make history. Our system of checks and balances are being put to the test and our judiciary is largely standing up to the assault on our democracy that the executive branch is leading.

In our day-to-day lives, when we encounter the kinds of people who are swayed by the influence of 47 and his minions, we need to go in understanding that logic will not serve us and understanding the functions of their behaviors will get us much further. What is the thing that happened right before they did whatever they did that has us concerned? That’s our antecedent. What was the consequence they received immediately after engaging in the behavior? Did the consequence reward or punish their behavior, or did it have a neutral effect?

If you can learn to read the room according to the basic principles of ABA, it’s like Neo seeing “The Matrix” in code rather than as it renders. Once you learn how to see the world that way, you can’t turn it off and is so helpful!

At the end of the day, any behavior happens for only one of two reasons: to attain/acquire something or to escape/avoid something. This renders the function of a behavior down to binary code. Attaining/acquiring something is a 1 and escaping/avoiding something is a 0.

In every scientific and mathematical sense, behavior can be reduced down to 1s and 0s. If you can figure out what someone is trying to attain/acquire or escape/avoid, you’ve identified the function of their behavior. Once you know that, you can affect what types of consequences meet them when they engage in the behavior, as well as prevent antecedents from presenting themselves that would set them off in the first place. Proactive strategies seek to prevent the behavior where reactive strategies plan for what to do if the behavior still happens. Proactive prevention is more effective and healthier than allowing the behavior to happen and then having to react to it.

The best behavioral intervention strategies proactively teach a socially appropriate replacement behavior that serves the individual better than the maladaptive behavior being replaced. Extinguishing the maladaptive behavior without replacing it with a learned skill leaves the individual to their own devices to cook up a new way to address the same want/need that drove the maladaptive behavior in the first place. If you don’t give them a replacement behavior, they’ll come up with one on their own that has a high likelihood of being as maladaptive as the behavior that was extinguished.

Basically, it’s not enough to make them stop. We have to reward them for doing something more appropriate, instead. For example, one hypothetical solution to our current, modern-day problems with 47 and his administration could be that he negates all of his executive orders, voids all of his pardons of the J6 offenders, terminates his tariffs, resigns, and retires, and in exchange, upon assuming the Presidency, J.D. Vance pardons him of all federal crimes. At that point, 47 could go live out the brief remainder of his life at his resort in Florida surrounded by sycophants as the president who saved the economy by sacrificing his elected office, “a hero of the people forever.”

This hypothetical scenario would still leave 47 vulnerable to prosecutions at the State level, but I’m willing to believe he would die of old age before he ever saw the inside of a jail cell. At this point, the world is so broken that it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to do much to hold him accountable. He’s basically holding us hostage in exchange for a literal “get out of jail” card. He’d likely gladly give up the presidency in exchange for simply being let off the hook.

On a more personal level, that one crazy uncle, neighbor, sister-in-law, etc., who just doesn’t get it cannot be responded to with logic, but you can change what kinds of consequences they receive when they engage in certain behaviors. Ignoring minor behaviors and being overly thankful and attentive when they behavior appropriately goes a long way towards shaping their behaviors without them knowing it.

Suggesting alternatives to conspiracy theories as questions rather than assertions allows them to arrive at the sensible conclusion on their own. You just need to plant seeds. If they say something crazy, you can say, “That’s really interesting. I’m just wondering how they account for XYZ?” and describe some logical aspect of the situation they hadn’t considered. Follow it with, “Did they say anything about that?”

Once you plant that seed of doubt in their minds, they’re more likely to Google it later when you’re not around to see if it means anything. If your logic blows their conspiracy theory apart, they may not come back and say anything to you about it. In fact, you may never hear about that particular conspiracy theory again.

The more you pique their curiosity with innocent questions that don’t imply you doubt them at all, the more they will figure it out on their own. They are far more likely to own it if it was their conclusion rather than someone else correcting them directly. If they do come back and say something about it, it’s to say they looked into and it turned out to be crap.

The question you asked got to bugging them and they had to look It up. When they did, they realized the whole thing was a bunch of BS. They may be chagrined, but nonetheless wiser. If you have a good relationship with them, they may even laugh with you about it and appreciate that you didn’t make them feel stupid by correcting them and let them figure it out for themselves.

You want to positively reinforce their curiosity, not positively punish their uninformed opinions. You want to positively reinforce their self-discovery of the truth. You want to ignore their misstatements of facts and/or inaccurate conclusions and redirect them towards the truth with an innocent curious question.

Shift the blame for not understanding onto yourself when posing innocent curious questions. Say things like, “I guess I’m just not getting it. Why do they do XYZ when ABC is happening?” or “Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand why they don’t just do XYZ and call it good. Am I missing something?”

End with comments like, “Wouldn’t that be interesting to know?” or “Let me know if you ever find out anything about that.” Keep it friendly and cordial, knowing that you are guiding them towards the truth in the kindest way possible, maintaining their dignity, and not humiliating them when they finally own the truth.

Punishing them for finally getting it defeats the whole purpose of trying to get them to get it. When they finally have their “Come to Jesus moment,” it has to be rewarding for them to “come to Jesus.” There has to be forgiveness and mercy on the other side of that experience once they finally get it, or we’ll lose them and we need them as allies to oppose the forces that would otherwise oppress us all.

Conscripting them into the fight would not earn their devotion to the cause. They need to understand what is really going on so that they are invested in fighting for democracy with the rest of us according to a shared understanding of the facts. We need to earn their partnership by graciously helping them overcome their knowledge and skill deficits through reinforcing their appropriate behaviors and discouraging their inappropriate ones on a person-by-person, day-by-day basis, and only a public informed about ABA is going to be able to do that, hence this post/podcast.

All of this further translates to what I’ve been building up to this whole time, which is discerning truth in media. When you can apply ABA principles in your day-to-day interactions with people without having to think about it, you will find yourself picking apart things in the media that don’t add up. The functions of some people’s behaviors will be suspect based on what consequences have rewarded them and won’t match how they’re being reported.

With peer-reviewed research and other technical reports, the true test of validity is when other people can replicate the same study or practices and obtain the same or similar results. The more times different people come up with the same results doing the same things, the more reliable the science becomes; this is what we called an “evidence-based practice.”

When people attempt to assert that something has been scientifically proven, a quick trip to scholar.google.com and a search on the topic will provide you with whatever science has been published on the topic. Some of it may be behind a paywall, but you can at least read the abstracts and see what their conclusions were. In any event, if something is legitimately supported by science, you can verify it this way.

Similarly, when people say that something is “the law,” ask them “Which law?” If they can’t identify the actual law, or at least the section of law (i.e., “state vehicle code, “ or “state education code,” etc.), then ask them where they learned it was the law and search the internet for trustworthy information about whatever they say in response.

If it’s case law from a court case, then they should know the name of at least one of the parties and where the case was tried. They may not know if it was state or federal, but they know what state it was in. Or, they may not know the state, but they know it was a state case and not federal. They should have some details about which case it is if they’re citing anything even possibly legitimate, in which case you can look it up through one of the many state or federal case look-up sites or just Google it.

PACER is the site I use for federal cases, but just a Google search can often turn up the cases I’m looking for, state or federal, if I have enough information about them to feed into the search engine.  PACER is cheap, but it’s not free like Google. The beauty of PACER is that it will give you all the publicly available records on a federal case once you’ve pulled it up, so you can see exactly what the court documents say and reach your own conclusions. Every state has its own unique system of case look-up portals that work in a similar fashion.

Because most of the arguments that need to be won are between fact and fiction, graciously steering misinformed people to discover the facts for themselves from reliable sources of information allows them to come to more accurate conclusions on their own, become more educated voters, preserves their dignity, and allows them to become part of the pro-democracy community with forgiveness and caring.

Making sure you don’t become one of the misled means looking to where the reliable data comes from and keeping things as simple as 1s and 0s as possible. When you can reduce things down to their simplest expression, it’s easier to figure out what to do. You have to eliminate all the noise of the pieces of data that aren’t the most important and focus on the few that are critical in order to create working system. You can tweak the details and make it pretty later, but you first need a functioning construct.

Please do your own personal research into ABA and how it can be applied in your day-to-day life. I promise it will change your perspective on the whole world and equip you with skills to navigate the world around you better than anything else you could learn.

What I’ve included herein is very basic, but I hope for our lay readers and listeners out there who were not already familiar with this science that I’ve given you a lot to think about and a new way to do it. I hope this information borrowed from my work in special education lay advocacy, paralegal support to attorneys, and educational psychology has translated well into information you can apply in your own unique life situations and that it serves you now and forever.

 #ABA #specialeducation #504 #ADA #IEP #students #parents #democracy #civilrights #disabilityrights #handsoff 

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See Our Instagram Live Video with Talkido

On Friday, February 7, 2025, I participated in an Instagram Live event with Ege Cakaloz of Talkido to discuss how I’m using their screen-free technology to teach emotional vocabulary and social/emotional concepts to a young man with a seizure disorder, intellectual disability, autism, and vision loss. Learn how I am using Talkido’s technology to increase my client’s functional communication skills and independence by watching the recorded event, here.

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Using AI-Generated Music to Teach Social Scripts

I have to say from the start that this is not a paid endorsement, and endorsing specific products is not something I normally do, but I’ve discovered a tool that has been a game-changer for how I work with one of my direct services clients as his counselor. That solution is using AI to create songs that are individualized to a specific person with lyrics based on therapeutically appropriate social scripts tailored to the person.

I discovered this solution in the course of looking for ways to embed peer-reviewed music therapy elements into my counseling sessions with this client because he is highly responsive to music, and seems to remember lyrics set to music better than spoken words. Given that he’s lost his eyesight, we’ve got to rely on his other senses.

I was looking for an easy way to generate songs he would take seriously as legitimate musical productions that contained the social scripts, such as “safe hands,” “inside voice,” and “be patient,” with which he was already familiar in order to expand his understanding and application of these concepts in his day-to-day life. I’m still shocked at how easy it was with the AI.

These individualized songs are also serving as a stepping-off point to teach my client new, more sophisticated social/emotional skills and scripts, going forward, once he’s incorporated them into his music listening routines and we work with them in our sessions. As time goes on, I’ll be adding new songs that tackle more sophisticated concerns than those that I’ve initially created to get him started.

My counseling client is in his late 20s and lives in a group home with 2 other men who have developmental disabilities. My client is blind, autistic, and intellectually disabled. He struggles to produce spontaneous speech and relies largely on scripted speech to communicate verbally with others.

Since 2010, I’ve been this young man’s lay advocate, his attorney’s paralegal, his compensatory education services provider. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have instant rapport with each other, even after not seeing each other in person for a couple of years.

Given the friendship and rapport I share with my client, I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at how quickly he took to the songs I created for him using AI, but I was actually flabbergasted. It was during my last session with him, in which I was collecting the last of the baseline data I needed to inform my program goals for him over the next 10 months, when I introduced the songs to him.

The moment I started playing the songs, the stimming decreased to nearly none and he sat listening, turning his head so his ears faced the music, and orienting to me as if looking me in the face to repeat familiar scripts he was hearing in the lyrics with a grin on his face. He was fully engaged and it took next to no effort from me. I was floored. I was sure that I was going to have to work to sell him on the idea, but he took to it like a fish to water.

This has left me inspired, because I know he can’t be the only one who would benefit from this. I was in an online IEP meeting for one of my other students a few days ago, and mentioned this experience to the other professionals who were already logged into the meeting, while we were waiting for the parent and a few other professionals to log in. When I told my colleagues about what I’d done using the AI with social scripts to create highly individualized music for therapeutic purposes, they got all excited about it.

So, based on the feedback I’ve gotten so far, I’m stopping what I’m doing right now to bust out this short post/podcast to share this information with anyone else who might benefit from it so that I can let it go and move on with the rest of my day. This is going to keep bugging me until I share it, and it’s preventing me from finishing anything else until it’s off my plate. Call me perseverative if you want; it is what it is. Thankfully, this can be fairly brief.

The music-generating AI website I stumbled upon after 30 whole seconds of Googling is MakeBestMusic (https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music). Again, this is not a paid endorsement.

I didn’t compare this AI against any other. It was the first one I tried and it instantly gave me what I was looking for in just the free demo. I copied and pasted the list of social scripts that I wanted incorporated into a song, selected some genre-specific tags, and hit the “go” button, then a minute or so later, I had two new songs using the words I’d provided as lyrics and one of them was absolutely perfect. I repeated the process for three more sets of social scripts and ended up with a total of four songs.

For the sake of illustrating my point, I’m playing one of them, titled “Ask for Help,” here:

Listen to the lyrics and you’ll hear that they are clearly about social behaviors, but it’s sounds like a real song and not lame like something I’d make up if I had to do it myself. The robots do it better than me, and for these limited purposes, that’s okay.

I’m not trying to earn an award for high quality music. I’m trying to teach my client how to act right around other people and still live a happy life for himself. For those of us who could never afford to outsource this kind of work to a professional songwriter, AI is a sufficient tool for this type of job.

Given that a less than professional job can serve a valid therapeutic purpose using AI at a much lower cost, using AI-generated music to embed music therapy elements into a program of social/emotional counseling with individuals who have developmental disabilities can be an affordable and powerful tool in a counselor’s arsenal of solutions. I encourage my colleagues who work with individuals with needs similar to those of my counseling client to play around with this type of technology and see what kinds of solutions you can create.

If you’re the parent, you probably have even more ideas about how you could use this around your home with your own family members. Seriously think about setting the step-by-step instructions on how to perform certain chores to music to play when you have your kids helping you around the house. Once the song gets stuck in their heads, so are the instructions on how to perform those chores.

I think AI-generated music holds a lot of currently untapped potential for parenting, teaching, and therapeutic interventions, and I’m curious to see how other people use it in these kinds of ways as time goes on. What instructional, parental, and/or therapeutic outcomes can you pursue using AI-generated music?

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Project 2025 and Special Education

Most people these days have now heard about Project 2025. It’s now one of the most commonly searched terms on the internet these days. These fascist shysters aren’t even trying to cover up what they are doing anymore, but what I want to emphasize as I start this post/podcast is that none of the Project 2025 agenda is anything new and these are the same exact people we’ve been up against in public education at the local level for the entire time that I’ve worked as a special education lay advocate, paralegal, and educational consultant, starting in 1991.

These individuals now feel even more emboldened by their far-right leaders and they are now done pretending that they work within public education to teach children. They are now openly acknowledging that they want to hijack our government of, for, and by the People so they can, among other horrible things, replace our public education system with programs of extremist indoctrination that promotes white male wealth at the expense of everyone else. They have never been in support of special education because people with disabilities, particularly if they are not white male landowners, are less than human to them.

None of this new. These are the same people who made the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) necessary in the first place. We wouldn’t need laws that protect people with disabilities in our public schools, other government agencies, and the community at large if it weren’t for these same exact people. For the same reasons that honor and ethics alone cannot be expected from Supreme Court justices without regulatory oversight, our public agencies from top to bottom cannot be expected to function in an honorable and ethical manner without controlling regulations and systems of accountability.

It doesn’t help that the people responsible for Project 2025 are almost guaranteed to, themselves, be mentally and/or emotionally impaired in some kind of way such that they are incapable of viewing other people as equal in worth to themselves and have a collective compulsion to identify classes of individuals to target for abuse for being different from themselves. There is no universe in which any of that kind of behavior reflects intact social/emotional development. It appears that nearly 1/3rd of our population is personality disordered or similarly impaired, and the difficult thing about these types of disorders is that those who suffer from them are often incapable of understanding that they are the ones with the problems. This is why they consistently blame everyone else for the consequences of their own behaviors. There is no logic or mental health in any of it.

Personality disorders and conditions with similar features have nothing to do with intelligence or communication abilities. Take, for example, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who insists the Earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time, thereby making the Flintstones historically accurate. One would think that he is cognitively intact enough to mentally process the facts and evidence to the contrary, and he technically is, but his social/emotional underdevelopment compels him to ignore facts that contradict his worldview, no matter how insane it is. The fact that he is communicatively adept also helps him superficially appear more competent than he really is, which is exactly what makes him and people like him so dangerous.

People like this can “pass” as developmentally intact, at least temporarily, because they can successfully mimic the behaviors of intact people up to a point, but it’s all scripted language and learned behaviors meant to help them navigate a world mostly full of sane people. They are masking to gain access to the things they need to meet their wants and needs, but they lack the social/emotional development to understand the perspectives of others and assume anyone who doesn’t agree with them is automatically in the wrong. They are each the center of their own little personal universes, functioning at an egocentric level that is age-typical in young children, but handicapping at ages beyond early childhood. Other people are simply objects in orbit around them, like furniture and buildings, that are either useful to them in the moment or not, and every decision they make is entirely selfish.

It doesn’t even occur to people like this that other people have their own unique wants and needs that are often very different from their own, which is why they seek to create homogenous rather than diverse communities and target anyone who disagrees with them with abuse. From a social/emotional developmental standpoint, they are like toddlers who don’t want to share. They consider the conflicting needs of others to be an affront to themselves, and use their adult-level knowledge, communication skills, and access to resources to pursue their selfish desires without regard for how their behavior impacts anyone else, other than what they can get other people to do for them.

With that in mind, I want to point out something obvious: Legitimately oppressed people do not have the means to book private jets to go protest their alleged oppression. I say that because individuals of the Project 2025 ilk did exactly that on January 6, 2021. Nobody just wakes up one day that dumb. This is the consequence of failing to grow all the way up, from a social/emotional developmental standpoint.

What this tells us is that privileged childhoods pose great risks of impairing children’s social/emotional development and producing adults who view the world through the eyes of toddlers their entire lives, which is tragic. It’s tragic because they are victims of circumstances that turn them into well-financed perpetrators of harm against the rest of us, carrying out the well-financed social/emotional agendas of toddlers using adult-level cognition and communication skills that allow them to “pass” as intact long enough to cause serious harm to all of us, and entirely lacking in the will or ability to take responsibility for what they’ve done.

In every case that has not been resolved through responsible adult collaborations from my caseload over the years, it has always been because of these types of people who have managed to infiltrate public agency administrations who were/are at the heart of the conflicts. These are the administrators making $200K per year or more to deny children with disabilities the supports and services promised to them by law and funded by the taxpaying public. They will deny services and supports to eligible children because they don’t want to pay for them. They think it’s a waste of money to invest those taxpayer dollars into children with disabilities, while lining their own pockets at taxpayer expense, as though they’ve done a service to the public by refusing to fund appropriate supports and services for children with disabilities.

One of the earliest litigation cases around these issues, which set the stage for what would ultimately become the IDEA, was PARC v. Pennsylvania. In that 1971 case, the public schools in Pennsylvania wouldn’t even enroll students with disabilities, instead sending them home to languish without any kinds of services or education. This case laid the groundwork for what would become the IEP process by mandating the hiring of a psychologist and an attorney to develop a best-practices model for creating Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) for each student based on their individual unique learning needs. Getting the public schools to abide by any of this since then has been a challenge because of the anti-democratic individuals already employed within the public education system at and since that time.

In 1971, public education administration was dominated by white men who wanted to use their positions to build their own personal wealth and become landowners at taxpayer expense. Women were largely limited to the classroom and support administrative staff at school sites and local school district offices. The public education system was created during the Industrial Revolution following the passage of child labor laws intended to prevent children from being maimed and killed working in factories or otherwise running the streets unsupervised. Men ran the schools and harassed their female employees, resulting in teacher’s unions being created around the same issues as those confronted by factory workers who were also unionizing at the time.

Eventually, school district administrations became more visibly “Karen”-dominated than overtly male-dominated, but the “Karens” have always been acting according to the expectations of the men who control their lives, both at work and at home. They have always been willing to throw families under the school bus in exchange for the favor of the men who control how much disposable income and creature comforts they have in their lives. This is similar psychology as that found in women who help male rapists capture their victims, like Ghislaine Maxwell.

The political divide has been present since our public education system was first created, with the “haves” trying to use it as a mechanism to maintain their relative positions of power and oppress the “have nots.” These are the people who insist that our government needs to be run like a business, because businesses generate profits, not constituent outcomes, and they believe in sacrificing constituent outcomes to generate profit for themselves at taxpayer expense. None of these people could possibly make the same money in the private sector because they lack the competence to be successful at private sector-level grift and would be lucky to be trusted with the responsibility of handing out flyers at the front door of a Wal-Mart because they are so inherently self-serving and dishonest.

People who cannot conceptualize the humanity of others will always put their own personal interests and greed before the welfare of others, and see nothing wrong with turning a public service responsibility into a profiteering grift. Like I said before, none of this is new and it’s what I’ve been fighting against since 1991.

The rule of law is our shield and weapon for protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities in our publicly funded education programs and society at large. This is why parents have due process rights in the special education process and can file regulatory complaints with the state departments of education or the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). You can see an example of what we’ve been able to accomplish using OCR complaints by clicking here.

Readers and listeners may recall that, upon being appointed by the 45th President as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos immediately shut down OCR, even though federal law mandates its existence. Two nationwide nonprofit advocacy organizations banded together to sue DeVos and the U.S. Department of Education for shutting down OCR, but it took approximately 18 months of litigation before the courts ordered DeVos to re-open OCR, at which point it had a mountain of back-due complaints to investigate. OCR has been backlogged ever since and the pandemic only made it a thousand times worse. Investigations that the law requires be done in 180 days generally take over 2 years to get finished.

Betsy DeVos already tried to hobble the U.S. Department of Education during the 45th presidential administration, and was temporarily successful until stopped by the the courts. She openly admitted during her term that her goal was to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and put an end to it. You will note that Project 2025 has that same objective. They’ve already tried to do this and they make no bones about their intent to permanently shut it down if the 45th President becomes the 47th President in November 2024.

Without the U.S. Department of Education, there is no IDEA, no OCR, and no due process. Section 504 would no longer apply to school-aged children because it only applies to federal agencies and entities that receive federal funding, like our public schools currently do. The ADA would theoretically still apply to students in private school programs and whatever kinds of indoctrination camps might be created in place of our public schools, but Project 2025 seeks to replace anyone employed within the public sector not sufficiently loyal to their chosen leader with individuals who put loyalty to their “dear leader” above the rule of law and the rights of others. It cannot be realistically expected that the Project 2025 people would lift a finger to help students with disabilities under such circumstances.

In short, the implementation of Project 2025 spells an immediate end for special education and all of the legal protections currently afforded under law to students with disabilities.

It’s already hard enough now to get a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) according to the applicable science and rule of law because these people have been obstructing the legitimate functions of their government agencies this whole time. If they are allowed to have things their way after November 2024, all of the parents of children with special needs who are reading or listening to what I’m saying right now are going to find themselves stuck at home with their special needs kids with no school, no special needs childcare, and, therefore, no way to hold down a job and take care of their families. It would only be a matter of time before a great many of our parents of special needs kids out there would lose their homes and end up on the street with their special needs kids, in a world in which the Supreme Court has now said homelessness can be regarded as illegal.

Right now, regardless of who the Democrats put on their presidential ticket next November, voting for a Blue bucket of mud would be better for children with disabilities, their families, and all the rest of us than voting for the Republican nominee. Voting for a president is not electing a king, it’s electing an entire administration of people who are supervised by a president. Any president is the chief executive of a whole cabinet of people, and those people are, quite frankly, more important than who sits at the head of the table. The current administration has done more for the American people and the world at large, regardless of its president’s age, because of all the other people working around him. Understand how our government is supposed to work and don’t get it twisted.

If the 45th President becomes the 47th President, Project 2025 tells you the exact kinds of people he’ll have sitting on his cabinet and staffing our government agencies from top to bottom, many of whom are already on the inside just waiting for this moment, and they will all defer to him as their dictatorial leader as they implement their fascist fever dreams as fast as they can. When you’re voting for a president, it’s more about the team that person will bring into the office and less about the individual sitting at the head of the table than I think most people realize. What team do you want making decisions about what happens to your child with special needs and your family? If you are eligible to do so, please vote in November 2024.

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Trauma-Informed Special Education Evaluations & Programming

Photo credit Kelly Short (colorized photo from circa 1936)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Interview of George Bailey, President of ZPods

https://zpodsforsleep.com

Transcript of Interview:

Anne Zachry 0:00
Welcome to “Making Special Education Actually Work,” an online publication presented in blog in podcast form by KPS4Parents. As an added benefit to our subscribers and visitors to our site, we’re making podcast versions of our text-only blog articles so that you can get the information you need on the go by downloading and listening at your convenience. We also occasionally conduct discussions with guest speakers via our podcast and transcribe the audio into text for our followers who prefer to read the content on our blog. Where the use of visual aids legal citations and references to other websites are used to better illustrate our points and help you understand the information, these tools appear in the text-only portion of the blog post of which this podcast is a part. You will hear a distinctive sound [bell sound] during this podcast whenever reference is made to content that includes a link to another article, website, or download. Please refer back to the original blog article to access these resources.

Anne Zachry 0:58
Today is March 31 2022. This post in podcast is titled, “Interview of George Bailey, president of ZPods.” In this podcast, which was originally recorded on March 23 2022, George and I discuss the impact of sleep disorders and related conditions that interfere with children’s access to education and the research being done into his company’s sleep solutions for children with autism, sensory integration disorders, insomnia, anxiety, and other disorders that can negatively impact their sleep quality.

George Bailey 1:29
Hi, I’m George Bailey, and I’m president of ZPods. We’re a startup in St. Louis, and we are developing sensory-friendly beds for autistic children and others who have severe sleep problems that are caused by sensory issues. So, our goal is to help out as many of these kids as possible. We enjoy it … and, uh, yeah.

Anne Zachry 1:54
That’s very cool. And I know that when I was emailing with you guys back and forth, when we were coordinating all of this, you know, my first question was what kind of peer reviewed research do you have behind what you’re doing? Are you doing any kind of studies? And, I understand that, not only are you … because you were just telling me that you’ve got a regional center here in California that’s already funded your product for one of its consumers, and they’re not going to just jump on something unless there’s evidence to back it up. But I know that you guys are also participating in some evidence … some studies and whatnot to collect the hard data that speaks to not just whether or not it’s effective, but what makes it effective. How is it effective? And what is the science that underpins what it is that you’re doing? And so I was hoping to get more information about that from you guys, in terms of what’s … what’s the research currently being done on the efficacy of your solution?

George Bailey 2:44
It’s such a good question. And, you know, I was just telling somebody earlier that one of the reasons why it took us a while to get around to really focusing on autism … we were thinking about, like, you know, “Where we should go?” … is because when people would tell us, you know, look at autism, early on, as we were trying to find an application for sleep pods that were great. We were bringing it from China, I balked at it. I’m a father of five. And I have two kids on the spectrum. And I thought like, “Ah, come on guys,” … like, parents of autistic children get all sorts of stuff.

Anne Zachry 3:19
Oh, yeah, for sure.

George Bailey 3:20
… business. Yeah. I don’t want business on playing on people’s hopes and stuff like that. And so I, initially when I approached him, and said, “Okay, I want to take this serious, because we’re getting that feedback that says we should do this.” But I started talking to experts, and with parents of autistic children, and interacting with autistic children of my own. And the feedback was a resounding, “Please try it.” And I think that … so, I’m going to answer your question two parts: I think that there’s an intuitive evidence and I think that there’s going to be actual evidence and the intuitive of evidence is kind of based on all of our collective experience.

Anne Zachry 3:59
Right, the anecdotal data. Yeah.

George Bailey 4:00
Yeah, yeah. There’s some heavy anecdotal evidence that’s seems to say, like, these children really value … they have the same needs as if … in that there’s, kind of, like, one type.

Anne Zachry 4:11
Right. There’s no monoliths, but, yeah, kids with similar needs. Yeah.

George Bailey 4:15
Yeah. These kids tend to love sleeping in the closet, under the bed, up against the wall, and … there’s something that’s like it. And there was enough there for us to see, so there was something there. But, all of the things that, kind of, come together out of this bed, it was not built for kid’s processing, initially. It was just, like, an enclosure with some LED lights and some fans and a mirror, and all of those elements, when combined together, seemed to form this really fantastic environment. And if you were to take any one of those things, separately … study this out and find some interesting things. Like for example, when you enclose somebody, then you give them darkness … well, darkness is heavily prescribed for good sleep hygiene.

Anne Zachry 5:06
Right.

George Bailey 5:06
… darker or something like that. It’s separate, but the enclosure itself provides almost like a sensory …

Anne Zachry 5:12
Right.

George Bailey 5:13
And, then, LED lights, you know, again, heavily used in the sensory, or special needs community …

Anne Zachry 5:22
Right.

George Bailey 5:22
Heavily used. And so all of these things … Now, where we’re at with clinical trials is that we’ve been in touch with the folks at the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Anne Zachry 5:27
Um-hmm.

George Bailey 5:37
The lead clinician for this project is going to be Dr. Christina McCrae, who is published widely on autism and sleep, and that was a must. We needed somebody to do … to ask the right questions …

Anne Zachry 5:48
Right.

George Bailey 5:49
… not do what we say. I am trying my best to remove myself from the academic questions as much as possible to just, kind of, stand back and let them do their work.

Anne Zachry 6:01
Right.

George Bailey 6:01
Because, it needs an honest assessment. That was my stance from the beginning, is that, if were going to go into this, here’s how we’re going to look at it: We’re going to find out what’s true. And what’s true may not be as flattering as what we’d like, or maybe it’ll be moreso. Maybe it will be better than, you know … maybe we’re not being optimistic enough? I don’t know.

Anne Zachry 6:20
Right.

George Bailey 6:21
… but if we learned that “X” works … and we will continue to do facts …

Anne Zachry 6:25
Exactly!

George Bailey 6:26
… if we can say, if we learned that, “Y” doesn’t, then we will also chalk that up to success and say we’re going to stop doing “Y.” And if we learned that we should probably … there’s an implication here that we should be trying “Z,” then we’re going to start pursuing that. We’re not …

Anne Zachry 6:43
Right.

George Bailey 6:43
… because I think that it requires that kind of mentality to really test this out. So …

Anne Zachry 6:49
Well, yeah. I mean, any kind of solution requires that kind of mentality. That’s just common sense. Which, you know, we also call scientific method.

George Bailey 6:59
It’s hard to do this in our community. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re hustling and you’re getting out there. You’re constantly … you just gotta, you know, sell, sell, sell, and you got to pitch your brand, bla bla bla. But you got to break out of that sometimes and just listen to what is being told to you.

Anne Zachry 7:19
Right.

George Bailey 7:19
And sometimes even … sometimes that’s hard, but you put your heart and your mind to it and your … and your money, as well. It’s very difficult, but at the same time, if you listen, then the rewards in terms of, kind of, like, personal satisfaction that you are doing right by the people that you’re trying to serve … Pretty tremendous!

Anne Zachry 7:40
Yeah, and I have to agree with that. Well, and what you’re making me think of is that the psychology of sales and marketing is the exact same science as the psychology of good instruction. It’s … it’s all the same thing.

George Bailey 7:52
Yes!

Anne Zachry 7:53
It’s all the same thing. And so, what you’re doing is … when you’re doing … there’s the, you know, the snake oil salesman, kind of, “I’m going to sell ice cubes to Eskimos and get people to part with their money for things they don’t need.” But then you also have consultative sales, which is responsible sales, where you’re actually … you’re not out there selling, you know, product features, you’re out there selling solutions to people’s problems. And you’re … you’re approaching it from the standpoint of, “What is your situation and do I have something that will help you?” And if you do, then what you’re really doing is you’re not selling the product, you’re selling the solution, and the product just happens to be the means to that end. And that’s a more authentic thing. And you build relationships with people. And it requires you to listen to what their needs actually are. And this is what they’ve been, you know, all these sales classes, they have people take, this as the message, and this is what you’re doing. But it’s also exactly the same thing as when you’re trying to identify an IEP solution for a kid. You’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on with the kid as a unique individual and match the solution to the actual need. And so there really is no difference between consultative selling and IEP development when you’re talking about matching solution to need. And …

George Bailey 9:11
I love that perspective. And, you know, it’s interesting, because I found myself in a few situations where I’ve actually explicitly told the parent, “I don’t think we’re a good fit for you.” And I feel like … it may feel like a, kind of, short-term security to be able to say, like, “Yay!” You know, “We sold another bed.”

Anne Zachry 9:30
Right.

George Bailey 9:31
But, it’s a long term hurt on the brand. If you really are trying to establish yourself, it’s like, we don’t make scientific claims. No matter what, here’s the crazy thing. It’s like no matter how many times I say that we are not making medical claims …

Anne Zachry 9:48
Right.

George Bailey 9:48
… there will be parents who read onto what we’re our saying medical claims …

George Bailey 9:53
Right.

George Bailey 9:53
… because hope springs eternal and they’re looking for a solution and this sleeplessness … sleeplessness of their child is causing them genuine distress.

Anne Zachry 10:05
Right.

George Bailey 10:06
When a child’s not sleeping with the entire family has suffered.

Anne Zachry 10:09
Exactly!

George Bailey 10:11
And so you have to be really careful to kind of repeat that again and again. But at the same time, there’s the kind of the other interest … is that you also want to make sure that you get it out there, because you rely on those early adopters who are like, really like, they’ll take a risk.

Anne Zachry 10:28
Right.

George Bailey 10:28
I love those people. I am not an early adopter, okay, I wasn’t on Facebook until 2011. I’m the last kid on the block buy the new thing. But the early adopters, one of the things whether they succeed or fail with your solution, they give you information, that it’s very valuable, you have to respect that …

Anne Zachry 10:52
Absolutely!

George Bailey 10:53
… going back to your sales mentality, I think you’re right, I don’t think that it’s always true. I’ve seen salespeople, huge tricks of the trade that I personally find to be manipulative …

Anne Zachry 11:07
Right.

George Bailey 11:07
… but I used to be a foreign language instructor …

Anne Zachry 11:12
Hmmm.

George Bailey 11:12
… for nine years. And it was really fun. I loved that time in my life, where I got to teach, and there was always, kind of, the part of explanation.

Anne Zachry 11:24
Yep.

George Bailey 11:25
You know, where you had to learn to, kind of … and a lot of the explanation that I did was kind of fun, it’s a little bit off topic, but you know, I taught Mandarin Chinese, first year. And that was very fun. And, the way that we would explain things … we were told by the teacher that we worked with, I was a teacher’s assistant that also taught courses, you’re not going to use English to teach Chinese, you’re going to use Chinese to teach Chinese.

Anne Zachry 11:49
Right.

George Bailey 11:50
So, there was a lot of need to be able to be empathetic with my audience. When I was looking at 20 of my students saying, “Wǒ” (我) which is the Chinese word for “I” or “me,” that I’d have to see, are they really getting it? And I think that with the art of sales, you have to really listen to people.

Anne Zachry 12:10
Yeah.

George Bailey 12:11
And the better you are at listening to people and their needs, I think the better you’re going to convey, like, that … that you really care and that you’re ready to solve a problem and not just, like, you know, get … sell snake oil.

Anne Zachry 12:24
Right. Well, again, I relate it back to … everything back to IEPs, because if you think about the IEP process, it’s the same thing. You can’t write an IEP, an individualized program of instruction for somebody, unless you listen to what their needs actually are. There’s not a one size fits all. That’s called Gen Ed.

George Bailey 12:45
Yes, yes.

Anne Zachry 12:46
You know, and, and so, you know, general education is the assembly line. And special ed is the custom shop.

George Bailey 12:55
You know, I really agree. We’ve worked with some IEP experts with my oldest son, Joseph. And I was always really touched. When I felt like they were taking the time to listen to me. And when they were really looking at my son and his specific needs, and so that’s, you know, it’s a labor of love. And it’s really critical to look at each child as an individual.

Anne Zachry 13:20
And, it’s required by law for that reason.

George Bailey 13:23
Yeah.

Anne Zachry 13:26
So yeah, so I mean, I realize there’s overlap, you know, all these processes and procedures that everybody’s using … it’s interesting that no matter what outcome you’re trying to achieve, very often there’s a similar formula to how you make it happen. And there’s always a needs assessment. And then there’s a matching of solutions and need.

George Bailey 13:44
A situational analysis.

Anne Zachry 13:45
Yeah. And so, I mean, it’s, again, you know, it’s common sense, otherwise known as scientific method. But, well, this is very interesting. So what, what kinds of … what kinds of responses have you gotten from the families who are using the ZPods?

George Bailey 14:02
So, we’ve got both the responses that have been highly favorable, and some that have been like, “Meh,” you know, but even with that, what we’ve never gotten .. what we’ve never heard from a single parent is, “My child does not like your bed.” We may have gotten responses like, “Your assembly instructions need some real clarity and they’re very inconvenient,” like, you know, we’ve gotten that …

Anne Zachry 14:25
Right. Technical stuff.

George Bailey 14:27
… from the parents, but the one universal is, “Our kids love, love your bed.” And then we’ve had another set of children where it’s like, minimalist a fact that they love it; they use it as a chill space. Right?

Anne Zachry 14:40
Right.

George Bailey 14:41
And then we’ve had a very large number of parents and again, I hesitate to get the numbers. I’ll give you what numbers I can, to be as, kind of, precise as possible. And we’ve worked between … with between 60 and 70 families, okay. And that number is always increasing and that there’s been a very high degree of customer satisfaction and a consistent feedback from families like, “Wow, my kid’s doing things that I’ve never seen the kid do before,” We’ve had, for example, one of my favorites was Dawson, a six-year-old boy, who, after a week of sleeping in our bed, the … first of all, the immediate result was that his sleep jumped from roughly two or three hours a night to about eight hours at the very least.

Anne Zachry 15:28
Praise God! That by itself is worth it.

George Bailey 15:30
Yes, that by itself is already worth it. But then, the, kind of, double validation came a week later, when the school teacher for Dawson pinned down the mother and said, “What are you guys doing different?” Because that was unsolicited.

Anne Zachry 15:49
Right.

George Bailey 15:50
One of the things we have to be really careful about as we study this is that parents who take the time and the trouble to purchase one of our beds have a bias towards believing that they made a good decision.

Anne Zachry 16:03
Right.

George Bailey 16:05
And, I don’t want to manipulate that. We want them to be happy, naturally. We want them to feel like they made a good decision. But I also acknowledge that bias that they have. So, when it comes to the third parties that come in and say, “Wow, I’ve seen some really, really great improvement,” … but we’ve seen that a fairly large number of cases where we’ll have like an OT say to parents, “This bed has been a game-changer,” things like that.

Anne Zachry 16:32
Right.

George Bailey 16:33
And, in Dawson’s case for the teacher to come up without knowing that there was a change in his sleep, but just saying, “This kid is more alert, more focused.” And, incidentally, in his particular case, there was talked amongst the parents about the possibility of institutionalizing him.

Anne Zachry 16:50
Right.

George Bailey 16:50
Because it was that bad.

Anne Zachry 16:52
Yeah.

George Bailey 16:53
And, Dawson’s not a bad kid. We know that. But, anybody who is under-slept so severely is going to have severe behavioral problems.

Anne Zachry 17:05
Right.

George Bailey 17:06
Sleep has incredible value for for the brain, for the body, you know, for cognition. it’s just …

Anne Zachry 17:14
… it’s neurologically necessary.

George Bailey 17:17
Yeah.

Anne Zachry 17:17
And it’s a … it’s part of human survival. You have to go through that or you will … it will make you literally ill. And …

George Bailey 17:25
And it sounds kind of funny, like trying to sell sleep. We’re not selling sleep, per se; it’s that we’re selling something that we hope will cause more sleep. But it’s almost a little bit kind of funny to hear myself, like, “Aww, now I’ve become one of those sleep preachers!” I keep reading these books about sleep, and I’m, like, these guys are all … dealing with sleep and saying the same thing. It’s almost like talking about water.

Anne Zachry 17:48
Right.

George Bailey 17:49
“Did you ever see the rejuvenative powers of water? It’s incredible!”

Anne Zachry 17:56
I know you … you really have hit on a very fundamental, visceral, survival-level kind of need that sadly enough in our society is neglected. And, you know, and you’re … you’re looking at, “Okay, how do we address this fundamental survival need, and these individuals who are struggling with this who … and are compromised?” And so I think that … I mean, I’m always excited to see new stuff. And anecdotal evidence is always a sign that, okay, we need to look into this a little bit more deeply to see, you know, what makes us you know, for real, so I’m always happy to hear that, you know, with stuff like this, the early adopters are like, “Oh, no, this seems to be doing a thing.” And all of it makes sense. I mean, logically, and intuitively, you’re right, it all logically makes sense. But it’s still going to be interesting to see what kind of research data comes from it and you know, … maybe some grad school student will latch on to it and want to write a paper or something. You just never know, and so …

George Bailey 18:54
And, that’s what we’re encouraging constantly. It’s that we want it to be subjected to scrutiny, empirical data, empirical study and and we also want to urge all companies out there that are trying to provide a solution for the autism community to find ways to get at third parties that are impartial to come in, because you only stand to gain …

Anne Zachry 19:19
Right.

George Bailey 19:20
… you may not hear what you think you hear; you may not hear what you want to hear, but you are going to hear what is going to be beneficial.

Anne Zachry 19:28
Right. Once you know what you’re working with, you can say, “Okay, well this is what I know I can do and I’m gonna stay in my lane and do only that,” you know? “I’m not gonna try and be everything to everybody,” and there’s … there’s a lot of value in that …

George Bailey 19:49
And, we don’t want that, either. You know, there’s this temptation to kind of overplay it, like, “Hey, you know this is going to do “X” and “Y” for the kid’s autism,” but you don’t know, it’s gonna be different for every kid, and it’s going to … whatever your child needs is going to be a very large combination of things. We are one part of a very, very complex puzzle of sleep …

Anne Zachry 20:03
Right.

George Bailey 20:04
There are physiological components to it, you know, some people can’t sleep because like internal parts of how they function.

Anne Zachry 20:13
Right.

George Bailey 20:13
Others that they’re … it’s just a matter of really good sleep hygiene. Some have a more selective sleep hygiene, which is kind of where we play …

Anne Zachry 20:20
Um-hmm.

George Bailey 20:22
… where they really need the aspect of enclosure, I don’t need to be enclosed in something to feel safe.

Anne Zachry 20:30
Right.

George Bailey 20:31
You know? Then again, I like being enclosed in my home, in my bedroom. You know? And then in my wife’s there. Those are some of the things that add to my own personal satisfaction …

Anne Zachry 20:42
Right.

George Bailey 20:43
… where I can calm down and initiate sleep. But some kids, they just thrive on …

George Bailey 20:50
And, you’re making me … the word “proximity” pops into my head, where … proximity to the wall, you know? How close are the walls to me? As … you know, if you’re … if you feel safe within your house, you’re still within a structure. But if that feels too spacious, and you need to have the walls closer to your physical presence to really feel that … that enclosed feeling, then I … then, yeah, that would, to me, say that some individuals need the walls in closer proximity to their physical beings than others. And, it again goes to everybody falls on a spectrum of some kind in every aspect of development one way or another. And that’s … this is just the one that you happen to be dealing with. And …

George Bailey 21:37
Yeah, some kids, actually … so our bed, it fits a twin size mattress; it’s about three feet tall on the inside. It’s pretty big I can I can sit up, I can kneel down and I’m barely touching my head.

Anne Zachry 21:51
Right.

George Bailey 21:52
So some kids feel comfortable in that, and they feel it. And I’m wondering, this is now I’m, kind of, theorizing that I wonder if this would fall under the proprioceptive sense. You know, where you can kind of sense that closeness to something without it being a touch sensation.

Anne Zachry 22:10
Yeah, because proprioception is like your the sensation of your body moving through space. And, yeah, and pressure and those kinds of things. Well, and I’m wondering if you’re enclosed inside of the pod, how much of it is air pressure? And if there’s an inner ear vestibular piece to it as well?

George Bailey 22:29
Yes, yes.

Anne Zachry 22:30
That’s curious.

George Bailey 22:31
… really comfortable, that other people feel like all they need around them are the warehouse walls of a Costco.

Anne Zachry 22:37
Right.

George Bailey 22:38
You know, something very large, they’re fine with that, you know? So …

Anne Zachry 22:43
Well, and it makes you think of our kids on the spectrum that struggle with personal space, and getting all up in people’s faces, and they don’t understand that other people have a personal bubble, and you need to step back a few.

George Bailey 22:54
Oh, that’s a great comparison!

Anne Zachry 22:55
And I’m wondering how much of that is inter played with what you’re dealing with? That’d be an interesting line of inquiry to explore.

George Bailey 23:01
Yeah.

Anne Zachry 23:03
Yeah. Well, you know what I’m thinking of to is here in California, which I know is unique, because not most states don’t have anything if any other states do. I’ve not heard of any other states that have it. But here in California, the Department of Education operates what they call Diagnostic Centers. And there’s three of them. There’s one up in Northern California in Fremont. There’s one in the central part of the state in Fresno. And then there’s another one down in LA for … that covers Southern California. And what they do is they’re … they’re funded out of the State’s federal special ed dollars and state special ed dollars, skimmed off the top, and then all the rest goes to the public schools. And so what Diagnostic Center does is they conduct evaluations of students who their local education agencies are having a heck of a time, even going through all the normal assessment procedures, trying to figure out what to do for these kids. And what they do, it’s an on-site thing where they … the family will go and the State will put them up in a hotel and give them coupons to, like, Soup Plantation, you’ll never want to eat there again by the time you’re done … and, and you stay there for like three or four days while your child is being evaluated by all of these “ologists” in this facility, while you as a parent are sitting on the other side of the one way glass watching the whole thing. And you’re getting interviewed and they’re just like turning, you know, your whole world inside out to get a handle on what’s going on with this kid. And I’m wondering if Diagnostic Centers wouldn’t benefit from having something like this to test with those kids who have those kinds of issues.

George Bailey 24:34
That is such a great question. Well, first of all, let me say that California has a fond place in my heart. I was born and raised in Hayward …

Anne Zachry 24:42
Oh, right on.

George Bailey 24:51
… so not too far from your Fremont Diagnostic Center. And, you know, In-and-Out Burger, I don’t know if you’ve ever been there …

Anne Zachry 24:51
Oh yeah.

George Bailey 24:52
Best hamburgers in the West. Great place. But to your point, that’s actually … I don’t know if we’ve toyed with that specific idea. I love that a lot. One of the things we have toyed with that we’re working on right now, it’s hard to get started to get … we’re very … we were three years old as a company,

Anne Zachry 25:11
Oh, you’re babies. Yeah.

George Bailey 25:12
Yeah, we’re babies. We’re two years old working within the autism community.

Anne Zachry 25:16
Got it.

George Bailey 25:18
But one of the things we’d love to see happen is we would like to get more Airbnbs to use these …

Anne Zachry 25:25
Ohhh!

George Bailey 25:25
… just depending on what kind of family it is. Well, then the point is that it’s kind of like if you go to the mattress store, and the guy says, “Well, try the mattress out, see how you like it.” Well, you’re gonna sit on the end, and kind of push it down with your hands. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s kind of like, “How do I know if this is good?” And then he’ll tell you, “You gotta lie down.”

Anne Zachry 25:46
Yeah.

George Bailey 25:47
So we’re trying to take it to the next level with our idea of putting these in Airbnbs because then it’s like getting inside the bed. We’re pretty good at assessing, we’ve had a number of kids come by St. Louis, just to try it out, get inside, and they love it. It’s pretty automatic. And they’ll close themselves in without being asked to do so. It was actually my son, when he did that. And then lie down. And I didn’t know what he was doing in there. I gave him five minutes alone, just kind of waiting. And then I was just like losing my patience. And I opened the door. And there he is on his back with his hands behind his head. Very chill, very relaxed. And that led me to like, “Okay.” That was one of my earlier signals were onto something. The point is that I could observe that for five or 10 minutes. Or I could do it overnight…

Anne Zachry 26:36
Right.

George Bailey 26:37
… with a lot more confidence.

Anne Zachry 26:40
It’s like an opportunity to try it out. You know, that’s interesting that you would say that, because separate from what we do in special education, I have a whole other program that we run that’s devoted to sustainable living and food security.

George Bailey 26:53
Yeah? Oh, that’s great!

Anne Zachry 26:53
And yeah, and so it’s all evidence based instruction. It’s the Learn & Grow Educational Series. But what we’re looking to do is build these Learning Centers where people can come and stay in a sustainably built structure, with grey-water recapturing and composting toilets, and all these things that sounds scary, but really aren’t and try it out for a few days …

George Bailey 27:00
… would love this, what you’re doing by the way!

Anne Zachry 27:15
Yeah, and …

George Bailey 27:15
… very much into this!

Anne Zachry 27:17
… our ultimate goal is to at some point in time … what’s the point of convincing people to live this way, if there’s no place where they can go live this way?

George Bailey 27:25
Yes!

Anne Zachry 27:25
… is we also want to be able to do affordable housing that’s sustainably built with all of these same technologies. And so that if they go and they … they do a trial through Airbnb, at one of our Learning Centers that we are looking to build in the future, that they go, “Oh, I can deal with this. This isn’t gross. This is still really bougie. I can handle this,” you know, then they … they can … there’s a place for them to go buy into a home that has all of those things. Because right now, it’s all the DIYers who are doing that, and not everybody wants to build their own sustainable house. Lots of people just want to go buy a house and move in and be done with it. And but there’s no sustainably built homes in neighborhoods like that. And so it’s the same concept of, if you go and try it out first, and then realize, “Hey, this is cool,” and you see benefits from it, then you’re, like, ready to approach it for real and incorporate it into your actual lifestyle. And so I think that that’s something you are doing that’s in common with what I’m doing in this other program I have. And that there, there’s a lot of value of having that Airbnb Experience out there for people to try things that are new. It’s something that I don’t think Airbnb realized when they first started that they were going to create.

George Bailey 28:34
Yes.

Anne Zachry 28:35
But it’s you know, there’s now all of these places, and now they have Experiences. In fact, our Learn & Grow Educational Series, we actually do classes (and tours) through Airbnb Experiences. For one thing, it’s a lot more affordable to do it that way for us because Airbnb will insure all of the events that we conduct for up to a million dollars per event.

George Bailey 28:55
Oh wow, yeah!

Anne Zachry 28:56
And so that means I’m not having to go down and get a certificate of insurance every time I’m conducting a class. And the owner of the property where I’m doing my classes is like, “Oh, thank God, I’m not going to have to file a homeowner’s claim if somebody trips and,” you know, “sprains an ankle while they’re walking through the driveway or something.” There’s all of these advantages to using Airbnb to create these novel experiences that people can test out for just a few days without having to change their whole living experience. And then if they decide, “Oh, this was worth it,” okay. It is like a living test. And I think that’s … that’s huge. I think there’s a lot of value in that. So that’s exciting. I think that that’s a smart way to go.

George Bailey 29:36
And it’s something … it’s something that we hope to get started as soon as possible. I know that maybe some of your listeners are thinking, “Oh, where can I do this?” It’s still in process. I mean, we’re still looking for people to kind of try it out. We may have something in Indiana, but not … certainly not in California right now. But what’s interesting to me about it is that on a broader topical discussion rather than just autism, it goes to show that we have shifted our purchasing behavior dramatically since the advent of the Internet, and Amazon has really changed.

Anne Zachry 30:07
Huge. Yeah.

George Bailey 30:08
It’s big because, like, we think, for example … we used to think, “Well, what would the brick and mortar store look like for our operation?” And pretty soon after that, we concluded that there is no brick and mortar store for us.

Anne Zachry 30:22
Right.

George Bailey 30:22
That’s not to say that brick and mortar is dead. I’m actually a big fan of brick and mortar. I love getting out there. I love being around people. I love walking around. I don’t want to buy everything I have on online and then cloister myself.

Anne Zachry 30:35
Right.

George Bailey 30:37
But, that being said, this specifically, it’s just, it’s a big product. And it has … you’re going to consider it more like a buy like a car…

Anne Zachry 30:48
Right.

George Bailey 30:48
… which can be which can’t be bought at the store.

Anne Zachry 30:51
Right. Yeah, it’s not an impulse buy. Yeah.

George Bailey 30:54
Yeah, it’s not an impulse … Thank you. That’s basically it. Nice, Anne. Yes!

Anne Zachry 30:59
… that, and, yeah. So, because it takes that consultation planning and forethought and thinking, yeah, it’s not really a retail-oriented kind of thing where you would just have like, the ZPod Store. I can see like, if you had a ZPod section of a mattress store or something. But I can also see, you know, literature in developmental centers and regional center offices, you know, and things like that, where it would be something that, like you said, you’re not doing a medical model. So it’s not necessarily something that would be prescribed. But, you know, like an assistive technology evaluation, when you have kids who are in a special ed, who you’re trying to find out what technologies will give them access to education. Well, what if the issue is sleep? Could that be part of an assistive technology evaluation? And if that’s the case …

George Bailey 31:51
Now that being said, I’m really excited you brought that one up because I was I was just about to bring it up. Assistive technology programs … if you have an assistive technology program nearby, like, ask them about us. And the reason why is because we’re actually currently I mean, literally currently reaching out to all of them. Because we didn’t really even know they existed. I was not sophisticated enough with special needs community that really understand what these things were …

Anne Zachry 32:20
Right.

George Bailey 32:20
… but it’s a program that’s been around since the 80s …

Anne Zachry 32:24
Um-hmmm.

George Bailey 32:24
… and every state has one. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, last year, the director for the Assistive Technology program for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, reached out to us. And these guys, they set the standard.

Anne Zachry 32:40
Yeah.

George Bailey 32:41
They’re actually the best in the United States. And this guy, the director, really wonderful gentleman, Tom Mercier reached out to me, I think he’s retired now, but Tom said, it’s, like, you know, “Some parents are really trying to get me to look at this, and I just want to take a look.” And we were like, “Sure!” you know. We set them up with one of our beds, they tried it out with the family. It was really amazing success for this family, to the point where Tom and his team approved for their field operators to be able to recommend the bed.

Anne Zachry 33:13
See in this … yeah?

George Bailey 33:14
I’ll end with saying, now we’re reaching out to every single one of them, just to educate them. And they are a great place where, if they do keep these products in stock, and then allow people to try them out to find if it’s suitable.

Anne Zachry 33:31
Right. Well, and you’re making me think of so many things. So, when you’re talking about an assistive technology evaluation, trial and error is the only way to know if the tech is going to meet the individual’s needs. So it doesn’t matter how much peer reviewed research you have about, you know, this group of subjects in a study. How does that relate to Bob over here who needs this particular problem solved? Is it going to work for Bob, you know? And so … so you have, you know, you … you end up with a study where, you know, N=1, you’ve only got one subject, and … when you’re doing an evaluation … And you’re doing individualized planning, and whether you’re talking about special education, or developmental services, whether it’s through a state DDS or they outsource it to regional centers, it varies from state to state, or you’re talking about the Department of Rehabilitation, which is to employment what special ed is to education. And you’re talking about 18 and older now and adults with disabilities and if sleep deprivation is an issue that prevents them from holding down a job, is this an accommodation that department of rehab might have to buy somebody to keep them employable? And so there’s all and it’s, it’s all individualized planning, everybody gets an individualized plan of something, some kind. So if it’s Regional Center, it’s an individualized program plan – an IPP. If it’s special ed, it’s an Individualized Educational Program – IEP. If it’s Department of Rehab, it has an Individualized Plan for Employment – IPE. But they all start with that “I.” And it’s always coming down to the assessment of that individual person of, “What are your unique needs, and how can we meet them?” And when you’re doing AT evaluations, again, it’s trial and error of, “Let’s try this tech with you and see if you benefit from it.” Then, really the bottom line, that’s the only thing that works in an AT eval. And that’s just as scientifically valid as a-million-and-one research studies about a bunch of random people that doesn’t have anything to do with the one person you’re trying to serve. So I think that if you connect with all of these publicly funded agencies and have to do individualized programming, then your support data is going to come from the instance-by-instance individual assessments of, you know, how many of these individuals benefited from this tech? And what was it about them that made it useful for them? What do they share in common in terms of needs? And what do they share in common in terms of effects? And, then you get your aggregate data from that, but you got to have enough individuals served that way. But I think that might be an interesting way to go. Because you don’t already have to have the published research to necessarily back you up. If you’ve got, I mean, where you’re at right now is sufficient, and the fact that you’ve already got a regional center here in California funding this for someone, and you’ve got these AT assessors from … from, you know, around the country, taking a serious hard look at this from a developmental standpoint. I think that’s huge. And that’s very compelling.

George Bailey 36:35
Oh, I feel very, very fortunate. And the thing, I know, a couple of points to hit number one, our parents are the secret sauce.

Anne Zachry 36:43
Yep.

George Bailey 36:43
They work so hard.

Anne Zachry 36:45
Yep.

George Bailey 36:45
And they make it happen. Like, we’re where we’ve had successes, really, primarily, because the parents pushed for this, they see what we’re doing, they see the value, they have to do the sales, you know, to these institutions.

Anne Zachry 36:58
And they have to enforce the laws with these institutions. I mean, all of these …

George Bailey 37:03
Yes, enforce the law. I love that.

Anne Zachry 37:04
… all of these … the parents are the enforcement arm of all of these civil rights laws that protect individuals with disabilities. It’s usually the family that has to go to bat for an individual who can’t go to bat for themselves. And, and so you, you’ve got the way the laws are written, is that, you know, and this is democracy: Of the people, for the people, by the people. So the way the laws are written is the people are supposed to be able to … you know, advocate for themselves using these systems. Now, how effective that is, is a whole nother conversation. But the way the system is created, it’s … it’s on … the burden is on the family …

George Bailey 37:39
Yes, absolutely.

Anne Zachry 37:41
… to drive the process. And these, these programs exist for their benefit, but they’re supposed to go seek them out and avail themselves of these programs and say here are their needs that need to be met, what do you got, and then when they come to … come with a unique issue that the system doesn’t already have a, you know, a canned solution for, and they’re required to innovate, these institutions are not built for innovation. They’re built for bureaucracy. And so if the burden then falls on the parents shoulders, they go, “Well, wait a minute,” you know? “You’re here to serve us,” you know? “That’s we pay taxes, and we’ve already paid for this stuff. So what are you gonna do with the money you’ve already been given?” And so, you know, it really is … it does fall on the shoulders of the parents, and not just because they’re the secret sauce. It’s because they have to be. You know, it’s how the system is set up.

George Bailey 38:31
As much as I know that there are people out there … my son’s, you know … people who teach him and mentor him and stuff like that. Love him. Take care of him.

Anne Zachry 38:43
Right.

George Bailey 38:43
But none of them … none of them love him like I love him.

Anne Zachry 38:46
Right.

George Bailey 38:48
So you have to fight to be that advocate, but you bring up another interesting point earlier, that just really jumped out to me that is that, on the one hand, you’re totally right, that, you know, what is right for one individual may not be another and yet, we still have a big need for clinical trials …

Anne Zachry 39:06
Yep.

George Bailey 39:06
… for these broader statements. So that we can at least know what could be predicted to work. In other words, those individual assessments if you have to start from scratch every single time, because you don’t have any big picture data …

Anne Zachry 39:19
Right.

George Bailey 39:20
… and it’s very hard for you to be able to say, “Okay, this is what’s gonna work,” or, “We should even try this.” Because every single time that you revisit … you visit an individual, you have to start from scratch …

Anne Zachry 39:32
Right.

George Bailey 39:32
So, big picture, you know, clinical Data, allows us to be able to predict.

Anne Zachry 39:37
Right.

George Bailey 39:38
This study says that 80%, 70%, 90% of people with this condition are going to respond positively to this.

Anne Zachry 39:47
Exactly, it helps you narrow down the field of what to try. Yeah.

George Bailey 39:51
Yeah. At the same time, on the individual level, if your child … turns out that your child gets a full 10 hours of sleep, which is probably what they should be getting at the age of five to 18, or whatever the number is, right?

Anne Zachry 40:08
Um-hmmm.

George Bailey 40:08
Ten hours of sleep, they get that because they bounce the ball 10 times before they go to bed. They’re good. Guess what? if that works for your kid, rock on.

Anne Zachry 40:16
Right.

George Bailey 40:17
I love that. And I love the individualized approach. So there really is value in both sides of that.

Anne Zachry 40:23
Absolutely.

George Bailey 40:25
And then on the other side, one thing that I wanted to add is that, you know, we have these individual customers. Our goal right now as a startup is, how do we early on establish a pattern of gathering data that can tell us more about each of these individuals, and then the aggregate, so that we know with greater certainty, what is still … what is going on what is helping, what is not helping? And I think that it’s very important, you know, I would really urge all startups, anybody in this space, do clinical trials.

Anne Zachry 41:00
Yeah.

George Bailey 41:01
Expose yourself to that. And also do everything you can to get constant customer feedback, because they’re always going to tell you ways that you can improve …

Anne Zachry 41:11
Right.

George Bailey 41:12
… and some can be more shy about it than others but you’ve got plenty who are just, like, “I’m going to tell you my mind. I don’t like this part of your product, but I do like this,” and you will improve.

Anne Zachry 41:21
Right.

George Bailey 41:21
Some of our best improvements came because, you know, I got told by a very frank parent, “I don’t like this.”

Anne Zachry 41:28
Right.

George Bailey 41:29
And, I was really grateful, because then we took those things and immediately said, “We have some changes to make.”

Anne Zachry 41:34
Well, in your … I was gonna say you’re making me think of how it could be done, because how you could get that data, because if you do the individual assessments where you’re matching product to unique individual need, and now you’ve got 50 individuals who have this in their IEP, or their IPP, or their IPE, whatever. All of those documents are goal-driven. So, whenever you do any kind of individualized planning, first, you have to figure out what it is you’re trying to make happen. And then you write a measurable annual goal to that need. So if the goal is is we want Bobby to sleep at least eight hours a night for a full month straight, then that’s your annual goal, that by the end of this year, Bobby is going to be able to sleep the, you know, at least eight hours a night for a month straight. And the progress … being made towards that goal is going to automatically generate data if the goal has been legitimately written … if it really has been written in a measurable manner. And so you’ve got all of these individuals with all of these goals that speak to sleep, and this is the solution that they’re attempting to meet that goal, the data collection is naturally going to speak to the degree to which the device is helping or not. And then when you get enough people who have these devices as part of their individualized plans, and you’ve got this progress towards goal data being collected in terms of how efficacious it is, then you can take all of these multiple individualized reports, and then turn it into a report of aggregate data where you say, “Okay, well, out of the 50 people where we had on these individualized plans, 25% of them have this issue and responded this way versus this or …” you know what I’m saying? So you’re taking the individualized data, and piling it all together to create a body of aggregate data that can then be analyzed. And so you’re taking advantage of both sides of that coin to get valid data. And … and it’s performance based. It’s not hypothetical. So that’s what I was thinking …

George Bailey 43:37
That’s one thing that really, I love. And that is, I want to emphasize to you on the terms that what, folks in the IEP, what I would love is that, I’m going to speak a little bit, because I’m not the IEP expert, okay?

Anne Zachry 43:56
Right.

George Bailey 43:57
But, the thing that I hope that a lot of IEPs take away from this is that, of all of the aspects of a child’s life we’re talking about, this is a pretty critical one.

Anne Zachry 44:08
Yep.

George Bailey 44:08
I’m not saying it’s the most important because I think that each of us in our specialties, we’re all vying for attention, we’re all trying to, “Well, we’re the most important because we’re sleep and that’s 1/3 of your life,” and “We’re the most important because we’re broccoli, and if you don’t eat broccoli, you’ll get cancer!” All of us are competing, but I am here to say that sleep is a critical component of your IEP.

Anne Zachry 44:33
Yeah.

George Bailey 44:33
And, if it’s going great, that’s wonderful, but it should be visited. And that … that’s a hard to find in a professional, in the sense that they at least have to have some fundamental understanding both of its benefits, and maybe some kind of surface recommendations that they can make, at least getting out the gate to, kind of, let’s … let’s take care of some of the things that could be the problem. Let’s find out, for example, your child … Is it dark enough when they’re sleeping? Is it too noisy? Are you watching television until 11 o’clock at night with your child exposed to screens? These types of questions help us to eliminate as factors, possible causes …

Anne Zachry 45:17
Right.

George Bailey 45:18
… what is driving the loss of sleep, and you need to have at least a fundamental, basic understanding of what could be getting in the way of sleep. Now, of course, at that point, you always want to have a good “sleep go-to”; somebody that you go to, “Okay, you know, I’m out of it, I’m out of my depth, I recommend targeting this institution with sleep centers,” …

Anne Zachry 45:40
Right.

George Bailey 45:39
… or something like that. And even then, though, I’ll tell you that I get a lot, a lot of phone calls from parents who said, the sleep center’s, like, given up.

Anne Zachry 45:48
Yeah.

George Bailey 45:49
They just don’t know what to do with this kid. Because this kid defies their kind of expectations for what should be helping the child to get better sleep.

Anne Zachry 45:59
Well, and I would think the sleep centers would want to test your product as well to see if … especially when they’re running into a situation like that. That that should be part of the testing milleu.

George Bailey 46:07
Yeah. Well, this is all the more reason for in-depth clinical trials, to be able to put in front of them, because they will correctly come to us and say, “We expect you to have data.”

Anne Zachry 46:19
Right.

George Bailey 46:20
And I expect that from them. I think that that is good. Now, if they’re so inflexible as to not be helping at all, especially when we already have the pretty heavy anecdotal evidence …

Anne Zachry 46:32
Right.

George Bailey 46:33
… that this is something that should be taken seriously, the aspect of that concept of enclosure, that I think would be kind of negative. But I do expect them to have an academic interest in what it is we’re doing.

Anne Zachry 46:47
I would think they’d be wanting to … helping you do the studies. That they would want to get in on and get published. I mean …

George Bailey 46:52
Oh, yeah. The reality, though, behind studies that we should all here bear in mind is that no matter what you do, you’re going to be spending money.

Anne Zachry 46:54
Right.

George Bailey 47:02
And so, for example, investors and startups, they don’t actually like to spend money on stuff. If you go to investors and say, “I want to raise capital, this amount of capital, $200,000, or whatever it is, is going to go towards a clinical trial.”

Anne Zachry 47:18
Right.

George Bailey 47:18
They’ll say, “Come back to us, once you’ve done the clinical trial.”

Anne Zachry 47:21
Yeah, it’s the same way with nonprofits. It’s like, “We’ll give you a grant, if you can show what you’ve done with the grants you’ve gotten in the past.” I’m like, “Well, now, somebody’s got to be the first one, here.”

George Bailey 47:33
Yeah, so you have to look for people who are very invested, not just financial returns, that you may be able to provide, but the outcome that they actually love the story that you have …

Anne Zachry 47:47
Right.

George Bailey 47:48
… what you’re trying to create. And so that’s where, you know, I agree with you that I would love to have more sleep centers, try our beds to figure out how effective they are. And not just that the tried numerous aspects. It’s not like, the bed’s are effective or ineffective. That’s not really …

Anne Zachry 48:05
Right. It’s like, how are they effective? And what areas? Yeah.

George Bailey 48:09
Yeah, yeah. Or, what about the scent? Is the smell of the space affecting anything? What about the temperature? And so there’s so many variables. We do have the, kind of, virtue of being able to isolate those variables and create some constants that are not really, as easily achieved in normal experimentation. I actually had a really good conversation with Temple Grandin about this, an the thing that she said, that just blew my mind, I would not have been the one to think of this, she’s very …

Anne Zachry 48:43
Oh, her brain is just something else. Yeah.

George Bailey 48:45
It’s really amazing. The thing that she told me … she says, “Every kid who sleeps in your bed, the same sheets, the same mattress …” and then she laid it out, like, “This is what it’s gonna look like,” It’s just like, “Oh, my gosh!” I immediately ran to my pencil and I’m just writing stuff down, going “Thank you! Thank you!” She’s so …

Anne Zachry 49:12
Yeah, the trial is … it’s not comparable if everybody’s not experiencing it under the exact same conditions. You can’t compare one person’s experience to another unless it’s all identical. Yeah, that’s the thing about clinical trials.

George Bailey 49:24
And it was really refreshing to get her perspective on that. I feel she’s very generous with her time.

Anne Zachry 49:31
She is.

George Bailey 49:33
And so that’s one of the things that I like about events is that we can isolate a lot of factors like, look at, okay, so this is one of the things we’re trying to get people to think about as we look at this as a solution is that, imagine every autistic child in the United States and adult. Now, imagine all of their different living situations. Some of them have big rooms, small rooms, most of them probably small rooms, you know, because we’re not all wealthy…

Anne Zachry 50:03
Right.

George Bailey 50:05
… you know? Even the room, the shape of the room, the lighting in the room, the proximity to the city, some sleep right next to the train tracks …

Anne Zachry 50:12
Right.

George Bailey 50:12
… and so to be able to isolate, their kind of like, the … the ideal is really hard to do. And I like the idea that we’re working towards that. And that we … were kind of, let’s give a consistent and predictable environment in which to control for other variables. And then we can start really isolating different variables in a quantifiable way that may be causing some of the more serious issues that we’re seeing.

Anne Zachry 50:44
Totally makes sense. Well, so we’re coming up now on … it looks like almost 50 minutes

George Bailey 50:51
It’s been … every bit, it’s been fun.

Anne Zachry 50:57
I know, this has all been, like, enthralling. So um, but I know that not everybody’s gonna want to listen for like, hours and hours. So I think the big question that people are gonna have after listening to all of this and going, “Well, that sounds really cool. How much does it cost?” So what is the price point that … that parents if they’re interested in looking into this, what are they looking at, you know, in terms of cost? I mean, even if a parent were to lay out money for this, there’s a possibility it could be reimbursed by any of these agencies that have an obligation to their kids. So … but it’s going to require, you know, proof of purchase and all that kind of stuff. I mean, what kind of price tag?

George Bailey 51:33
So we’ve got the bed, as I’ve said, covered in states like Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, California, and Kansas, and we’re gonna keep on working on that.

Anne Zachry 51:42
Good.

George Bailey 51:43
We’re happy to kind of advise parents on how we think that can be best accomplished. They come out in June, the new version, because we sold out all of … all of our China inventory.

Anne Zachry 51:55
Wow.

George Bailey 51:55
We have a new Made-in-the-USA version that has upgrades all based on what we heard from parents.

Anne Zachry 52:01
That’s so cool.

George Bailey 52:02
So the new one will cost $5,000, retail. That being said, the first 288, that we’re going to be selling are going to be $2,800 each, and that shipping included on those 288.

Anne Zachry 52:14
Okay.

George Bailey 52:16
So we’re going to cover the shipping on that. The reason why we want to get these out and want to get people experienced … I was gonna say that, we do have financing and such, but the fact of the matter is that if you are invested in trying this for your child, we are invested in finding a solution. We have been very fortunate to get some really great guidance on how to get these things funded, we really want to share that with people. Our website is zpodsforsleep.com.

Anne Zachry 52:48
Right on.

George Bailey 52:50
Feel free to reach out to us because we are so invested in these kids, and we just want to help in any way that we can.

Anne Zachry 52:58
Well, that’s really exciting. And all that being said, I mean, for me as a … as an advocate, someone who goes in and helps families advocate for these kinds of solutions for their children, you know, this is something that we regularly do. It’s like, “This is cost-prohibitive for this family. It’s not like we’re asking for a $2.99 app, you know. This is this is an outlay of cash that is a necessary accommodation for this particular individual.” Then, you know, I know that I can go … these are the kinds of things that I go to agencies for and say, “Look, you know, if it was something easy and out of pocket that this family could do, but this is this is an expenditure. And this is what these public resources are for.” I’m really excited. I’m going to be looking on your website to see what you’ve already got up there in that regard … of how parents can go advocate for themselves to get these things. But I would also want our listeners to know that if you already have an advocate or an attorney that you’re working with, and this is something you think might be appropriate, you would want to involve that person in the conversation as well. Because, they may know, you know, how the system works a little bit better in terms of rules and regulations to help you navigate those sharky waters and overcome whatever objections people might have. Because the agencies don’t want to spend that kind of money either. And they’re going to come back and say, “Oh,” you know, “… you just want us to fly your kid to Hawaii and swim with the dolphins.” And you know, it’s like, “Look, dolphin therapy might be effective, but does it … does my kid needed to learn how to read? No.” And so, you know, there’s, you know, … I’m not, you know, I’m not the person who’s going to go there and try and pitch some, you know, crazy, ridiculously expensive solution just because, you know. We’re not trying to help people milk the system for things that are not what the system was designed for. But in an instance like this where, like you were talking about the one child who was on the verge of institutionalization, well, now you’re talking about least …

George Bailey 54:48
Yeah.

Anne Zachry 54:48
… least restrictive environment, that in all of these programs, the … the commitment is to try and keep people in as non-segregated of a setting as possible, and to keep them as integrated with the rest of society as much as you can. And, you know … and also, when you’re looking at it from a budgetary standpoint, which costs less? A one-time expenditure of five grand, or $8500 a month for a residential treatment facility, and to accomplish the same outcome? And so for those kids who are in that unique boat, I think that this is a serious conversation to be had. Because how many residential placements could be prevented by making the home environment more suitable? When you’re talking about … it’s really about ecological control. And all if for the … in the absence of ecological control, you’re going to pack this kid off someplace and separate them from their support system and their family. You know that … that’s never the best idea. And that’s always the last resort. So if there’s another layer of intervention that can come before that, that can prevent it, that’s always important for everybody in the … in these lines of work to understand and know about … that this could be something that the agencies understand this is far less expensive than what the alternative is for some of these individuals. And it certainly is far more compliant and less segregationist. And so for everybody involved it’s a better solution, if that’s the case. And so I think that this is something that other advocates and attorneys need to be paying attention to as well, that this is something they could potentially be asking for if it suits the need. And if so, only an individualized assessments going to answer that question. And …

George Bailey 55:03
And I would be happy to talk with any of those attorneys formulating strategy sessions. It’s kind of our joy, to be able to help. It is funny, but I’ll leave you with one last story. I know that we’ve talked a long time … about two months ago, I was helping a mother and I was in a hearing. I was not allowed to speak. They were asking about, kind of, like … they’re looking for any sort of other low-cost, you know, a solution and this mom had tried everything.

Anne Zachry 56:52
Right.

George Bailey 56:54
Finally, the, kind of, opposing counsel, or whatever you want to call him there, was saying, “Well, this is … it’s just changing their environment. That’s all that they’re doing. Why not change the room?” Like, “You can get … the room doesn’t need to be that …” Something like that. I was just thunderstruck …

Anne Zachry 57:11
Yeah.

George Bailey 57:12
… by what I was hearing. I was like, “You’re literally advocating that this woman move rather than just paying for the cost of the bed?”

Anne Zachry 57:19
Right. Oh, yeah. It’s like, “How can …” All the things I see. The stories I could tell, trust me. I mean, that’s like the tip of the iceberg. And, and it always comes back down to, “We don’t want to …” It’s a “not out of my budget” mentality.

George Bailey 57:36
Yes!

Anne Zachry 57:37
It’s not out of my budget mentality. You’re …

George Bailey 57:39
Very short sighted.

Anne Zachry 57:41
… very short sighted. I mean, these are the same kinds of people who would rather criminalize a behavior and stick a kid in juvenile hall than pay for a BCBA to come in and provide a behavior program. And it’s like, well, you know, “Even though it’s going to cost the taxpaying public 10 times as much with, like, far more abysmal results to put them in the juvenile justice system, at least that’s like coming out of my budget.” And it’s like, “What? You’re gonna go home and pay taxes for that? Do you not understand this coming out of your personal budget?” And it’s just the lack of wisdom. And so it’s like, how did you get this job? You and I are encountering some similar issues just coming at it from a different perspective. And it this has been a very enlightening conversation, this has given me a lot of things to think about. I’m going to have an ADHD spin-off in a minute, and, you know, a-million-and-one ideas are going to pop in my head. But well, thank you very much for doing this with me today, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. And this is a lot of information for people to digest, I will very, definitely make sure that I’ve got links to all of your stuff, you know, it’s going to be something going to be sharing with the other professionals that I work with as well, so that they are aware that this is even an option. And as we encounter these kinds of things in the field, we now know, we have got this potential tool in our toolbox that we can at least attempt to see if it’s going to work. I mean, again, trial and error when you’re talking about technology.

George Bailey 58:57
You never know, but when it does, it really rocks. And, seeing the changes that we see, like, we’re talking about four hours of sleep a night; all of a sudden, ten hours of sleep.

Anne Zachry 59:06
Oh yeah, any kind of … any kind of change you can make with respect to sleep problems is always usually pretty noticeable pretty quickly. And so, you know that part of it, that’s the proven science is that improving sleep quality improves a whole bunch of other stuff. So really, it comes down to, you know, where does your product fit into improving sleep quality? Not, you know, so you don’t have to prove the sleep quality issue. It’s just you … it’s about, you know, showing how your product fits in with it. So I’m excited to see this and if you get some Airbnbs and stuff like that they’re willing to take these on, yeah, share us the links for those guys, too, because we’ll put that out there for people to go and check it out and try it and see what they think.

George Bailey 59:45
Absolutely. Thank you …

Anne Zachry 59:46
Thank you.

George Bailey 59:48
… so much! More than anything, it’s been fun.

Anne Zachry 59:50
Well, thank you! It has been. It has been. Well, much appreciated.

George Bailey 59:55
Thank you.

Anne Zachry 59:55
You’re so welcome.

Anne Zachry 59:57
Thank you for listening to the podcast version of, “Interview of George Bailey, President of ZPods. KPS4Parents reminds its listeners that knowledge powers solutions for parents and all eligible children, regardless of disability are entitled to a free and appropriate public education. If you’re a parent, education professional or concerned taxpayer and have questions or comments about special education related matters, please email us at info@kps4parents.org or post a comment to our blog. That’s info at K as in “knowledge,” P as in “powers,” S as in “solutions,” the number 4, parents P-A-R-E-N-T-S dot O-R-G. We hope you found our information useful and look forward to bringing more useful information to you. Subscribe to our feed to make sure that you receive the latest information from Making Special Education Actually Work, an online publication of KPS4Parents. Find us online at KPS4Parents.org. KPS4Parents is a nonprofit lay advocacy organization. The information provided by KPS4Parents in Making Special Education Actually Work is based on the professional experiences and opinions of KPS4Parents’ lay advocates and should not be construed as formal legal advice. If you require formal legal advice, please seek the counsel of a qualified attorney. All the content here is copyrighted by KPS4Parents, which reserves all rights.

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Mysterious Special Ed Accountability Report Published in California

On January 13, 2022, after staying up late to finish my last post/podcast, I woke up to find a message in my inbox from the CAPCAA listserv that included a very comprehensive-looking report published by a group referring to itself as “The Office of Administrative Hearings Special Education Task Force,” with the email address of oahspecialedreport@gmail.com. The members of this task force are not identified in the report. The report identifies its authors as follows:

Authors/Contributors: This accountability report is provided by the Office for Administrative Hearings Special Education Task Force, a coalition of concerned attorneys, advocates and parents. Many of these contributors conducted research, collected and organized the information, and assisted in the writing of this report.

Bias, Noncompliance and Misconduct In Special Education Due Process: An Accountability Report on the California Office of Administrative Hearings Special Education Division, January 2022

Given the degree of retaliation that anybody calling out the California Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) could easily face in the current anti-democratic climate of American politics, these days, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that the individuals responsible for this report have not named themselves in it. That could be really a good way to find some “good ol’ boys” burning crosses in their yards and planting pipe bombs in their hedges on behalf of some tax-fattened, suit-wearing carpetbaggers.

So, I can’t discount the report for lack of identified authors. That leaves nothing but the content of the report with which to judge its legitimacy, but that’s almost better. It’s like a blind audition on The Voice; it doesn’t matter what you look like if you have a good voice. What you have to say and how you say it matters more than what your name is or what you look like. So, that’s how I’m looking at this report.

In these troubling times, I’m willing to accept verifiable facts from anonymous authors truly fearing for their own safety if they dare to speak the truth. I will not accept unverifiable assertions being openly spewed by people saying whatever will get them attention. So, let’s examine the assertions being made by this report.

This Task Force’s report follows a professional format for organization and presentation of its information, but it’s not a legal brief or scientific paper. Not every assertion is supported by black-and-white evidence, but the assertions not supported by evidence are nonetheless consistent with those assertions that are supported by evidence.

Additionally, because I work extensively in the very areas of concern targeted by this report, all of it rings true with the experiences that I’ve lived as a professional over the period of time discussed in this report. That which is not outright supported by evidence in this report is nonetheless credible to me given the evidence that is presented and what I already know to be true from real-life experience.

While anecdotal accounts were added to the report to bolster the authors’ positions, the identity of those offering these accounts are unknown, so verifying them is impossible. Again, concerns about retaliation and privacy are legitimate, so I don’t want to discount the privacy concerns of the authors, but one of the first rules of proving the veracity of a document is authenticating its content with its authors. That’s just a basic rule of evidence. At some point, for this document to be taken seriously by regulators and/or legislators, its authors will have to reveal themselves.

Putting aside the authorship issues for the moment and delving into the actual content of this report, what this report is basically asserting is that OAH, which is a division of the California Department of General Services (DGS), is organizationally compromised relative to its obligations to try special education cases pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The report supports these arguments with references to a collection of publicly available documents.

These arguments appear sound and supported by credible evidence, in my opinion. Of particular note to me were its references to the November 15, 2021 study conducted by CDE titled, California Special Education Governance and Accountability Study, as well as news that the courts finally resolved the issue of continued distance learning for medically vulnerable children on IEPs. This latter issue affects one of our families and I’ve been waiting to hear about this situation.

The Task Force’s assertions in its report are also consistent with my experiences dealing with OAH since it took over the hearings in 2005. In fact, I first became a paralegal in 2005 and witnessed the very shenanigans reported by the Task Force with the change-over from the Special Education Hearing Office (SEHO) to OAH that same year. It was a dumpster fire inside of a clown car that had crashed into a train wreck, to put it mildly.

OAH underbid SEHO in terms of the costs of conducting special education mediations and hearings by failing to include the costs of administrative support and sending mediators and judges around the State to handle each case in its local community, which allowed OAH to come under SEHO’s bid by several million dollars, as memory serves. The moment it opened its doors for business, it was already millions of dollars over-budget from what it had bid to get the business from SEHO.

The quality of the judges from OAH was atrocious out of the gate. One then-new judge went down in California special education parent/student legal history for the angrily and stupidly stated words, “Ms. [Attorney], what does autism have to do with behavior!?!”

When you have people who have no idea what anybody is talking about deciding the futures of children who have no voice of their own in the process, those of us who are trying to protect these children become almost as powerless as the children we’re trying to protect. We were, and continue to be, faced with people entrusted with responsibilities that are clearly light years beyond their actual skills and knowledge, and the authorities and powers that go with those responsibilities.

What is the point of having the rule of law if the people responsible for enforcing it are personally incentivized to break it or are otherwise too dumb to know how to enforce it? We’re paying these people to implement the regulations, not to invent excuses as to why they don’t have to and bully the rest of us if we dare to question them.

I’ve been saying for the last 30+ years that special education issues are civil rights issues, and if our babies aren’t truly protected, then none of us really are. The national political landscape appears to support my conclusions, not that I’m happy to be right about that. Marginalized groups with specifically identified protected rights are always the first ones targeted by fascists, so special education is really a “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to American democracy. Clearly, we’re not doing that well and this Task Force is seeing a lot of the same things I’m seeing.

Regardless of the authorship issue, which I suspect will be resolved in due time, the evidence cited in this report and the consistency of what it describes with what I live and breathe everyday inclines me to treat it as credible, though if anyone can find an inaccurate assertion in it, please post a comment and let me know. At minimum, another federal investigation is warranted based on this report, but I don’t know that going to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is the right way to go, now.

As the report discloses, there was already an OCR investigation in 2014 of the California Department of Education (CDE) as it pertains to making its hearings accessible to individuals with disabilities. I won’t repeat the anecdotal account of what that was all about, here; you can read it yourself in the report. But, I warn you, it’s upsetting. I wish I could say it was too outlandish to be true, but it sounds just about right for OAH and CDE, based on my own experiences.

Last year, just to give you an example from my own caseload, I filed a compliance complaint with CDE against a local school district for failing to implement all of a student’s IEP during the pandemic-related shutdown. The most critical element of the complaint was the district’s failure to provide in-person 1:1 aide services, as required by the child’s IEP.

Instead, the district put the aide for this non-verbal, inattentive, prompt-dependent child with autism on Zoom, requiring the child’s mother to be the in-person aide helping her child access Zoom, constantly cueing him attend to the online instruction, and prompting him through all of his work tasks to completion. The aide could only sit there, staring at them through the screen, completely useless … at taxpayer expense.

The aide was willing to provide in-person support and the non-public agency (NPA) that employed the aide was ready to send her to the student’s house in a mask for in-person services during distance learning, but the district wouldn’t permit any in-person services during shutdown. This single parent ended up selling her condo and moving, with her children, in with family friends, in no small part because she couldn’t work a paid job while sitting at home serving as the free aide for her child with special needs throughout each school day while the paid aide sat in her own home on Zoom, unable to do her actual job.

This was a blatant violation of State and federal law that the district kept blaming on the county’s health department. I challenge anybody to find a legal authority that gives a county health department the authority to tell a school district that it doesn’t have to abide by the IDEA. After attempting to get the district to do the right thing by way of written correspondence and the IEP process to no avail, I filed a regulatory complaint with CDE.

CDE opened an investigation based on what I alleged through its complaint intake unit, but then the investigator subsequently assigned to the complaint materially altered the nature of the investigation and cited the district for a different violation of the law than what I had originally alleged, and failed to issue a finding regarding the original allegation I’d made about the aide. The investigator’s findings then went to yet another unit within CDE that developed the order for corrective actions, which included compensatory special education instruction for lost service minutes, but it was silent regarding aide support during those compensatory services.

Think about this for a minute. I alleged in my complaint that the district failed to provide aide support during distance learning. The intake unit opened an investigation in response to my complaint based on the allegation of the district’s failure to implement the IEP as written, specifically with regard to 1:1 aide support. The investigator found that the district failed to implement all of the instructional minutes in the IEP, but issued no finding regarding the 1:1 aide support. The corrective actions unit ordered compensatory instruction to make up for lost service minutes, but there was no mention of aide support.

Once corrective actions have been ordered by CDE and its findings are sent out to the parties, the offending education agency has to provide proof of corrective actions to yet another unit of CDE. When I called that unit to get clarification as to whether the compensatory service minutes were supposed to include the 1:1 aide support called for by the IEP, that unit’s response was, “Yes.”

The offending district’s attorneys (definitely of the Rudy Guilliani/Syndey Powell variety), however, said, “No.” They then tried to fight with CDE over whether or not the compensatory service minutes had to include the same 1:1 aide support the student required throughout the school day in every other instructional setting, as per his IEP, likely billing the district by the hour the whole time.

What ensued turned into an internal feud within CDE. The unit at CDE responsible for collecting proof of corrective action from the district insisted that, because the IEP called for 1:1 aide support during any and all instruction, it was understood that 1:1 aide support also had to be provided during the compensatory services ordered. But, not everybody involved with the investigation at CDE agreed.

What I came to suspect was that the investigator and legal department at CDE had deliberately steered my complaint away from its original allegations for presumably fiscal and/or political reasons. It certainly had nothing to do with CDE abiding by its obligations or making the district comply with the law. It had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the educational and civil rights of a little boy with autism who can barely talk and needs an aide to access his education.

Reading through this Task Force’s report, I’m now seeing that experience again through new eyes. The argument the CDE is fiscally motivated to find it does nothing wrong and neither do its districts, regardless of the facts, as asserted by the Task Force, resonates with me as true.

Another compelling argument asserted by this report that also rings true for me is that DGS exists for the purpose of cutting costs, not ensuring the State’s compliance with federal mandates or protecting the rights of citizens. The report further argues that, as an integral part of DGS, OAH also exists for no reason other than to control costs and not to protect the rights of California’s citizens. As such, the Special Education division of OAH is not organized in a manner consistent with the requirements of the IDEA that special education hearings and mediations be conducted by impartial parties whose only function is to protect the educational and civil rights of students with disabilities.

A State employee who is being told their primary function is to save money should not be in charge of making sure the State abides by the IDEA. It’s an outright conflict of interest, which this Task Force asserts in its report. This isn’t just a philosophical assertion; it’s a regulatory requirement. The IDEA requires education agencies to design and implement individualized programs of instruction that confer appropriately ambitious educational benefits upon each student according to his/her/their unique circumstances, regardless of cost.

A State agency that exists to cut costs should not be making programming decisions in situations in which it is unlawful for cost considerations to be used to determine who will get what. That, to me, explains a lot of the hyper-Republicanism (in the present-day fascist sense of the term, not the former “Party of Lincoln” sense of it) going on in California’s special education system.

And, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that, back in 2005, right-wing grifters were responsible for giving the special education due process business back to OAH. One of the sleaziest special ed law firms there ever was, which happened to be the largest special ed law firm representing school districts in California at the time, was Lozano Smith. It was instrumentally involved in getting the due process hearings switched to OAH in 2005. All of this came on the heels of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2004, which resulted in changes to the IDEA. Those changes created an opportunity for anti-student and anti-parent forces to lobby for changes to how California handled its special education matters, from changes to State law, to changing who enforced the laws from SEHO to OAH.

However, in 2005, something else big happened involving Lozano Smith, right after OAH took the special education hearings back over. Lozano Smith will live on in infamy, at least in my mind, for decades to come following two public displays of anti-democratic behavior.

The first was its epic 2005 faceplant in the matter of Moser v. Bret Harte Union High Sch. Dist. (366 F. Supp. 2d 944 (E.D. Cal. 2005)), which made the news. The second public example that stands out in my mind was its 2014 amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court opposing protections for special education students under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the matter of K.M. v. Tustin Unified Sch. Dist., 78 F. Supp. 3d 1289 (C.D. Cal. 2015). This second example didn’t steal headlines, but the actual outcome of the case was huge for students with special needs regarding their disability-related communication needs.

If special education advocacy has been the “canary in the coal mine” of American democracy, Lozano Smith has been one of the Mitch McConnell-esque specters of obstructive fascism that has been trying to snuff the voices of “canaries” like me for decades. I’m convinced that every single unrepentant person who had a hand in the Bret Harte mess and anything else like it will have a special place waiting for them in Trump Tower Hell, when they die; perhaps it will be named the Lozano Smith Suite.

In the present, all of the concerns raised by this Task Force’s report are grounded in the realities I deal with every day. The fact that the authors fear to reveal their identities is also grounded in the harsh reality that the fascists aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they are coming for us, anymore. Anybody who stands up for civil rights, these days, is a target, and I realize that includes me just by saying so.

Here’s the thing, though. Those of us accustomed to dealing with special education issues who understand Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) also know an Extinction Burst when we see one. So long as those of us who see this Extinction Burst for what it is continue to abide by our professional ethics, stand our ground, and stick to the applicable science and rule of law, none of the self-serving histrionics of those with anti-democratic tendencies within our government will overcome our fact-based arguments. We have to keep acting like we live in a democracy or it stops being one.

We may lose battles on occasion, particularly in those States currently permeated by maskless, unvaccinated seditionists spreading COVID as readily as their lies, but the only way we lose the overall initiative is if democracy fully collapses in the United States. All of us “canaries” need to start beating our wings and squawking loudly as the voices of experience when it comes to fighting fascism within America’s government, or it’s curtains for all of us.

It’s not shocking news to any of us that the fascists are targeting local government, including school boards, as a means of seizing control of the country. That’s nothing new! That’s what all of us working in special education advocacy have been up against since the original laws that protect our children were passed in the 1970s. To the rest of the Country, it’s unfortunate that it’s now happening to you, too, but we welcome you to the front lines and look forward to working with you to win this soft civil war currently being fought over basic rights and the rule of law in America.

To our colleagues fighting similar battles on behalf of other marginalized groups, we look to unify with you. When it comes right down to it, those of us who exist in marginalized groups collectively outnumber the few individuals at the center who put us in their margins.

In a democracy, majority rules. The minority of individuals who want to rob the rest of us of our rights cannot oppress a unified majority. Special education rights are human rights, just like ethnic rights, gender rights, sexual orientation rights, relationship rights, etc. If all of us whose rights are being infringed upon join forces instead of competing for the crumbs that fall from the would-be oligarchs’ tables, we can be sitting at the table eating meals full of freedom with everybody else, instead.

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Win an Amazon Gift Card from KPS4Parents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Appeal to My Colleagues

Urie Bronfenbrenner, Human Development Researcher

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

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

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

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

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

Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Model of Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What About Kids with FAPE Claims that Pre-Date Quarantine?

As much as special education in general is all up in the air in most quarantined school districts, with unlawful conduct being perpetrated by school officials who have never believed in the IDEA seeing this as an opportunity to get rid of its obligations while still collecting federal special education dollars, there is a subpopulation within special education that is even more affected by this than others. That subpopulation is made up of the students whose educational and civil rights were already being violated by their local education agencies (LEAs) prior to the quarantine.

There is huge debate going on right now about Betsy DeVos, the Trump Administration’s appointed Secretary of Education, and the waiver power she does and does not have under the law to exempt school districts from delivering a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) to students with disabilities. Congress has now asked her to testify as to what parts of the IDEA she thinks needs to be waived and we don’t know how it will vote on the matter.

More and more comes out on this topic each day. The Council of Parent Advocates and Attorneys (COPAA), the national nonprofit professional organization that advocates and, where necessary, litigates on a national level on topics like these has published its own policy statement about the current situation, which can be found on the COPAA website.

Currently, there are no waivers of the IDEA in place. The only exemption right now is that LEAs that are not providing distance learning options to their general education students don’t have to provide education to their special education students, either. Until there are actual Congressionally approved waivers, nothing has changed with respect to implementing the IDEA for those special education students served by LEAs that are currently providing distance learning to their general education students.

Nonetheless, I have four families with students in one particular school district that is currently providing distance learning to its general education students and something half-baked in terms of online options for its special education students. All four of these families received generic Prior Written Notices (PWNs) over this last weekend advising that it’s impossible to implement IEPs under the current circumstances, even though it very often is possible and the administrator sending these things out has a decades-long history of throwing money at lawyers to defend her decisions instead of actual services for students. Three of those families already have due process cases filed or about to be filed.

Just like everything in special education, PWNs are supposed to be individualized to each student, but she sent the same PWN to the families of everybody in her district in special education, telling them all that implementing their IEPs under the circumstances is impossible with no examination of each student’s unique, individual situations. She may have finally dug herself into a hole that she can’t get back out of.

This administrator made unilateral decisions on behalf of her district outside of the IEP process during a time when the IDEA has not been waived in any kind of way, in part or in whole. It’s a systemic violation of the law memorialized in writing on district letterhead to the family of every special education student in her district. She may have well just created a class action lawsuit against her employer.

Children with disabilities from low-income, single parent, immigrant, and non-white households were already getting the short end of the stick when it comes to special education. Being white and affluent doesn’t necessarily protect you, but it does increase your odds of avoiding at least some FAPE violations.

That said, the aforementioned administrator sending out PWNs that break the law on her employer’s behalf worked most of her career for an affluent school district where the only way to get a decent IEP was to sue the crap out of her district. Her department would play to the egos of affluent parents and tell them special education was a welfare service and they would be better off privately paying for services, thereby collecting federal IDEA dollars without actually having to spend them on services.

Now she’s working for a district in an economically depressed community with a largely Latino population and is preying on low-income, non-English speaking, families of color. Maybe she thinks they aren’t going to stand up to her taking advantage of the pandemic to bring in IDEA dollars without having to deliver on IDEA obligations. She’s wrong.

I already had cases that were pending due process on my caseload when this pandemic hit. The students involved in those cases were already being under-served, if served at all, and now they’re sitting at home with even more nothing. One student’s parent has an elderly parent in a nursing home she can’t visit and is working from home (or at least trying to) while her adult autistic child who is still eligible for special education has one meltdown after another because of the sudden disruption in routine and her inability to go out and do anything (trips into the community were being used as reinforcers as part of her behavior program, as well as community-based instructional opportunities, before all of this hit).

This parent is understandably furious. All that she’s gotten so far from her daughter’s teachers is a useless Google classroom link that takes her to a page full of nothing to do with her daughter’s IEP goals. And, while her daughter’s IEP makes clear that she requires “highly trained staff” to meet her goals, all she’s got right now is her frustrated mom and useless downloaded worksheets that her mother doesn’t know how to teach to her and she doesn’t know how to complete. There is no support from the teaching staffs to help this parent engage her daughter in the distance learning option, such as it is, that they’ve been given.

This student is from the same district mentioned above that is sending unlawful F-You letters on PWN forms to its special education families. I have three other students in this district, two of them already with litigation pending for violations that occurred before the quarantine. They were already being denied a FAPE before quarantine, and they sure as hell aren’t getting a FAPE now.

I’ve already written about the impact of the quarantine on special education before to some extent, but I want to hammer a particular point once again: Many special education students are at risk of significant regression, which is the loss of previously learned knowledge and skills, during lengthy breaks from instruction. These students are eligible for Extended School Year (ESY) services for this very reason; summer breaks, and sometimes winter breaks, are just too long for them to go without services or they have to make up for lost ground once they return to school, which makes them unavailable for learning anything new.

The impact of the current situation on these students in particular stands to compound an already egregious denial of FAPE. If they were already being denied a FAPE before this all happened, additional regression on top of that will create deficits that will never be overcome.

As of right now, no IDEA waivers have been permitted. Congress is waiting for Mrs. DeVos to tell it what waivers she wants to push through in response to the pandemic and mass quarantines. There is significant fear that the waivers Mrs. DeVos will request will include exemptions from implementing all or part of the IDEA.

The consequences to students if Mrs. DeVos is successful in getting IDEA waivers are obvious. What is not quite so obvious is what becomes of federal special education dollars to school districts if she manages to get any or all of the IDEA waived. While some school districts may be ready to embrace reduced duty and accountability, do they realize that IDEA dollars are tied to complying with the law? Does Mrs. DeVos intend to use IDEA waivers to not only reduce accountability for the public schools, but to also reduce their special education funding? How many school districts are willing to walk away from special education dollars in order to get out of having to implement IEPs?

Parents of children with disabilities, their extended families, their friends, and any taxpayers who otherwise get it need to act on this right now. You need to reach out to your representatives in Congress to tell them that any IDEA waivers are unacceptable. There is a way to deliver a FAPE to most special education students right now; it just takes cleverness and ingenuity, things most government agencies are not particularly known for. Clever problem-solving is generally unaccepted in institutions built on political corruption.

So, here’s your call to action: Contact your Congressional representatives and tell them that no IDEA waivers are acceptable or necessary. Look up your Senators here, and your Representatives here. You can also use our easy-to-use form letter generator or sign our online petition. If you are listening to this as a podcast rather than reading it as a blog, you can find the links in the text-only portion of this post.

It shouldn’t be necessary to have to fight to keep civil and educational rights in place for our nation’s children, but it is. Many LEAs are pushing compulsory education laws by threatening families with truancy proceedings if they don’t participate in distance learning options, but then are looking for any and all excuses to not actually deliver a real education, particularly to their special education students.

These distance learning options are all about keeping those Average Daily Attendance dollars coming in, I assure you. LEAs can’t live without that money and its based on attendance, which is why they are threatening to criminally prosecute parents who don’t implement their half-assed distance learning options for truancy. But, to actually deliver a real education in exchange for those dollars seems too much to ask, and it’s a thousand times worse for students with special needs.

It may quickly become the case that the only way for families of special education students to protect themselves against unjustified truancy charges, which are tried by local superior court judges who know nothing about how special education is actually supposed to be delivered, is to file for due process and make the record that the education being offered to those special education students during quarantine is inappropriate to their needs and they are unable to access learning as a result.

Parents should not feel forced to make their kids do something that will not help or just make things worse out of fear of being criminally prosecuted for truancy if they don’t. The sad reality, however, is that so long as they log or call in every day to whatever distance learning platform has been made available to them, even if their kids aren’t learning anything, they will not be prosecuted for truancy because those logs will be used as proof of attendance so schools can get their Average Daily Attendance dollars. That still does nothing to ensure their receipt of a FAPE, though.

Now is the time to reach out to advocates and attorneys if your child with special education needs isn’t getting appropriate instruction and related services while sheltering in place. You can find people to help you by searching online for “special education advocates near me” and “special education attorneys near me.”

Just be careful of the con artists out there, though. There are lawyers who will claim to represent families but then cut backroom deals with the attorneys representing the LEAs in which they convince the family to sign settlement agreements that short-changes their kids and eliminates their claims against the LEAs. There are also lay advocates who mean well, but don’t know the applicable science or law.

You should be leery of lawyers who have been in practice for years but have no litigation history. If they could actually litigate, they’d do it. But, if they can’t, they’ll get a few thousands dollars in fees for selling out their clients via backroom deals cut with school district lawyers and administrators. There are sleazy people on both sides, so parents do have to be choosy about who represents them.

Your state should have some kind of online database of due process decisions that you can search by an attorney’s name. If no due process decisions come up with that attorney’s name, and they’ve been in practice for years, that’s a red flag. If you search the decisions by attorney name and the results produce only cases that the attorney has lost, that’s another kind of red flag.

The good lawyers’ caseloads already get impacted by this time of the school year, but this situation just takes it to a whole different level, so parents should find someone fast if they think they even might need the help. One source that helps parents find advocates and attorneys is COPAA. It has guidelines to parents for choosing a special education attorney and/or advocate, as well as a searchable directory of COPAA members by location.

You will note that I am not listed. I am not a COPAA member and with good reason. As much as I appreciate what COPAA does on a national level, particularly with respect to its amicus briefs, it has no membership options for paralegals. This isn’t about bashing COPAA because there are things about it that I genuinely love, but there’s also things about it that I find wholly unacceptable.

I’m speaking to my truth, not disparaging an organization that I am, here, deliberately telling parents they should check out as a valuable resource. My issues with COPAA are mine, but I’m sharing them here for the benefit of those who search the database I’ve referred them to, don’t find me on it, and wonder why.

If I go to the COPAA conferences, I can only attend the workshops for parents and other advocates, where I spend the whole time either biting my tongue or correcting the presenters because they’re disseminating misinformation, and I never learn anything I didn’t already know. I’m not allowed to attend any of the attorney sessions, even though I totally could use the MCLEs for my paralegal status.

I can’t even subscribe to the COPAA listserv for attorneys, even when it contains information that would benefit my supervising attorneys for me to have access to it. My supervising attorneys are not even allowed to share it with me, even if it pertains to a task they are delegating to me. Until COPAA makes a space for me and people who work in the profession as I do, I can’t justify the expense of a COPAA membership or its conferences.

Besides, when I’ve gone to the conferences, I’ve walked through the tables and booths between sessions and, every year, there sits a table set up by a non-public school that broke one of my student’s arms during an unlawful restraint several years ago. When this issue was raised with COPAA the first time I saw this bunch at a conference, they ignored my supervising attorney on that case and continued to take money from these child abusers for the table space each year after that. I’m not okay with that.

Given the poor instruction options available to me at the COPAA conferences, the presence of known child abusers at the conferences, and the overwhelming evidence I’ve observed that far too many people only attend it so they can drink to excess and cheat on their spouses for a week, I don’t find the COPAA conferences worth the thousands of dollars in fees, hotel and travel costs, and lost billable time to be worth it. Plus, they hold it in the middle of the busiest time of the school year, which makes no sense at all. I’ve always got way too much work happening when the conferences are held to attend, anyway.

So, while I don’t have a high opinion of the COPAA conferences, I have a very high opinion of the brilliant legal minds that write COPAA’s amicus briefs and I’ve agreed with every one of them I’ve ever read 100%. Nothing is perfect and COPAA is a good resource for many. The actual work COPAA does, aside from its annual conferences, is stellar and I can look past the conferences for the sake of the bigger picture, which is legally protecting children with disabilities from educational and civil rights violations.

COPAA has taken on the U.S. Department of Education with bold, accurate words in legal proceedings that make my heart want to burst with pride in our profession. That’s what matters to me about what COPAA does. That is, in my opinion, the most important thing COPAA does.

If you are looking for an attorney or advocate, the COPAA membership directory can be a good resource for many parents. Just know that there are a lot of other professionals out there who are really good at their jobs who are not members, there are members who aren’t that good at their jobs, and there a non-members who haven’t signed up because they’re crooked and don’t want to get caught by those of us who are doing this work for the right reasons. Like everything else in life, it’s a mixed bag.

Being on the COPAA membership directory doesn’t automatically mean someone is good and not being on it doesn’t mean someone is bad. It’s just a list of people who work in this field and pay membership fees to COPAA, but it’s the only national directory of advocates and attorneys that I know of and it’s foolish to not regard it as a valuable resource. Just take it for what it is and don’t think that hiring a COPAA member automatically means you don’t have to put much thought into it.

As I stated before, the membership directory page includes links to COPAA’s guidelines for finding a qualified attorney or advocate, which is pretty sound advice. Regardless of whether an advocate or attorney is a COPAA member or not, COPAA’s guidance as to how to vet attorneys and advocates is still good.

If you are the parent of a child with special needs who is not receiving a FAPE while in quarantine and your LEA is providing alternative learning options to its general education students, as of the time of this writing, there are no waivers of any part of the IDEA and it is still fully in force. This isn’t about kicking your LEA while it’s down; this is about protecting your child from being kicked by his/her LEA while your child is down. LEAs have millions apiece of taxpayer dollars intended to pay for the education of our children and that damn sure better be what it’s spent on, regardless of the situation.

Students who were already being denied a FAPE before the pandemic are now further compromised. How this is going to play out in litigation remains to be seen. If the rule of law is followed, there are no exceptions to providing a FAPE right now. Any FAPE violations that were already going on before quarantine have not been made better by it and families in those situations very likely need to consult with a qualified special education attorney sooner rather than later, if they haven’t already.

This is a difficult time for everyone, but the true measure of a society’s health is how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members during times of crisis. While some fascist LEA administrators may see this as an opportunity to finally carry out their bigoted agendas and terminate special education like they’ve been wanting to since 1975, those of us who still prefer democracy to fascism have to stand up and enforce the laws that have been part of the fabric of our country for the last 45 years.

As soon as one civil rights law falls, all the rest of them fall, the tenuous thread that our democracy is holding onto right now will snap, and we will find ourselves suddenly living in a real oligarchic regime. The moment it becomes okay to violate the civil and educational rights of children with disabilities, it will become okay to violate everyone else’s rights, too. Every protected class – women, minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, low-income families, single-parent households, etc. – will lose rights one by one thereafter until no one has freedom anymore, except the wealthy oligarchs.

While I am focused on the individual needs of the children and families involved, I can’t help but appreciate the over-arching ramifications for democracy at large. We protect everyone’s rights, or we protect no one’s. True democracy means everyone is equal, including special education students.

And, regardless of whether IDEA waivers get approved, no one is contemplating waivers of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If the IDEA is no longer enforceable, those laws still are and Betsy DeVos has no control over them. So, if she manages to get IDEA waivers passed by Congress, families will still have recourse under 504 and the ADA, which can have harsher ramifications than the IDEA on LEAs.

The IDEA diminishes “equal access to education” but expects no expense to be spared in the pursuit of that watered down version of equal access; the ADA says “equal access” must be 100% equal, unless it creates an undue burden on the responsible party, which it has to prove. We’ve not had civil rights litigation under 504 or the ADA since either of them passed that sets a precedent for what we’re dealing with right now, but I can promise you that what special education students are getting at home during quarantine doesn’t come close to equal access to education as that being given to their non-disabled peers.

These are uncharted waters and only time will tell how this is going to play out, but it’s up to those of us who do this work and the families we serve to do everything we can to protect our children with special needs. Please contact your Senators and Representatives, tell them that no IDEA waivers should be granted, and let’s all keep the pressure on until we have an answer. In the meantime, nothing has changed and the law is still enforceable, so we need to enforce it.

While many courts have moved to a work-from-home model (I recently watched a federal court trial in which Google was accused of aiding and abetting the Taliban that allowed me to see into the homes of three federal court judges and the Plaintiffs’ attorney), some state special education hearing offices have closed down, ceased operations except to issue continuances and stays, and are accruing a backlog during quarantine that is going to explode with new cases from all the FAPE claims arising from school district misconduct currently going on. Parents may need to use this time to find an attorney, start organizing their evidence, and file to preserve their timelines, even if they aren’t going to get in front of a judge right away.

For families that were already facing due process before the quarantine, if their states are operating their complaints and due process hearings according to a work-from-home model, which Texas is doing, then there should be some kind of mitigation in place to prevent that huge of a backlog. If three federal court judges on a panel can hold a trial to determine if Google was complicit in the Taliban’s use of its technologies to engage in acts of terrorism from their homes, special education due process cases can be tried the same way.

If you have a due process case that was pending before the quarantine, then you’ve likely already been communicating with your attorney about what is going on. If you haven’t, yet, do it now. You need your attorney looking into what due process mechanisms remain intact in your state and what the procedures currently are. Any competent attorney will have already done this, but may be so overwhelmed by the sudden explosion of casework that is starting to happen that they haven’t had a chance to talk with you about it, yet. Don’t overwhelm them by stalker dialing ever 5 minutes, but do reach out and make an appointment to discuss how all of this impacts your case.

There is never a good time to participate in litigation. For most parents, “litigation” and “good time” generally don’t go together. But, this is definitely a worse time to be pursuing due process in a system that was already glutted with cases. The sooner you act, the better.