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?

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.

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.

Interview of George Bailey, President of ZPods


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.

Amazon Gift Card Contest

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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.

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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.

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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.

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An Appeal to My Colleagues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

IEP Goals Determine Services & Placement

If you’ve read or listened to our past posts and podcasts, or have otherwise been educating yourself on the special education process, hopefully by now you understand that special education is supposed to follow a particular procedural flow. This is not only the method supported by best practices, but also the method required by federal law.

To recap, assessment data provides the present levels of performance and baselines necessary to formulate educationally appropriate IEP goals for an individual learner. The goals describe what the IEP is supposed to make happen. Once the enormous milestone of developing the IEP goals has been achieved, then it’s time to figure out what services are going to be necessary and where they can be delivered in order for each goal to be met. This is where things can suddenly go off the rails.

It does no good to articulate sensible outcomes in measurable terms if effective services aren’t put into place to actually work on them and make them happen. Goals are just hopes if you don’t have a plan for the services you will need to meet them, and hope is not a strategy. But, this is often where things can get tricky in developing an IEP.

There are two common reasons for why things can go wrong at this stage: 1) everybody means well, but they don’t know what they’re doing; or, 2) something fishy is going on. In the first instance, it’s usually a matter of training. In the second instance, somebody is gaming the system in pursuit of an agenda in which the student is ancillary, but not the point.

In many instances, where this process gets tripped up actually starts with the development of the IEP goals. When the IEP goals are improperly written and/or necessary goals are excluded altogether, determining what services are necessary to deliver appropriately ambitious educational benefits to each student becomes compromised.

I’ve had many parents come to me over the years saying things like, “My kid needs more speech and language. He doesn’t know word meanings, can’t follow instructions, and can’t express himself, but he’s only getting 20 minutes of speech per week.” They look at increasing the service minutes in speech as though that’s going to somehow magically translate into working on all areas of his speech/language needs, when the real issue is that there is only one speech goal in the IEP for articulation and the rest of their child’s speech/language needs have no goals.

Because there are no goals for anything else, the number of speech/language service minutes is limited to how much time is reasonable to pursue the one goal that is there for articulation. 20 minutes per week to work on nothing but articulation isn’t automatically off-base.

What these parents really mean, when they say their kids need more speech and language services, is that the IEP is not targeting all of their speech/language needs. If that’s true, then the IEP team has to go back and look at the data to determine what other areas of speech and/or language should also be targeted by explicit intervention, then write goals to those specific areas of intervention need.

Once those new goals are written, the IEP team can then look at how many service minutes will be necessary to meet each goal. In addition to service minutes, which are expressed in terms of frequency and duration, the location of where the services will be delivered has to be determined.

It isn’t automatic that related services, like speech/language or occupational therapy (OT), get delivered in a pull-out setting. The location of services, like all other parts of an IEP, must be individualized to the unique needs of the student.

Pull-out services require the student to be removed from the classroom, often during instruction, and can interfere with learning. It’s a balancing act to find the right time to pull a student out of the regular class routine to go participate in direct pull-out services.

Push-in services bring the intervention into the student’s classroom and make it part of the classroom experience. Sometimes, this can be small group instruction with a reading specialist when the general education class is broken into small reading groups as a normal matter of instruction. This weaves the special education into the general education situation so that students with reading challenges are facilitated in participating with everyone else.

Embedded services are much like push-in, but they are intertwined with the instruction throughout the entire school day as a matter of instructional design for the classroom. An example of this would be embedded speech/language instruction and Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in the program design of a school specifically for students with autism who cannot successfully function and learn on an integrated campus.

In this example, because it can be reasonably expected that all of the students in such a special school will need these supports according to the research and evidence-based practices, they are woven into the instructional design of the program. They are part of how the instruction is delivered on a continual basis.

In such cases, the integration of speech/language and ABA have to be used to describe the placement rather than parsed out as individual related service minutes, because they are part of the placement design that makes that particular placement appropriate for certain students. In this instance, they are not discrete services provided outside of or in addition to what is otherwise happening in the classroom.

Which leads into the next phase of the process, which is placement. Placement is the last decision to be made by the IEP team. There’s a really good reason for this. Placement is supposed to be determined by what is the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) in which the services can be delivered such that the goals are met.

Special education is a service, not a place. The whole point of the IEP is to meet the IEP, but it is discrimination on the basis of handicapping condition to automatically remove kids from the general education setting for instruction just because they have disabilities. Unless removal to a more restrictive setting is the only way for the goals to get met, it’s not the LRE.

LRE is relative; what is restrictive for one student may be empowering for another. A student with autism who can nonetheless function in the general education setting with push-in ABA supports, for example, would be inappropriately placed in a school for students with autism.

Sometimes parents mistakenly think a special school is better because it’s focused on the specific types of needs their child has. But, it’s only better if the student cannot otherwise be successful in a less restrictive setting. Restrictiveness of setting is directly related to the severity of the student’s needs and the intensity of instruction necessary to meet the IEP goals.

Sometimes, creating an appropriately hybridized placement offer for a student who needs some pull-out services, but can otherwise participate in general education the rest of the school day, is such a difficult thing to coordinating in a particular school’s pre-existing culture that special ed staffs find it more convenient to put kids in more restrictive settings. This gives special ed staffs more control over the quality of the instruction and allows them to prevent their kids from being harmed by discriminatory general education practices, but it segregates their students on the basis of handicapping condition.

Sheltering students with disabilities from abuse by sequestering them from bigots inadvertently reinforces discriminatory practices that keep people with disabilities from equally accessing the world at large. Preventing the abuse of students with disabilities through diversity appreciation instruction, as well as proactive, research-based Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) on a schoolwide basis, makes far more sense.

The LRE laws exist for this reason. Rather than sequester students with traits in common to prevent them from being bullied by the rest of the students, it is more appropriate to teach all of the students how to get along with each other. Appropriate programming results in general education students looking out for their peers with special needs rather than picking on them and mocking them. It facilitates unity in the school community.

Because LRE is relative to each student, no parent should go into the IEP process demanding a placement because somebody else’s kid got it and they’re doing great there. Somebody else’s kid is not your kid. You don’t base IEP placement decisions for your child off of what somebody else needs or gets; you base it on your own child’s unique, individual learning needs as targeted by the IEP goals.

Most school districts will tell you that the “continuum of placement” for special education is whatever they already have. That’s only partly accurate. What the school district already has is part of the continuum of placement, but if the placement the student needs doesn’t already exist within the district, the placement has to be outsourced or created.

It’s appropriate for the school district to describe the types of placements it already has. These can include, but are not limited to: general education placement with push-in supports; pull-out to a special education class and/or therapies for part of the school day for targeted specialized support, with placement in general education for the rest of the school day; full-time placement in a special education class; and placement for all or part of the day in a non-public school.

But students are not limited to the types of placements already put in place within a school district. Sometimes, the closest appropriate school is so far away that the child and a family member live in a nearby apartment or other local housing arrangement during the week and go home on weekends, with their local school district funding the housing and travel expenses as related transportation services in the student’s IEP. There’s caselaw around this issue in favor of students (see, for example, Ojai vs. Jackson).

There is no master list of all the “types” of placements that can be offered to a special education student. Like every other part of an IEP, placement is supposed to be tailored to the student, only with the LRE requirements relative to what services it will take to meet the goals in mind. Sometimes, IEP teams have to get creative to meet highly unique individual student needs.

Other times, the types of supports a student needs are relatively common such that there are entire classrooms that provide those kinds of supports to all of their students. Resource Specialist Program (RSP) services are the most commonly delivered special education services. These are the least intensive forms of special education services provided.

Most students on IEPs have relatively mild learning disabilities that make RSP support a useful tool in helping them maintain grade-level performance. They are usually mostly in the general education setting with some special education supports and plenty of them go on to college and successful careers.

Many of these students glide through the K-12 system with an IEP that no one knows about but their families and teachers. Most of their peers have no idea and their closest friends realize it’s no big deal and don’t care.

Further, it is becoming less stigmatizing to be on an IEP than it used to be, so students are being more forthcoming with their peers about their special education statuses, just as matters of fact, without judgment entering the picture. If only the adults could follow their lead.

How Parents Can Help Promote the Application of Peer-Reviewed Research to Special Education

Image credit: Elco van Staveren

Special education is heavily regulated to protect the rights of eligible students to individualized educational planning, but complying with the regulations is easier said than done. The operational design of most public schools is over 150 years old and based on the mass production mentality of a factory, having been created during the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, the applicable special education laws were first passed in the 1970s, accounting for only the last 1/3rd of the current American public education system’s history.

Trying to implement the individualized educational planning called for by special education law in an environment created for the purpose of mass instruction is like trying to build a custom piece of furniture on a moving assembly line. In the early days of special education, this meant removing students from the general education setting to special education classes, effectively choosing to build a custom piece of furniture in a specialized workshop rather than on the pre-existing assembly line.

The problem, however, is that pieces of furniture do not have civil rights. It’s one thing to segregate inanimate objects according to how they are constructed. It’s another thing to segregate human beings according to whether they need changes in how they are instructed due to disability.

Because special education students have legal protections against being segregated out of the general education setting simply for having a disability, integrating individualized educational planning into a mass instruction environment becomes that much more complicated for special education students who are educated with their general education peers for all or part of their school days. The complexities of individualizing educational programs for each student are seemingly infinite, given all of the relevant disability-specific considerations plus all of the ecological factors involved in each instructional setting.

However, science – specifically research conducted by educational psychologists and their colleagues – has been attempting to keep up with the demands created by various types of unique student needs, including disabilities of all kinds. While it all hasn’t been figured out for every situation by any stretch of the imagination, there is still a wealth of information from education research that never makes its way into the classroom, much less into individual IEPs.

That’s a problem because Title 34, Code of the Federal Regulations, Section 300.320(a)(4) mandates the application of peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education on an individualized basis, unless it’s not practicable to do so. No one has yet defined what “practicable” actually means, so it’s still up for debate.

The history of how all this science ended up being codified within the implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), has been summarized in our last blog post, “The Fundamental Flow of IEP Creation,” so I won’t repeat it here. You can review the impact of PARC v. Pennsylvania in that post to inform references to it, here.

The point is that the applicable science has always been written into any serious redress to the educational needs of students with disabilities after having been deprived educational benefits by the public school system. In PARC v. Pennsylvania, a psychologist with extensive experience working with children with intellectual disabilities and an attorney committed to representing the interests of children with intellectual disabilities were jointly appointed by the federal court to serve as special masters to oversee the implementation of appropriate interventions to students with intellectual disabilities in Pennsylvania’s public schools as part of the settlement that was negotiated between the parties. The settlement included federal court oversight by way of the court-appointed special masters.

The historical foundations of the requirements for measurable annual goals in IEPs pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.320(a)(2) and the application of the peer-reviewed research to the delivery of special education as mentioned previously can be traced directly back to PARC v. Pennsylvania. There has never been a time when the law did not expect the delivery of special education to be informed by anything other than evidence-based practices developed from the peer-reviewed research.

From the moment the first laws were created to provide special education to all eligible children in the United States, science was built into its design. Federal Supreme Court case law has established that Congress expected procedural compliance with the IDEA to all but guarantee compliance with the substantive requirements of the law when it authored and passed what is now the IDEA. Specifically, the case law states, “…the Act’s emphasis on procedural safeguards demonstrates the legislative conviction that adequate compliance with prescribed procedures will in most cases assure much, if not all, of what Congress wished in the way of substantive content in an IEP.” (Board of Educ. v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982))

Congress intended for the applicable science to guide the special education process for a number of good reasons. First, using science means using what everybody can agree actually works under a given set of unique circumstances, to the degree such is known. There is evidence – proof – that under the explicit conditions that were tested, a particular method of intervention works or doesn’t.

Because every special education student presents as a highly unique individual such that their learning needs do not conform to conventional instruction, they require highly individualized instruction that is tailored to each of them, respectively. There is no one-size-fits-all method of intervention proven to work in special education contexts. What is proven to work is writing up a unique program of instruction for each individual student. That is the evidence-based applicable science, that is the bottom line requirement of the applicable federal law, and this has been known and federally regulated since 1975.

This, therefore, begs the question as to why so much of special education is based on subjective opinions, ballpark estimations (often underestimations), and fad theories about learning rather than science. There’s been a lot of research into why the research isn’t being promulgated for use in public education and politics has a lot to do with it.

Applying the research means upgrading facilities, retraining teachers and their support staffs, buying new materials, and paying for more specialists. Further, it’s often necessary to purchase all of the research materials necessary to inform any kind of evidence-based program design and hire someone who knows how to translate the research into a data-driven educational program. For highly paid top agency administrators who get compensated on the basis of how much money they don’t spend rather than how many students they do get educated, applying the research means spending money, and that’s no way to get a raise in that kind of institutional culture.

Another concern of many public education agencies is accountability. When using evidence-based practices in the delivery of special education, one can’t ignore the body of research that supports that the data collection and analysis methods used in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) are the most reliable methods of data collection and analysis used in any special education context (Drasgow, Yell, & Robinson, 2001; Kimball, 2002; Yell & Drasgow, 2000). The problem for some education agencies is that valid data collection means all their missteps will be captured by the data. If they aren’t actually implementing the IEP as written, the data will reflect that, exposing the agency to legal consequences.

People often mistake ABA for a treatment for autism, but this is not the case. It is true that behavioral interventions using ABA can be effective at addressing behavioral challenges with students who have autism, as well as any other human beings with behavioral challenges, but it can also be used as an instructional methodology and as a tool to determine if learning has occurred and, if so, how much. That is, it is excellent at measuring progress towards a clearly defined outcome, such as a measurable annual IEP goal.

The Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (ABC) data collection methods used in ABA naturally lend themselves to measuring progress towards IEP goals. This is how it works: a stimulus (Antecedent) is presented to which the student responds with a specific Behavior, which immediately results in an outcome (Consequence) that either increases the likelihood of of the behavior happening again (reinforcement) or it doesn’t (absence of reinforcement or punishment).

Most people in special education are at least familiar somewhat with using this approach to dealing with inappropriate behaviors. You don’t want to deliver a reinforcing consequence when an inappropriate behavior occurs. Instead, you want to reinforce a more appropriate replacement behavior that still meets the student’s needs; the behavior was happening for a reason and you can’t leave its function unaddressed or a new behavior will just develop around it. Treat the cause, not the symptom.

You only resort to punishing the undesired behavior when reinforcing the desired behavior is not sufficient at extinguishing the undesired behavior. Presenting reinforcement for doing what is expected and withholding reinforcement for doing what is not expected is usually a pretty powerful strategy for positive behavioral interventions.

When using ABC data collection and analysis on the fly during instruction, your thought process is a little different. When you’re looking at whether a student is learning from the instruction you are providing, especially when working with students who have significant impairments that limit their expressive communication skills, sometimes it’s the raise of an eyebrow, the turn of a head towards you with eye contact, or the smile or grin that tells you whether or not you’re getting through. There is still an Antecedent (the delivery of your instruction and/or check for understanding), a learning Behavior (the student’s response to your instruction and/or check for understanding, whether verbal or not), and a Consequence (praise for learning or encouragement for trying) that increases the likelihood that the student will remain engaged and continue to participate in the instruction.

When using ABA-based data collection methods to measure for IEP goals, so long as the goals are written as math word problems based purely on observable learning behaviors, it’s pretty straight forward. Take for example this goal, which is purely made up for illustrative purposes: “By [due date], when given 10 calculation problems using multiplication of double digit numbers per trial, [Student] will calculate the 10 problems with at least 80% accuracy per trial in at least 9 of 10 consecutive trails within a semester, as measured by work samples.”

This is easy. There are 10 problems per trial. The student needs to get at least 8 out of 10 problems right per trial (measure of accuracy) in at least 9 out of 10 consecutive trials (measure of consistency) within a semester (measure of time) in order to meet the goal. Nothing is left to guesswork. Everything is represented by an increment of measure.

What ruins a goal out of the gate is basing any part of it on internal thoughts and feelings experienced by the student. Never start a goal with language like, “… when feeling anxious or angry …” or “… when presented with a non-preferred task …” You can’t trigger the onset of measurement based on something you can’t observe. You only know what the student is thinking or feeling once they express it in some way.

There is no way to get in front of the student’s expression of their thoughts or feelings to prompt their behavior in an appropriate direction because there is no way to know what the student is thinking or feeling before they act. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, including those of special education students, cannot be observed or known by other people. No credential in special education imbues special education personnel with clairvoyance. By the time you know what the student is thinking or feeling, it’s too late to influence how they act on those thoughts or feelings; you only know because they’ve already acted.

The same goes for preference. Preference cannot be observed and it can vary from day to day, or even moment to moment, for a lot of special education students. What is preferred at one time will often not be preferred at others. Eventually it is possible to have a good idea of what is not preferred by a student, but then confirmation bias can enter the picture and you see what you expect to see, not realizing you’re prompting it according to your preconceived expectations.

What makes more sense is to write goals that do not target what are referred to in ABA as “private events,” but rather to expected behaviors. For example, a common behavior targeted in the IEPs of students with challenging behaviors is work refusal, which is to say non-compliance with task demands. A teacher will assign a task and, if the student is non-compliant, they will either passively sit there and just not perform the task; do something else passive instead, like doodle or read a book; engage in distracting or disruptive behavior, like play on their phone or talk to their neighbors; or engage in outburst behaviors, possibly accompanied by leaving the room (eloping).

It’s usually pretty easy to figure out if there is a pattern to the types of tasks assigned and when non-compliance occurs such that preference can seem easy to identify. But, trying to rely on that for the purpose of measurement is like trying build a house on shifting sands because someone’s preferences can change so quickly.

The language that I see most commonly used in goals that work around the issue of private events reads more or less like this: “By [due date], when assigned a task, [Student] will either initiate the task, ask for help, or request a 2-minute break within 60 seconds of the task being assigned in at least 8 of 10 consecutive opportunities as measured by data collection.”

This makes things easy. Regardless of whether the student has a personal preference or not for the task being assigned, they will either start the task, ask for help with the task, or take a short break and get it together before they come back to the task.

Some students have processing speed delays that interfere with their ability to get started right away. They need extra time to process the instructions so they understand what you want them to do. Sometimes that extra little break is all they need to get there independently. It just takes them a little longer to think it through and make sense of what you want from them before they know what to do and can start. Other students get emotionally overwhelmed and just need to go get a grip before they tackle the expectations being placed on them. Yet others take longer to stop one activity and transition to another one. That short little break can buy them the time they need to process the mental shift of set and orient themselves to the new demands being placed on them. Other times, students just don’t understand the expectation being placed on them and need clarification.

In any event, if there’s a problem, the goal provides a solution; otherwise, the student just needs to perform the task as assigned. Further, the language of this example goal can be modified for a student to provide for alternative acceptable responses and/or a different response time.

With respect to measurability, there is no guessing about what anybody is thinking or feeling in a goal formatted this way. Measurement is triggered by the delivery of a task demand (the assigned task) and is based on whether any of the described acceptable outcomes occur within 60 seconds. All of the elements of the goal are measurable.

Further, a goal written this way follows the ABC format of ABA. First an Antecedent is presented (the task demand), then one of three acceptable Behaviors (task initiation, request for help, request for break) occurs, then an appropriate Consequence (completion of the task, delivery of help, or receipt of a short break) is immediately forthcoming. Everything that needs to be measured can be observed. The observable criteria are easily represented in increments of measure. It’s black-and-white without making any assumptions about a student’s thoughts, feelings, or preferences.

So, having said all of this, how does this get us to the point of the article, which is how parents can successfully advocate for the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and implementation of their children’s IEPs? Well, first, I needed to be clear as to what I mean by applying the peer-reviewed research, hence everything I just got through explaining.

Parents first need to understand what they are asking for and how it impacts the design and implementation of their child’s IEP. Further, any professionals reading this for the purpose of further developing their skill set may not have all the background information necessary to make sense of all of this, either.

A foundation first had to be laid. Having now done that, parents need to keep the information I’ve just shared in mind when participating in IEP meetings and reviewing IEP documents for appropriateness.

If you live in a consent state like California, I usually suggest signing only for attendance at the meeting and taking the document home for review before signing agreement to any of it. In California and other states, you can give partial consent to an IEP and the education agency has to implement the consented-to portions without delay while the non-consented-to portions remain subject to IEP team discussion and negotiation.

Anything that can’t be resolved via the IEP process must go to due process for resolution, whether you are in a consent state or not. Just because you are not in a consent state doesn’t mean that an education agency won’t change the language of an IEP at your request. An IEP meeting would likely be called to discuss your concerns and, if you back them up with facts and logic, the education agency isn’t going to have a good reason to say, “No.” Not everyone is outlandishly unreasonable in special education; there are some definite bad apples, but they don’t account for the entire barrel. Due process is your only resort if your efforts to resolve things at the IEP level are not met with success and your child is increasingly compromised because of the unresolved matters.

If you are unfortunate enough to have to rely on due process to see things resolved, the fact that your denied requests were supported by facts and logic will only help your case once you get in front of a hearing officer. Understanding the underlying arguments of what makes something legitimately measurable and the federal requirement that special education be delivered according to what science has already proven works makes you a far more informed IEP participant than at least some of the other people at the table.

As a parent, the more you can support your requests and arguments with peer-reviewed research, the better. Once you frame your requests according to the proven science and make it as black-and-white as possible, you eliminate all kinds of silly arguments. This means not only asking for goals that are truly measurable, though that goes a long way towards solving and preventing a lot of problems, but also understanding the nature of your child’s disability(ies) and what the research says can be done to teach to learners with such needs.

Gathering the necessary research data to inform a request for a particular assessment, service, curriculum, methodology, technology, or placement requires accessing the peer-reviewed literature and understanding what it means. A lot of it is really dry and technical, as well as expensive. This isn’t a burden parents should have to take on, but if it’s one that they can take on, it will only help them become better advocates for their children. Google Scholar can be a good place to start.

In truth, it should be education agency personnel doing this research, but if parents want to see the science applied, they may have to push for it, themselves. Parents can also submit published research articles to their local education agencies that appear to apply to their children’s educational needs and request that the approaches used on those articles be used as part of their children’s special education programs, including being written into their children’s IEPs. If the local education agency declines to honor any request, 34 CFR Sec. 300.503 obligates it to provide Prior Written Notice (PWN) explaining why to the parents.

Conversely, if the education agency proposes a particular approach and the parents are unsure about it, the parents can request an explanation of the peer-reviewed research that underpins the education agency’s offer. Either it honors the request or it provides PWN explaining why it won’t. If it’s the latter, it better be one heck of a good explanation or it will only reveal that the education agency has no research-based explanation for its recommended course of action, giving the parents a good reason to dispute it.

If what you are asking for as the parent is backed up by facts, logic, legitimate measurement, and credible research that all directly apply to your child, and the education agency still says, “No,” then you will either end up with no PWN because the agency doesn’t want to put the denial in writing, which violates the law and only makes your case stronger in hearing, or you will end up with a PWN full of malarkey that won’t stand up in due process. If what you are asking for makes total sense and the education agency won’t do it or something else equally or more appropriate, the education agency will have some explaining to do in hearing.

So long as what you are asking for is necessary for your child to receive an appropriately ambitious amount of educational benefits (meaning as close to grade level or developmental norms as possible), there’s not a lot of good reasons for a public education agency to turn down your request. It’s illegal for the public education system to use fiscal considerations to determine what should be in a special education student’s IEP.

Just be sure to submit all of your requests for changes to your child’s IEP in writing. It is the education agency’s receipt of your written request for changes that triggers the PWN requirement. In the instance of requesting assessments, many states allow for a public education agency to decline to conduct assessments for special education purposes upon parent request, but the agency must provide PWN when doing so. For more information on special education assessments, see our previous post, “The Basics of Special Education Assessments.”

If it doesn’t decline a parent’s written request for assessment, the education agency must provide the parent with an assessment plan to sign that authorizes the agency to conduct the requested assessments. State law regulates the provision of assessment plans; in California, local education agencies have 15 calendar days to get an assessment plan to the parent, regardless of who made the referral for assessment. Submitting the request for assessment in writing is not only important for triggering the PWN requirement if the request is declined, it’s also important in establishing when a state-mandated timeline starts counting down.

You as a parent can encourage the application of science in special education by insisting upon it. If you live in California or another consent state, you can use your authority to withhold your consent to anything that looks sketchy in an IEP being given to you for your signature. You can consent to instruction in the areas targeted by IEP goals but not to using the language of the goals for the purpose of measuring progress if they aren’t actually written in a measurable way. You can consent to everything in an IEP except a change in placement. If you can’t resolve all of the issues you have with an IEP this way, those left unresolved become due process issues.

Even if you are not in a consent state, you can still make the record in writing that you disagree with the sketchy portions of your child’s IEP, explain why using math and science, and request appropriate changes. The local education agency will likely call an IEP meeting and change those things it’s willing to change and give you PWN on those things it is not willing to change. The things left unresolved at that point are due process issues.

Understanding how to use math and science to solve everyday problems is a solid skill to have, but not everybody has it. It’s a skill necessary to developing a sound IEP for any special education student. Parent education can be provided as a related service under a student’s IEP if the purpose of the parent education is to help the parents understand their child’s disability and/or to help them be equal participants of the IEP team. There is absolutely nothing wrong with parents asking to be trained on how to write measurable annual goals and the IEP process in general as part of parent training as a related service under their child’s IEP. Parent training is specifically named as one of many possible related services that can be provided to a student with an IEP by 34 CFR Secs. 300.34(a) and 300.34(c)(8)(i)).

If you’re distrustful of the quality of instruction you might get from parent training through your child’s IEP, you may have to result to self-education by reading everything you can find about your child’s disability, as much of the peer-reviewed research about instructing learners with the types of needs your child has as you can digest, and simplified reports of the research findings in trusted publications from credible sources. You may need to periodically consult with experts for hire, but what you invest in informing yourself you may save many times over by preventing yourself from getting duped.

The bottom line is that parents can protect their children’s right to evidence-based special education planning and implementation the more they understand how to use measurement and evidence in the planning and implementation processes. By knowing what to look for, they know what request when they don’t see it. Informed parents can monitor the situation for education agency compliance.

In those areas where parents have not yet mastered the knowledge necessary to know whether an approach is appropriate for their child or not, they are encouraged to ask questions like, “Can you explain to me how this fits my child?” and “How can we measure whether this works in a meaningful way?” By shifting the burden back onto the education agency to explain how and why its recommendations are supported by the peer-reviewed research and written in an appropriately measurable manner, parents rightly shift the burden of applying the science to the appropriate party.

Parents are not, and should not, be required to become experts in order to participate in the IEP process. But, for the sake of protecting their children’s educational and civil rights, and their own rights to meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, it behooves parents to become as knowledgeable as possible. It’s more difficult to get tricked or misled the more you know, and the more dry and technical you can keep things, the less hysterical drama you’re likely to experience in dealing with your local education agency.

References:

  • Drasgow, E., Yell, M.L., & Robinson, T.R. (2001). Developing legally correct and educationally appropriate IEPs. Remedial and Special Education 22(6), 359-373. doi: 10.1177/074193250102200606
  • Kimball, J. (2002). Behavior-analytic instruction for children with autism: Philosophy matters. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10883576020170020101
  • Yell, M. & Drasgow, E. (2000). Litigating a free appropriate public education: The Lovaas hearings and cases. The Journal of Special Education, 33(4), 205-214. doi: 10.1177/002246690003300403