Tag: special education

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Emotions Part 4 – Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions Part 3 – Administrators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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