Spring IEP Season: Defend Your Child’s Rights In The Face Of Budget Woes And Program Cuts

Parents in Los Angeles Unified School District have raised the alarm that the district is closing many of the special education programs in neighborhood elementary schools and will be busing children to centralized school sites, a money-saving measure that will help the district accommodate staff reductions. If the changes are instituted, children in these programs will be forced to deal with transportation difficulties and transitions to new settings with higher student:teacher ratios, and will be denied the chance to go to their local school with their neighbors and siblings.

Is There An Under Representation Of ED Students In The Special Education Population?

During the 2000-2001 school year, approximately 6% of children and youth with an emotional disturbance were eligible for special education and related services in the public schools (Twenty-fourth Annual Report to Congress, U.S. Department of Education, 2002). During the same period, 3% of the general population reported that their children had an emotional disturbance. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001). In other words, approximately 8.4 million households reported having a child with an emotional disturbance while only 470,000 students nationwide were eligible for special education and related services under the category of ED. What could account for this difference?

The Sibling Experience

A recent New York Times article details, “Research suggest[s] that when one child has a disability, siblings may in fact benefit. After all, they receive what amounts to an intensive training in tolerance and empathy. In various studies, parents in such families have characterized their typically developing kids as more caring and mature than average, while college-age siblings have described growing up with someone with a disability in favorable terms.”

But contrary to the Hallmark Movie Channel image painted by some psychological researchers, I was not a supersibling.

Bullying and the Special Ed Student

According to a study conducted by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, approximately 50% of children are bullied during their academic careers. Children with disabilities are especially vulnerable to being teased and bullied by their peers. Bullying may intensely impact students in a negative manner and raise serious safety issues. For students with special needs, the effects of bullying may impede the right to have equal access to the benefits that an education offers.

Notes From the Road: Olympia, Washington

Olympia is a medium size town an hour south of Seattle, Washington. I stay there when I go to visit my son who is a freshman at Evergreen College.

In trying to come to some assessment of what factors conspire against families in Washington, several things seem to be in play:

Local communities are small and everyone knows everyone else. Disagreement about educational services is more uncomfortable if you have to see your superintendent or your special education teacher at the garden center or in church.
Washington has an independent and geographically isolated culture. The state was founded by hardy and capable settlers who wrestled farming land from a vast, forested wilderness. A strong sense of being self sufficient and taking care of your own runs through things.
Perhaps coincidentally, many of the people I spoke with who are fighting to get services, are also employed by the school districts.
And then there is the question of money and access to the resources. Washington has not been spared in the fallout from the Great Recession.

Housecleaning For Springtime (Or how busy, overextended but effective parents can prepare for IEP season)

I guess the crazy busyness of Spring IEP season is just around the corner. For the newly initiated members of our special ed family, what this means is that the District has 3.5 months to finish all of its annual IEPs that it didn’t get to in earlier months. Not too surprisingly, this results in calendar logjam and lots of rushing to complete assessments and to compress complex meetings into short amounts of time. If you are a parent and you are preparing for an IEP at this time of year, here are some things that I hope will help a lot.

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