Special Education Law Blog
A special education legal resource discussing case law, news, practical advocacy advice, and developments in state and federal laws, statutes and regulations. Postings include insight and sometimes humor from Charles P. Fox, a Chicago, Illinois attorney who is also a parent of child with special needs, and other guest authors.
The following is a statement from the Equip for Equality addressing the hate crime against the man with a disability that happened last week. I am reprinting the statement in full and please write to your Illinois Representative and state Senator to get the Governor to act. As the federally-mandated Protection and Advocacy system for people with disabilities in Illinois, Equip for Equality is deeply troubled by the recent news of a savage attack upon a young man with disabilities in Chicago. Unfortunately, this incident highlights a tragic, but well-documented fact: People with disabilities are far more likely to be the victims of crime and violence than are people without disabilities. Moreover, research indicates that violent crimes, such as sexual abuse, are not only more prevalent among people with disabilities, but an alarmingly low number of these cases are investigated and prosecuted. See Morano, Sexual Abuse of the Mentally Retarded Patient, 130; Psychiatric News, Aaron Levin, People with Mental Illness More Often Crime Victims, http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.40.17.00400016 . Currently, local law enforcement agencies report to the Illinois State Police on the number of hate crime incidents reported. The data collected does not include the number of hate crimes actually prosecuted. This horrific […]
According to the September 2015 47th Annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes toward the Public Schools, only 31% of Americans favor allowing vouchers to be used to pay for private and religious schools. Numerous other polls show higher ratios supporting use of vouchers, particularly for low-income students in failing schools, for whom many existing voucher programs were initially designed. Currently, 14 states have voucher programs, all of which are funded by the states. Only schools in the District of Columbia use federal funds for voucher programs. Regardless of whether you support or oppose the use of vouchers, with the advent of the educational policies of Betsy DeVos and a Trump administration, we are rapidly and inexorably slouching toward the use of public funds to pay for private and religious schools through the use of vouchers.
It is remarkable to me how many IEPs provide for reading programs that are not individualized to the student’s needs and do not produce meaningful results. A one-size-fits all approach simply doesn’t work for students with reading disabilities. What may be an otherwise perfectly acceptable reading curriculum often is inadequate to meet the individualized needs of a particular student. More and more frequently I am finding myself attending IEP meetings for students who are repeatedly failing to meet their IEP goals and am confounded by the insistence of the IEP team to continue implementing a program or curriculum that is clearly not working for the student. This posturing is denying the student access to FAPE, or a Free Appropriate Public Education. In many instances, students with specific reading disorders, such as dyslexia, are slotted into a specific reading program for intervention that isn’t even designed to address their needs. What is provided to the student is based on expediency, availability of programming in the district, and not the needs of the student.
I have always adhered to the adage that reasonable people can reasonably disagree, whether it is in the context of an IEP meeting or even our current political debate. With this in mind, I discussed in a recent blog how some of the issues in the current political elections may affect persons with disabilities but did so without taking a position on specific candidates. This blog is not partisan. I now want to go further and discuss how each candidate’s website, platform, or public statements (Democrat, Republican, or third party) details his or her proposals for how they will address issues related to disability. My goal is not to persuade readers to vote for one specific candidate but to ensure that readers are informed about the various positions espoused by candidates. I’m also a strong proponent of not re-inventing wheels, and I quickly discovered that this research has already been done well by other disability-related websites. Complex Child, which is devoted to the needs of families of children with complex medical conditions or disabilities, culled from the websites of each candidate—Clinton, Johnson, Stein, and Trump—five different categories or issues: Disability rights Medicaid, insurance, and the healthcare system Special education […]
Where to live in future years is an issue never far from my mind especially living in Illinois that ranks close to the bottom for services for people with disabilities. Download Case-for-Inclusion-2016-FINAL-3. For families that do not have a loved one with a disability, it may be a matter of where we are raised or where our extended family remains. Others locate their homes based upon where the job is. Weather or access to seasonal outdoors recreation is paramount to others. But according to WalletHub, a personal finance social network, and as many of us know, families with members who have disabilities have a rather different set of criteria for determining where we want to live. WalletHub attempted to quantify which of the nation’s most populous 150 cities is the most “Disability-Friendly” by looking at three chief areas: economics, quality of life, and health care. From here, an additional 25 specific criteria were weighted and considered. And the winner is. . . . Overland Park, Kansas. Realistically, none of us is packing up and moving to Overland Park this week as the result of this survey. But the survey does give each of us food for thought as we consider […]
Persons with disabilities now represent the single largest minority group in our country’s electorate. According to a report from the Rutgers School of Management, 35.4 million people with disabilities, which represents one sixth of the US electorate, are eligible to vote. When family members of the disabled are included, the number of Americans affected by disability swells to 62.7 million. The disabled community needs to identify as a voting bloc they can wield huge power in the electoral process, but to date that has not necessarily been the case. It’s scary to contemplate the disabled community not exercising its right to vote. Given that one fifth of Americans overall have disabilities, we need to ensure that entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Social Security Disability remain protected. We also need to strengthen the educational rights of the 2.8 million school children in our country who require special education services. Persons who have disabilities are twice as likely to be victims of violence compared to persons without disabilities. Additionally, one-third to one-half of persons who die at the hands of the police have mental health issues or other disabilities. For all these reasons plus many more, persons with disabilities must vote […]
I have blogged previously about how essential it is for parents to ensure that any informal accommodations received by their child, particularly those related to testing, are documented in the child’s IEP or 504 Plan. Memorializing these accommodations will hopefully preserve them later for such high stakes testing as college entrance exams. What accommodations children receive for such high stakes testing as the ACT or SAT are determined not by the child’s public school, whose IEP or 504 teams work to develop testing accommodations, but by the private testing services who develop the college entrance examinations. Just because a student receives extended time on a school exam, is provided with a scribe, or has the test read to him or her is no guarantee that he or she will receive these same accommodations on these high stakes tests. When parents call in dismay after their children have been denied these accommodations, I have to tell them that my hands are tied. I can rarely provide them with any real after-the-fact assistance.
Parents frequently tell me that their school districts refuse to recognize their child’s diagnosis of dyslexia. One school psychologist defines dyslexia as “simply a fancy word for a disorder that involves reading.” Other parents are told by their districts that dyslexia is merely an umbrella term for a reading difficulty or a medical diagnosis that is not relevant to specific planning for the child in his or her IEP. These parents are often frustrated and confused when schools won’t even insert the term “dyslexia” anywhere within the IEP. But guidance from the Department of Education makes it explicitly clear that dyslexia is recognized by the IDEA. An October 2015 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education states: “there is nothing in the IDEA that would prohibit the use of the terms dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia in IDEA evaluation, eligibility determinations, or IEP documents.” Why is this letter so important for students with dyslexia, dyscalculia, or dysgraphia? Because calling a duck a duck may be needed not only to ensure that students with dyslexia are deemed eligible for special education services but also that they receive appropriate remediation for their dyslexia.