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.
IDEA has been a Federal law for the better part of three decades. From the beginning the concept of educating children in the least restrictive environment ("LRE") has been a cornerstone of the law. To combat wholesale segregation of children with special needs was one of the motivations for enacting the law. Even after all of these years, in Boston over 40 percent of children with IEPs are segregated from their neurotypical peers and not exposed to the general curriculum. Boston is the harsh reality that thousands of children face; not the fantasy world of Nanette Asimov’s imagination, or the false construction of the school side in Arlington Central v. Murphy–that experts and advocates are coopting parents into filing due process. As discussed below, the abject lack of inclusion in Boston’s special education system raises fundamental issues.
When raising a child with special needs, I believe it’s more important to focus on the similarities than the differences. However when I hear a mom bellyaching that “all parents worry about their children,” I sometimes get a little defensive. Although some sincere friends and relatives genuinely try to put themselves in my AFOs [ankle foot orthotics], I think the “mainstream” parent doesn’t have a clue. So I’ve designed some everyday analogies to help parents of “typical” kids better relate to the stresses and strains of some of our daily routines.
I recently posted on Nanette Asimov’s article in the San Fransico Chronicle entitled "Extra-Special Education at Public Expense." This article was an outrage and did an enormous disservice to families of children with special needs everywhere. I am happy to report that parents and have written to the editor in droves to attempt to set the record straight. The following is a small sampling of some of these letters. Bravo to parents and disability rights organizations like COPAA who have taken the necessary time to fight back against newspaper coverage that acts as an effective propaganda weapon for schools.
The National School Board’s Association ("NSBA") has filed an amicus [friend of the court] brief [Download NSBA amicus brief.pdf ] suppporting the school district’s contention that schools should not be required to pay expert’s fees to parents who prevail in due process. This post is a followup to an earlier one discussing the underlying case.
A high priority item for successful advocacy in special education is to have a good quality data based evaluation from a private evaluator. Such evaluations are not required in every situation; typically,however, when a parent calls an attorney or advocate it is time to seek private evaluations. These evaluations can be from a doctor, therapist, consultant or psychologist, but they all must hit the mark to be of any real value. The following are my highlights of the criteria to evaluate the evaluators.
A new study from reseachers at Yale University Medical School suggest that eating less can have a profound effect on learning and memory. The premise of the study is that the stomach when full secretes a hormone known as gherlin that inhibits centers in the brain associated with learning and memory.
In December 2005, the Illinois legislature amended the School Code to allow students with special needs to participate in graduation ceremonies with their peers. This new law allows students who have IEPs to enjoy the "pomp and circumstance" of the graduation ceremony, even if the student is continuing to receive special education services post-graduation. The ARC of Illinois successfully lobbied for this law which is known as Brittany’s law.
The harsh reality is that a large number of adults in prison are failed special education students. What schools frequently fail to recognize is that the stakes for students who receive special education runs the gamut from a meaningful life to a life behind bars. The following story puts a human face on the experience of one teacher working in a juvenile prison school in Georgia.
One of the single greatest factors in determining the direction of educational planning for children with special needs is their IQ. The profound tragedy for many children is that accurate and reliable testing for IQ is either not readily available or it is misapplied. The testing focuses on what are the learning deficits–memory, processing, or "intelligence" in a variety of forms; goals, accommodations/modifications, and curriculum all should be designed in consideration of these factors. IQ testing also tends to set the bar of expectation and tracking. Is the child achieving to his or her "level" is an implicit and pervasive issue at IEP meetings. However, if the compass needle of the IQ testing points in the wrong direction the whole IEP proceeds down the wrong road.
Parents victimizing schools is the premise of this long winded article from the San Fransisco Chronicle. This article furthers the propaganda war against parents of children with special needs and fosters the notion that schools are being victimized. Among the many failings of this article, it fails to even mention the low standard of FAPE set out in Rowley. The article claims that "the law does not define appropriate–an omission that has lead to escalating disputes about what public schools must pay for." Ignorant of the law that the Supreme Court gave meaning to this term in Rowley over 30 years ago, and cases have been refining it ever since. The article misconstrues the power disparity between well funded schools with attorneys on their payroll, and parents who are forced to take significant risks to fight for their child’s education, usually when all else fails. The article misses this essential point. The article even misstates the entitlement of IDEA being to the age of 22 when it ends at 21.