On Special Education

The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates and other like-minded organizations want you to spend May 6 calling your congressional representatives on behalf of a bill that seeks to award expert witness fees to parents who win due-process disputes against schools.

H.R. 4188 seeks to undo a policy created by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Arlington V. Murphy. In that case, the court decided that parents who prevail in special education cases are not entitled to be reimbursed for the fees they pay to experts, such as educational consultants.

(Education Week covered the case extensively, as you can find here and here. I wrote a profile of Marilyn Arons, a parents' advocate at the center of the case, in a story here.)

COPAA's take on the issue is that "few parents can afford the thousands of dollars needed to pay qualified medical, educational, and technical experts. While parents must hire expert witnesses to testify, school districts can use therapists, psychologists, and other expert witnesses on their own payroll, or hire outside experts with taxpayer dollars."

Charles Fox's Special Education Law Blog has more information about the May 6 call to action.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Virginia wants to drop a state requirement that parents have to be notified before terminating a student's special education services.

Like many states, Virginia is in the process of aligning its state special education standards to the federal standards included in the 2004 Indviduals with Disabilities Education Act.The state says this type of notification isn't required in the federal standards.

The state gave an example of how this might work: If a student with a learning disability was receiving an hour of occupational therapy a day, the school would have to notify a parent if it determined the child only needed 30 minutes of daily therapy.

But, if the school decided the child didn't need any occupational therapy at all, dropping the service without prior parental consent would be fine. If the parent protested, the service would be maintained until the matter could be resolved through due process.

(More details on all the changes are available here.)

No surprise, this proposed change hasn't gone over well with parents. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, 3,000 comments have been filed with the state on this proposal, and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has said he's not in favor of that change. The state's largest district, Fairfax County, is neutral on the proposal. And least one member of the state's board of education says he was surprised by the idea.

"I've always been an advocate for parental involvement, but there must be some reason that people think this is the right time for no parent involvement," board member Gary Jones said in the Post article. "I'd be interested in knowing what the reason is."

I don't think this proposal will last very long.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

A morning session with Thomas Hehir, a professor at Harvard and former director of the U.S. office of special education programs, was a bit of a lift. He started his presentation on “ableism”—the notion that our attitudes about disability are so negative that they distort the way we educate students—with the clear message that children with disabilities are doing far better today than they ever have before. In addition, special educators know much more now about good practices for learning disabilities.

What got my attention, though, was his statement that most of the gains have been made among white middle-income and upper-income kids. (He drew his conclusion from these studies.)

He thinks that many of the problems that remain are based on practices rooted in "ableism."

The goal is not to make children feel like something is wrong with them, nor to ignore their disability to the point where children are constantly struggling. You can read more about his conclusions in his book New Directions in Special Education: Eliminating Ableism in Policy and Practice.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More from the Council for Exceptional Children conference in Boston...

A new provision of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students receive a “summary of performance” when services end. The summary must include recommendations on how to assist the student in reaching post-secondary goals.

Every state is tackling this requirement in a different way, with predictably varied results. Virginia educators gave a presentation at the CEC convention on how they’re implementing this policy. The model templates available here give a good example of how a thorough summary of performance can look.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

They may have other policy differences, but when it comes to special education, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want the same thing for states--more money.

My colleague Michele McNeil has already written in her lively blog about Clinton's pledge to "fully-fund" the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

That gets into a tricky area. In 1975, when IDEA first was passed as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the law said that the federal government would eventually kick in to the states 40 percent of the nationwide average cost of educating a student. (Look at how relatively brief the special education law was, originally! Those were the days.)

The feds have never met that standard, though, despite stated intentions and "glide paths" and other attempts at meeting that 40 percent standard. President Bush's proposed fiscal 2009 budget would provide to states grants equal to about 17 percent of the average cost of educating a student.

McCain says the government's failure to meet the 40 percent funding threshold is a "disgrace." Check out his comments at a New Hampshire forum when he was asked about the topic by a mother of two children with autism:

McCain's wife, Cindy, has a master's degree in special education from the University of Southern California, and she's come up more than once when McCain is asked about education topics.

As for Obama, his disability plan fact sheet also includes a charge to fully-fund the law.

So, good news, right? The only problem is that no one makes it entirely clear where the money is going to come from. The 17 percent funding in Bush's proposed budget amounts to $11.3 billion in grants to states. More than doubling that percentage (and adding new programs, in the case of Clinton's and Obama's overall education proposals) adds up to real money. Do you think the candidates, once elected, will finally be able to achieve this goal?

Posted by Christina Samuels at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)

The Journal News, based in White Plains, N.Y., recently ran a nice article about a therapy dog that has apparently prompted wonderful results in a classroom of children with special learning needs. One 6-year-old with selective mutism -- a social anxiety disorder that prevented him from speaking -- apparently broke his silence just so he could talk to his mother about Boo, a 7-year-old Labrador mix.

Therapy dogs have had a long history in schools, but they are not universally accepted, for a variety of reasons. A few years ago, I wrote about a family that wanted their specially-trained therapy dog to be a part of their daughter's individualized education program, because giving the dog commands helped the child improve her speech. The school said no. The always-interesting National School Boards Association blog, "Board Buzz," wrote a piece in 2004 about a superintendent who got hounded (forgive me) for not allowing a dog that was specially trained to note the onset of seizures attend school with a student who has epilepsy.

So I'm glad to bring attention to a happy ending. There's only one thing missing from the Journal News article though -- words from the child in question! If the therapy dog has been so successful in getting this young child to speak, I'd love to know just what he's talking about.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

An article I wrote recently about New Jersey shifting the burden of proof in individualized education program hearings is generating a lot of thoughtful reader comments.

The issue: When a school creates an IEP for a student and the provisions of the plan are disputed, who has to prove their case? Does the school have to prove that it is doing the right thing, or do the parents have to prove that the school's plan is wrong? In 2005, the Supreme Court decided in the case Schaffer v. Weast that, in the absence of any other state law, the "party seeking relief" should always have the burden of proof. Practically speaking, the ruling means that it's the parents' job to prove that the school is wrong, because parents are most likely to be the party seeking relief.

New Jersey, however, recently passed a law stating that no matter who is complaining about the IEP, it's the school's job to prove that its plan is appropriate for the child.

You can read more of the details in the article. Feel free to join the lengthy conversation that is already taking place in the comments appended to the bottom of the story, or to talk about the topic here.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)