SpEd Tip #2: Keep Your Documents…and In Order

One of the first things I have my clients do is round up all their documents regarding their child – medical records, specialist records, school records, notes from teachers, standardized test results, etc. I ask them to put them in reverse chronological order, with the earliest documents on the bottom and the most recent on the top.

There is a very good reason for doing this – it creates an excellent way for me, and for the client, to review their child’s educational history and how medical diagnoses and treatments affect their educational progress. We can each read through the file, or stack, or mountain, as the case may be, from bottom to top, and get a pretty comprehensive understanding of how the child has arrived at the point where the parent is seeking special education services, and my services as well.

We can see what the school has done, if anything, over time, which teachers were on the ball and which weren’t, and we sometimes, speaking as a parent, find out that we have fallen short from time to time as well. Having the documents arranged and collected in this manner is a real eye-opener.

This also helps highlight which documents are missing, and there will be some gaps. One of the things I do, early in my relationship with the client, is a document review. I check to see if there is a full set of grades, standardized test results, documentation supporting any special ed services, and so forth. There is very rarely a complete set, and that’s absolutely normal.

When that happens, it’s important to fill in the blanks by sending the school a FERPA letter. Further information on what FERPA means and what should be in the school records is here . Here is a sample FERPA letter, which can be altered to fit the child’s specific information:

Your Name
Your Address
City, State, Zip
Home Phone

Date

Mr. , Principal
UNCOOPERATIVE SCHOOL
Street Address
City, State, zip

Re: Name of student

Dear (Principal):

As you are aware, my child is a student at Uncooperative School (or “has been found eligible for special education and related services and currently has an IEP”). In order for me to have a clearer picture of my child’s educational history, please either make available for review and photocopying or send me a complete copy of my son’s entire cumulative and confidential records.

Please be sure to include copies of all evaluations and actual test scores, any electronic communications, computer records or records stored on other media, and any personally identifiable records regarding my child. If there is a cost and policy about photocopies, please let me know immediately.

If you have questions about my request, please contact me at the number listed above.
Thank you for your assistance and quick response.

Sincerely,


, parent

Cc: Name of, Lay Advocate
Name of, Special Ed Director

This letter must be signed by the parent, and it’s important to follow up on it. Usually the school will make copies and have the parent come in and get them. Sometimes they will only make them available and the parent has to come in and review the file and ask for specific copies. Other times they may refuse to make copies, and the parent should bring a camera or hand scanner and get copies that way.

It is often the case that the first letter does not do the job. Some records may have been sent off to the regional office of education, some records are purged annually and are no longer available, and very often schools do not include the emails which mention your child. In that case, I follow up with FERPA letters to the special ed folks, the regional office of ed., and a letter to the school which mentions missing documents and asks for a further search (and copies) or which nicely asks where these items might be.

Schools will not admit to having lost documents, and are often snarky enough to ignore the letter requesting additional or missing documents. It doesn’t matter – if you’ve sent a written request for the documents and/or an explanation, you have behaved reasonably and entered YOUR LETTER into the record. If you don’t get a response within 10 days, send a photocopy, clearly marked SECOND REQUEST (and add the second request date) all in red at the top in large print.

It can sometimes take six months before you can be sure you have exhausted every possible location where a document might be stored and before you are sure you have a comprehensive list of what’s still missing. That’s normal, too. Generally, the first two letters (first FERPA and first follow up) will unearth enough information to make it possible to move forward with reasonable accuracy and efficiency.

Keep copies of all the letters and emails you send, too. This saves time in finding addresses and contacts, and makes your records the best available should legal action become necessary down the road.

This dogged pursuit of every possible document relating to your child is the most valuable thing parents can do to assist themselves, their advocate, or their attorney in getting appropriate and timely services for a disabled child. There is a real wealth of information in longitudinal educational data – charts and graphs can be made showing lack of progress, decreasing scores over time, pinpoint areas of particular concern, show a puzzling relationship between class grades and standardized scores, and so on.

I have used this kind of information with consistent success and gotten real insight into the clients’ children, finding out things they haven't noticed in the face of more obvious problems. Visual presentations of data are winners in meetings, too – it’s hard for the school district to argue with their own data showing steadily decreasing abilities and scores. They don’t do this kind of reporting or analysis, but you should (or your advocate or other helper).

Your stack of paper will become pretty large, and lots of people are surprised by the eventual size of it. Make a copy of everything, put the originals away safely, and then keep the copies, in the order mentioned before, in a big, sturdy, three-ring binder with a divider for each year. Particularly important documents can be tagged with bright sticky notes so that you can find them easily in order to refer to them. You want copies, not originals, in your “working notebook” because you must not punch holes or make marks on your original documents, if at all possible – that’s why you store those elsewhere.

Bring your big, scary binder to each meeting until you have an IEP or 504 that you think is appropriate and complete. Over time, and with successful interactions with your school district, you will be able to retire the early information, since you won’t need to refer to it much. You can reduce your working binder to this year’s and the preceding year’s information, PLUS the complete set of standardized and special ed domain tests (and your visuals) and grades (and visuals). Remember, this is ALL current information to and from the school district and education personnel – your emails and letters, doctors’ note or letters, etc.

Do not, under any circumstances, give in to the urge to purge until your child has graduated high school, or if they have extended services to age 21, until those services expire. I guarantee you that you will never regret having collected, analyzed, and kept all this information.

A Haunting Melody

(Some identifiers changed for obvious reasons)

Yesterday was exhausting. I had an IEP meeting to attend with a client in a district over an hour away, and the client has had a brain injury. The subsequent damage has resulted in a number of problems, the most significant and overwhelming aspect being frenetic, excessive verbosity.

This has been tough to deal with because the frantic talking is so severe that meeting with them is like being hit by a tsunami of disjointed phrases and topics so disparate that they simply cannot be connected. In addition, the onslaught is powered by a damage-induced frenzy to produce verbiage at a pace and intensity so consuming to the client that he has to be physically grabbed, redirected and told to stop by his spouse.

The first time I met with the clients, I felt like brick wall had fallen on me. That meeting lasted nearly three hours, and I think I got maybe 50 words in. Nevertheless, after a lot of work, I was successful in getting the child’s IEP revised to the parents’ satisfaction. The school district was thrilled to have someone helping the family create comprehensible requests, which in turn helped defuse a situation that had been becoming increasingly contentious and hostile.

There have been additional meetings since then, and in all instances, I have done what I try to do with every client – work everything out well in advance so that the parents and I present at the meeting as a united front, get whatever hard data we can put together in supportive presentation form, and walk in to the meeting prepared for success in getting necessary services.

However, I got blindsided by my clients yesterday. Dad had decided, while I was driving to the meeting, to utterly revise all our previously mutually agreed upon points, opt out of some services, and pretty much wander off in a whole different direction, much to the surprise of Mom and the student. None of us knew about this before the meeting. I usually meet with my clients in the parking lot before meetings to review our position and any strategy, but the family showed up late, and everyone else was already in the meeting room, so we had to hustle. I got no warning of any kind that any changes were in the works.

I did what I could to recover the situation to the student’s benefit and within my clients’ difficult-to-discern, revised wishes, but I was definitely caught off guard. Mom was staring at me, hands cupped around her face, mouthing, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” The district was in shock, too. We wound up rescheduling, having used all the allotted time trying to figure out what Dad was trying to say.

I held my clients back after the meeting and tried to get an inkling of what had prompted this abrupt change. It took a while, but I did manage to determine that Dad seemed to be vehemently opposed to one particular service and would do whatever it took to avoid it. It was a service the student wanted, the mother wanted, private service providers have recommended it, the school district was willing and eager to provide it, and it is a service I thought was a spanking good idea.

So, knowing full well what I was in for, I asked “Why?” In rolled the tsunami. I searched for fragments of possibly relevant flotsam, filled up my mental pockets with likely bits, and finally called a halt when there didn’t seem to be any more progress to be made.

I drove home annoyed, venting to the inside of my car. I walked into my house, flopped facedown on the couch, and decided to mentally pull the blanket up over my head and pretend I wasn’t there for an hour or two. After I’d recovered a little, I trundled off to Chix. It was nice to chat with other ladies about a number of things not related to my day.

I awoke this morning with something from the past floating through my head, which for me, is like playing a game of “Connections”. I need to figure out the theme of the memory and look at it from various angles to see why my subconscious thinks it’s relevant today.

BC (before children), I tutored a great deal. One of my clients back then was a girl who had been an above average student who seemed to hit a wall and needed academic assistance. Over a period of a few weeks, she got edgier and more distracted and less able to focus on the tasks. I worried that it was me – that I was not connecting with her, that maybe a different tutor would do a better job. Then I got a call from her mother, asking me if I would be able to continue tutoring, even though the child was now in a locked ward at the hospital as a result of attempting suicide.

I was a little flabbergasted and asked why the school or hospital was not handling that. It turned out that they only provided tutoring up to a certain level, and the subjects I had been covering with the student were not considered necessary and were therefore not included. She didn’t want her daughter to fall behind, and the daughter had specifically asked for me to come and help her stay current. Mom was crying and reaching for a lifeline, so I agreed.

It was creepy getting cleared through security, but the aura inside was mostly sad. My student was watching me as I came in, checking my reactions, possibly to see if I was repulsed or frightened or disoriented. When we sat down together in the study area, we looked at each other for a minute or two. I raised my eyebrows, and she shrugged, rolled her eyes a little and brought her scared gaze back to me. I winked and smiled, pulled the first textbook over in front of us, flipped it open and said, “How about we get started?” (Or something much like that, which is my standard line.) I set paper and pencil out, the same way I usually did.

I will never forget her reaction. I heard a light snort and looked over to see her sitting rigid, with tears sheeting down her face, pouring onto her shirt. She reached over and touched my arm very lightly and said, “Thank you. I didn’t know if I’d see ‘normal’ ever again,” and her face showed relief.

That was extent of the memory I woke up with, but since I don’t like to leave anyone in suspense, dark stuff was stirred up, the family imploded as a result, I lost touch, and a few years later I got a card from the student indicating that life was back on track, that “normal” had returned.

I wondered why my subconscious had chosen to plaster that particular memory on the inside of my forehead this morning, as I drank my first cup of coffee and watched a rainy dawn break. Then things started clicking into place – all the services Dad wanted removed were those which would have marked his child as not “normal”. Dad was proposing replacing in-school services with private pay after school services to accommodate the child’s needs in other ways so that the child would have a normal day. Dad was not proposing removing services, just altering delivery times, venues, and oversight because, for whatever reason, he thought having a normal day should be a priority.

I can understand that and work with it. I can sound out the client to see if that’s the case, and we can reorient as a team. It may not be what I’d have chosen or what I would recommend, but it’s not my child. Besides, feeling “normal” is important, too.

SpEd Tip #1: Stay Frosty

This is the first piece of advice I offer anyone about to enter the labyrinth of special education, related services, and 504 plans. Most every parent who gets to the point where their child is getting in trouble, getting poor grades, clearly not able to do grade level work, and admits to themselves that the kid might need special ed, gets mad. They’re mad because they think, rightly, that the school should have spotted it, should have done something about it, should have taken steps.

Maybe the parent is mad because they’ve been asking, year after year, for help for their child, and the school district has been delaying, dallying, denying, and generally dinking around, while the child is falling further and further behind. Maybe the school district has lied outright to them on any number of issues.

You’re mad because of a betrayal of expectations. We expect schools to know what they’re doing, know what they’re supposed to do, and then we expect them to do it, by gum! We expect them to be knowledgeable professionals with the best interests of our children as a priority.

We don’t expect them to lie, be incompetent, refuse to help a child in need of assistance, or to make excuses for why it’s OUR fault and not theirs. We don’t expect them to squirm like snakes to get out of providing necessary services. We don’t expect them to complain that they can’t afford help for our children because there are so many other children with greater needs. We don’t expect them to be stupid or malicious.

But they are. And that is why parents get mad; normal expectations have been betrayed, and we are hurt, hyper-alert, and angry.

So, my advice is to “stay frosty”, in other words, get cooled down and stay there while I fill you in on the reality of school districts. There are some good ones who know what they’re supposed to do and do it without even blinking. If your child were in one of those districts, he’d already be in SpEd, and you’d be reasonably well-informed and engaged in the process of getting services for him. Many school districts are not like that.

The problem is rarely malice. It’s usually a combination of ignorance and inappropriate gatekeeping. There are very few people in schools, administrators, teachers, nurses, or others who actually know more than a thimbleful about special education and the law. They only know what they’ve been told, and that’s not much.

Administrators have next to nothing to do with your children. They are the logistical planners for schools – they arrange transportation, days off, negotiate for supplies, review bills from utilities, manage office staff, call for substitute teachers, and deal with similar things. They prepare reports for the school board, report to the superintendent, and are supposed to be well-versed in the general laws regarding schools. The assistant principal may be in charge of the mechanics and procedures of formal discipline. Administrators tend to be fixated on cost containment and will do their gatekeeping (preventing your child access to special services) on that basis.

Teachers are used to dealing with “average” students. The average student acts up occasionally, responds reasonably well to consequences, gets reasonable grades, and is kind of predictable. Teachers feel themselves to be primarily responsible for teaching average students, the middle 80% of children – they rarely know what to do for a gifted child or a child with special needs. They can get belligerent if they feel they’re being blamed for your child’s poor performance (and they always feel that way). They don’t like having to do extra stuff, or complicated stuff, or things that are “more” than what they’re doing for the 80% because they feel like they’re shortchanging their “real” students. Fortunately, they can be very cooperative if the parent knows this and accommodates the TEACHER’S needs, too. Teachers will resist and gatekeep if they think you’re asking too much of them.

The only people in the whole school system who have even a moderate understanding of special needs, disabilities, and services and programs are the people in the Special Education department. Therefore, it’s important to get through the other gatekeepers, the teachers and administrators, and get to the SpEd folks. They will be gatekeepers, too, in kind of a microcosmic reflection of the regular administrators and teachers. They are always understaffed, underfunded, overworked, and you’re always asking for too much for no good reason. Oh, woe is me.

However, it is their job, and their responsibility to know the laws, to follow them, and to get your child the services required. And, eventually, they will, God willing, and with the help of research, good friends and sound advice.

Now that you know that, you need to blow off all the steam that built up while dealing with the gatekeepers in regular education. If you take your anger with you into the SpEd department, it’s only going to make you look hysterical and unreasonable. Stay frosty, because for the SpEdders, special services are their everyday business. Asking for appropriate programs should be done the same way you’d ask the butcher for a pound of good, fresh pork chops, or the greengrocer for oranges from the latest shipment. It’s really no big deal, they have to follow the law, and this group of people knows that.

Then, as legal requirements click along at a pre-determined pace, like a train on the tracks, it’s easy to get frustrated and let all that residual frustration and anger come back again. Don’t do it. Let the process flow; remain frosty.

Remember, as long as you are the coolest cucumber in the room, you’ll last the longest.

504 Reasons to Soak My Head

My youngest son has a 504 plan, and, now that he’s starting high school, we needed to do a review of his existing plan. If you are unfamiliar with what a 504 plan is, the short version is that for kids with learning disabilities of any type, they’re evaluated to see if they need special services and would then qualify under the federal program IDEA or if section 504 of the ADA would be more applicable. 504 plans are generally considered less expensive for the school district and generally include things to take place in the regular classroom.

Seven years ago I started my journey on learning more about special education law and the various twists and turns along the road to FAPE because Spawn also has ADHD and needed a 504. My first year was an introduction to the gatekeeper mentality of my local district, which is the most pervasive point of view of most school districts. They dithered for a year, using the Intimidation Triangle of gate keeping.

The Triangle has three levels. The first level is delay – stall, put meetings off for as long as possible, find ways to avoid having meetings, question the same things over and over again on tiny technical details, hoping to run out the school year clock. One of the favorite tactics at this level is to pretend that “necessary” people are constantly unavailable, the person in question changing for each proposed meeting. Also included is feigned ignorance – we don’t understand the law, so we need to research it to find out how we can best serve your child.

The second level is denial – your child doesn’t require services or accommodations or modifications, tough luck, better luck elsewhere, we’re not going to tell you about your rights to mediation, that you can file a complaint, or how to resolve the issues otherwise. And, the third level is intimidation – you don’t know what you’re talking about, you wouldn’t want the teachers to cop an attitude towards your child because YOU are being so difficult, or, my favorite, larding the meeting room with as many people dressed in suits and dour expressions and sour attitudes as will fit in order to really impress upon you how outrageous your request is and how much valuable time of theirs you’re wasting.

I survived that year, bringing in the same plan I’d suggested a year earlier. We were one day away from formal mediation when they buckled. I have not had a problem since in dealing with the district or the Special Ed Cooperative. Most helpful was this website and the information on it, Wrightslaw . I read, reread, studied, memorized, highlighted and printed out reams and reams of data. I also made friends with the regional Office for Civil Rights, speaking with the head of the office, and contacted the State Board of Education as well, following the guidelines on the Wrightslaw site.

This year, in the transition to the high school for Doodle, which is in a different functional district, I’m facing gatekeepers again. Fortunately, my skills are still sharp. I started the meeting by placing a tape recorder facing the staff and nicely offered to provide them a copy at cost, if they desired. We each introduced ourselves to the machine and carried on, discussing various issues such as extra copies of texts for home (I volunteered to pay an additional book fee – always a key ingredient – make it easy for them to say “yes” and thereby remove objections proactively), they indicated they’d need documentation on extended test time, we discussed discipline factors, and then the big issue came up.

In addition to ADHD, Doodle has a slight processing disorder. It has the most significant effect in on-demand writing tasks, be they longer essays or short answers to questions. He locks up and his brain locks down. When it was originally diagnosed, it affected a wider range of areas, but over the years we’ve strategized, worked around it, and gotten him habituated to working past it to the extent that he is a fantastic student in math, science, and all other subjects that don’t require writing, and his marvelous brainpower can shine through. Not so with writing, unfortunately.

Up until the last two years, that hasn’t been a critical issue. We worked with prompting, outlines, brain mapping, and a wide variety of approaches here at home and in school. He was able to do extra credit work to counteract his classroom problems and get a reasonable grade. Standardized tests requirements for writing on demand have become increasingly more difficult, and the problem is becoming more significant. His last set of tests showed the problem in glaring relief – 100% in all multiple choice questions and next to no points at all in extended response or essay areas. His teachers last year tried and tried, but nothing worked.

So, this year, I specifically asked for Special Education services to be implemented to assist him in overcoming the processing disorder’s effect on writing initiation. It’s not that I want him to become Shakespeare; I’d be happy if he became a midget Dave Barry. Heck, I’d be happy if he could manage to squeeze out the bare minimum. I was very clear and very specific about my request. I included references to FAPE intents of teaching students to state standards, and indicated that he was clearly falling below those standards in this area. Nevertheless, I could hear the gatekeeper mentality locking into place.

First was the round of “is it because he doesn’t like the topics,” then “is it just essays,” all followed by “that would mean a case reevaluation” which was supposed to dissuade me from pursuing it further. One staff member even tried to bring up the “severity” gate – that a problem has to be severe enough to cause the student failing grades before services can be suggested.

Experience was on my side. Most of the staff in the room had not been in the district as long as I’ve been advocating for my children. Those with similar longevity had it in areas unrelated to special education law. Kindly, and in a very friendly manner, I pulled out my printouts from the OCR website indicating that special ed services are included in potential 504 solutions, specifically and without restriction. I offered them my copy of the decade-old elimination of “severity” as a determining factor letter from the Department of Education. I told them I’d value a case reevaluation so that personnel trained to the master’s degree level in uncovering learning disabilities would be giving my son the expert attention that would be most helpful in resolving the problem.

I showed them copies of his last standardized test results, backing up my case. I offered to talk with the head of the Special Ed Co-Op, and mentioned him by name, glowingly (because honey catches more flies than vinegar), assuring them that I knew him to be an honorable man whose main concern was adequately and appropriately serving the children of the district. I offered to run interference for them, negating that implied obstacle. I asked for additional suggestions and ideas.

One, clearly unfamiliar with SpEd law, suggested Sylvan. I saw the SpEd representative’s eyebrows shoot up in dismay, as I turned to him and said that if all options within the district failed to serve the purpose, I was certainly willing to try any alternative the district suggested (and, by law, will need to pay for). I advised that that I had no problem bringing Doodle in early, picking him up late, arranging for transportation for weekend assistance, that my goal to was to do whatever was necessary for us to work together in resolving this one issue where he falls below state standards in performance and ability.

I’m not unsympathetic to the constraints of school districts – money is always abysmally short, and sped costs can put a district in the red in a heartbeat. Specialized personnel are hard to find, hard to keep, and hard to motivate. Often, they’re on the road between facilities for long stretches of time, the workload is crushing, the results few and often fleeting. They’re also faced with people who haven’t done their homework, who don’t want to do anything for their children at home, and nowadays, with parents of perfectly normal kids who are trying to scam extra time at exam time to improve scores for colleges. Their road is might tough, too.

It would have been easy to give up, years ago, when the first district pulled out the big guns and the intimidation triangle. It would have been easy to tell myself I was asking for too much, that I was wrong, that I was odd, that there was something peculiar about my wanting a little extra help or at least a margin of ease for my kid. Perhaps some perverse sense of aggravation, or an overblown protective maternal instinct, or just generalized frustration made me persist, and it served Spawn well. He graduated with honors, with a high ACT score, and with as much of a sense of competence as I could indirectly jam into him. I can’t do less for the Doodle, not ever.

I’d like to say that I feel triumphant, or that I’m sure the district will do what is right. I don’t, though. I will be thrilled if we can get Doodle the help he needs to continue on his journey to be his best self. That’s all any of my requests have ever been about, and they have been few, as well. But there are times when I want to soak my head, nonetheless.