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Parents: The
Invisible Majority
by Tricia & Calvin Luker, September 24, 2003, Our
Children Left Behind
For more articles like this
visit
https://www.bridges4kids.org.
It is crunch
time. Our last chance to make personal, visual contact with our
US Senators is October 4-12, 2003, while they are home during a
Senate recess. The Senate almost certainly will consider S1248,
the bill to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act [IDEA], sometime after this early October recess.
Our Children Left Behind [OCLB] has covered the primary talking
points for S1248 in previous homepages. We need to use this last
opportunity for “face time” to give our Senators the
parent/family viewpoint. So far, the IDEA reauthorization
process has been school-driven, not family-driven. The focus has
been on making things easier for and more convenient for the
schools.
We need to be sure that each Senator knows something about the
reality of the special education process for the individual
family and child or children who receive IDEA services. It is
not enough to talk about the technical language of S1248. We
need to talk about how hard it is now to work with IDEA, and how
much more difficult it will become if the proposed changes are
made. Our Senators must understand the practical realities that
we confront on a regular basis. Here are our realities:
Schools drive the IEP meeting times. They choose the dates,
times and places of meetings, frequently have proposed IEPs
already prepared, and generally set time limits for how long
they are willing to allow the meeting to go on before the IEP
Team meeting and the IEP itself are concluded. Parents receive
the notices and have to scramble like crazy to clear the time
off work, arrange for care for all their children, change
appointment schedules with other professionals involved in their
child’s life, arrange for their own transportation to and from
the meeting and make other arrangements and accommodations in
order to meet the school’s schedule.
Schools drive the meeting. When is the last time any of you
attended an IEP Team meeting where the number of parents, parent
advocates and friends of the child outnumbered the school
professionals sitting around the table? That never happens. How
many times have you been outnumbered as much as 10 to 1 by
school professionals? Imagine yourself a single parent, late
teens or early 20s, just beginning to learn about the process?
Talk about intimidation – all these “professional” who know the
law, the system and the school. And there we are, the parents,
alone.
Schools drive the paperwork. How many times have we prepared
several points in advance to raise at our child’s IEP Team
meeting, only to discover that once we’ve made the points they
don’t show up anywhere on the IEP itself? It almost makes us
feel invisible. When is the last time we remember there being
anything resembling a vote on a program issue or a serious
disagreement among the school professionals before the IEP form
itself was filled out? How many of us now attend
computer-assisted IEPs, where we don’t even get to see what is
being written as the meeting progresses? And how many get a
really fair opportunity to carefully review the IEP as written
before we are pressured either to sign it in agreement or to
request a due process hearing? How many others of us are told
that the school will mail us the IEP once they get it written
up, only to discover when you receive it that it has subtle but
significant changes from what was agreed to at the meeting? How
many of us end up receiving a legible copy rather than a fourth
generation carbon or photocopy?
Schools own the resources. How do schools prepare for IEP Team
meetings? They hold prep meetings during teacher break times.
They consult taxpayer purchased educational and programming
resources they keep in their offices/classrooms. They call
taxpayer compensated professionals and consultants for advice
and discussion. They consult with their taxpayer supported
special education department and experts. They run their plans
and concerns by their taxpayer provided law firms and school
attorneys. They use their computers purchased by the taxpayers
to participate in professional list serves and organizational
entities who provide on-line resources. If they have an IEP
preparation need they have a resource available, paid for by the
taxpayers, to meet that preparation need.
Compare the school’s resources to the family’s resources. Most
families have few or no educational resources at home. There
child’s doctors and other professionals rarely involve
themselves in special education and know little or nothing about
the process. Many schools use gag orders so that if a parent
wants to ask how the student is doing in school they only can
gain that information from the teacher, principal or special
education director and not necessarily from the professional or
paraprofessional who is providing the service. Want to bone up
on special education law? The school might give us a book on
“procedural safeguards” with no tips or explanations to guide us
in the finer legal points of programming. The public library
might provide some greater information, if you have the time to
wait to speak with reference librarians, find the books on the
shelves and follow them to other sources (of course, after you
have made all the child-care, work and other arrangements that
we talked about in scheduling IEP meetings). Want somebody to
help you prepare for the meeting? Who are you going to call?
All states have Parent Training and Information Centers [PTIs],
but the quality of resources available and the knowledge level
of the information specialist vary greatly from state to state
and from office to office. Most, if not all, PTIs are on limited
budgets and have to fight for scarce public grant funds to pay
for their programs. They have nowhere near the resources
necessary to respond to the dramatic needs of the families who
call them. Many PTIs do not provide direct advocacy support at
either the preparation or the IEP attendance stages.
Want help from other families who have gone through the IEP
process and perhaps understand it better than you? Want a
volunteer parent advocate? Again, scarce. Seasoned parent
advocates have to make all the same arrangements to accommodate
their family needs that you have to make so that they can help
you prepare. Most parents don’t have that time. Volunteers face
the same arrangement challenges and frequently limit their
availability either by geography or by subject expertise.
Volunteers don’t have budgets. They give what they can in
copying, postage, gas money and related expenses but unless they
are affiliated with a formal parent volunteer program – also
very scarce – they can only go as far as their resources take
them.
So maybe you want to call a lawyer to help you prepare for the
meeting. You will pay for it out of your own pocket. There might
be a nearby lawyer who handles special education issues for
families, but don’t hold your breath. In Michigan there are
perhaps 10 family-focused attorneys who do special education law
on a regular basis for Michigan’s 200,000+ students eligible for
special education services.
Schools always are “represented” at IEP Team meetings. Whether
it is the building principal, a special education director or
area manager, the school has a representative who understands
special education law. For the really tough cases they can have
their school lawyer attend the meeting. Families have no similar
option. Already outnumbered at the table, most families are
lucky if they receive volunteer or professional help to prepare
for the meeting, let alone have those representatives attend the
meeting with them.
Is it any wonder, given all of the control that schools already
have over the IEP process, and the resource control they have
over the parents, that schools now would push for the
elimination of short-term objectives, greater disciplinary power
and attorney fee caps? As intimidating as the process already is
to parents, we can only begin to imagine how much more hostile
it will become to families if these provisions pass.
Our next homepage will discuss the attorney/volunteer issue in
greater detail. If you want to understand what is happening with
S1248 and HR1350 you need only understand that the present
system is already overwhelming to parents and families. Take
away scarce resources, volunteer parent advocates and parent
attorneys and you are left with a system completely controlled
by the schools. Is this really what Congress wants to do to 6.5
million students and their parents and families? Ask your
Senator that question.
Copyright 2003 by Tricia and Calvin Luker. Permission to
forward, copy and post this article is granted so long as it is
attributed to the authors and
www.ourchildrenleftbehind.com.
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