New Making School Work Blog

I am phasing out this blog and transitioning to a new one.  Please visit my new blog at www.MakingSchoolWork.org.

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Increasing the Number of Students with Disabilities Served by Public Charter Schools

Increasing the Number of Students with Disabilities Served by Public Charter Schools

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For schools, use of stimulus money falls short of big hopes | csmonitor.com

For schools, use of stimulus money falls short of big hopes | csmonitor.com

Now there’s a shocker!

Special Education Vouchers Prevent Mislabeling, Study Says

Special Education Vouchers Prevent Mislabeling, Study Says EdWeek Article

I write from the Florida special needs voucher trenches – I am both an attorney for parents of disabled public school students and a fierce proponent of the McKay Scholarship. I don’t doubt the results of Greene and Winters’ study which addresses those students with “marginal” disabilities. But special needs vouchers may provide an even greater benefit (to both schools and parents) for moderately disabled students.
In my experience, the most severely disabled get expensive special education services, regardless of what the quality of those services may be. But there are few private schools (at least in South Florida) which can meet the needs of those students at a reasonable cost – even if a parent gets the maximum allowable McKay Scholarship to private school – about $20,000!

Because of the way Florida special education funding is structured there is no added incentive for giving special ed. services to the moderately disabled – the schools do not get more money for labeling or serving them than they get for the mild or marginally disabled. Yet, the moderately disabled are more difficult and expensive to educate. Thus, I have found that Florida parents of the moderately disabled tend to be less satisfied with the public schools which generally are not effectively educating them.

If a parent of a moderately disabled student leaves public school with a McKay voucher worth let’s say $10,000/year, that money could put a good dent in a private school tuition which may do a better job educating that child. At the same time, the school district still retains the federal special ed. funds for that child but is no longer responsible for the touch job of educating him or her.

The bottom line is that while special needs vouchers may not decrease the financial incentive to label students who are moderately disabled, they may result in a win-win situation for both schools and parents. And the largest growth in the use of special needs vouchers may come from those students, given Response to Intervention.

If RtI Isn’t Working for Your Child: Knowing Your Legal Rights

Response to Intervention (RtI) is a 3-tiered process of research-based instruction, which is part of federal law (IDEA 2004). Before RtI, in order to get considered for special education services (an “IEP”) the main thing your struggling learner needed was a psycho-educational evaluation (conducted by a private or public school psychologist). The evaluation needed to show that he or she had unexpectedly low achievement in reading or math (known as the “discrepancy formula“). RtI is a multi-step process of increasingly intensive and individualized instruction above and beyond what usually happens in the classroom. It will hopefully be more effective for struggling learners than special ed instruction, but the fear is that RtI (which is very complicated and labor-intensive) will be nothing more than an ineffective roadblock to an IEP.  Now that RtI will be growing exponentially (due to support from economic stimulus money), there are a new series of steps between your child and special ed services, and those steps make up the RtI process.

A New Course of Action:

If you believe your child may have a specific learning disability (SLD), he/she will probably be starting RtI (like all students) before obtaining a psycho-educational evaluation. Implementing an RtI system does not change a school district’s legal obligation to identify students with disabilities. By law, you have the right to request an evaluation at any time in the process, whether or not your child has demonstrated a lack of responsiveness to RtI instruction. Your written consent to an evaluation automatically starts the special education process and puts a time frame on the RtI process so that it can’t go on for months or even years.

Bottom Line: If Your Child is Not Progressing Well in School and you think he or she may have a learning disability:

1. Immediately Request and Sign Your Written Consent to a comprehensive psycho-educational evaluation performed by a school psychologist. Note: If the school does not allow you to sign your consent, you have the right to file a due process complaint to an administrative law judge.

2. Your Written Consent will trigger the special education (“IEP”) process. The school district will have 60 days  to complete the evaluation and complete the RtI process. Note: If the RtI process were allowed to extend the time frame for determining eligibility for an IEP past 60 days, but the 60 day time frame applied to everyone else, the school district would be discriminating against children with learning disabilities.

3. At the end of the 60 day period, the school must invite you to a meeting when the team will review both the RtI progress monitoring data and the psycho-ed. evaluation to determine if your child is eligible for special education services. If you  believe your child has been unfairly denied an IEP, you have the right to file a due process complaint to an administrative law judge.

© Copyright 2009 Florida School Partners, P.L.

Congress Comes to the Rescue of Learning Disabled Students: Now Easier to Get a 504 Plan

In the past, as many of you know, it has been extremely difficult for a learning disabled student who has performed well in school by compensating for his or her disabilities to obtain a 504 Plan.  That was because the law (Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act as interpreted by most school districts) stated that students who achieved well in school could not, by definition, have a disability which “substantially limited” the “major life activity” of learning – even if they suffered from a learning disability, ADHD or other disability.

Getting a 504 Plan for that type of student should be very substantially easier now.

On January 1, 2009, the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008 went into effect. In developing that law the Senate specifically stated that when considering whether a student is eligible for the protections of the ADA (i.e., higher education students or applicants for accommodations for high stakes exams, such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT etc) or of Section 504 (i.e., students in grades K-12), students should not be penalized because medication, such as Adderall or Focalin, helps their disability or because they have developed strategies to compensate for the negative effects of their disability, such as repeatedly reading a passage to understand it.   (See Congressional Record – Senate, September 16, 2008 Statement of Managers – S. 3406, page S8842).

The Senate specifically stated the following when considering the condition, manner or duration in which an individual with a specific learning disability performs a major life activity, such as reading, thinking and learning. “ . . . it is critical to reject the assumption that an individual who has performed well academically cannot be substantially limited in activities such as learning, reading writing, thinking or speaking.” (See Congressional Record – Senate, September 16, 2008 Statement of Managers – S. 3406, page S8842).

This is absolutely fantastic news for many students, such as my former self, who have struggled, successfully or unsuccessfully, to compensate for their disability by for instance, staying up until late hours to complete homework or other assignments – often at great cost to their self-esteem, social life and emotional health.  Now the 504 team cannot simply reject that student’s plea for accommodations because they have done well or merely OK in school.

© Copyright 2009 Florida School Partners, P.L.

Accommodations in Grades K-12. How to Navigate the Public System. . .

Once the psycho-educational evaluation of your son or daughter is complete (See the Post below entitled “How Do I  Know if My Child Needs Accomodations” for more details on this), if a disability is found the next step will be to have a school meeting to determine if that disability significantly impacts his or her educational performance.  That sounds simple enough, but can actually be a great sticking point, particularly for gifted and disabled students. I covered that topic in detail in an article reprinted on the ISER web site. One thing is for sure that a student does not have to be failing in order to qualify for a 504 Plan or IEP, as many school districts would like you to believe.

If you disagree with a school districts’ evaluation because it’s inadequate or inaccurate, you have the right under federal law (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) to request an Independent Educational Evaluation. – that is, a private evaluation at public expense.  If the school district refuses to grant an I.E.E., they must sue you in administrative court to prove that their evaluation is appropriate.

If the evaluation shows that he or she has any type of disability which impacts his educational performance (according to school district standards, of course), the student will get an I.E.P. or a 504 Plan.  Then the IEP or 504 Team, which includes a parent, discusses what accommodations would be necessary for your child to be successful in school.  Here are some of the questions the team may ask:  How independent is the student in completing assignments?; Can the student be expected to use the same kind of books as others students?; Would a peer buddy help?; Does the child need physical/occupational supports – such as a slant board, foot rest or weighted blanket?

For a detailed list of types of accommodations, go to this web site FAPE and click on the document entitled “School Accommodations and Modifications.”

© Copyright 2009 Florida School Partners, P.L.

Accommodations for Entrance Exams. . .

Getting accommodations from the College Board (which administers the SAT, AP exams and others) or from any other standardized testing or professional licensing boards, is even more difficult, and is governed by a whole different set of laws, than getting accommodations in public grade school.

When a parent of a disabled child come to me for help getting accommodations on these exams, here are some of the key questions I ask (none of which are determinative in and of themselves):

1.  When was your child diagnosed with a disability?

2.  Has your child been getting accommodations for tests in school?

3.  Does your child have a private psycho-educational evaluation?

4.  Can you compile documents from the last 3 years (at least) showing that your child has been accommodated for school tests?

5.  Does your child have a 504 Plan or IEP (in public school) or a formal private school plan granting accommodations?

If your answers to the last four questions are “yes,” you can feel more confident that your child can get entrance exam accommodations.  When I deal with the testing boards, I have a very different focus than most psychologists who do so.  I have been very successful winning accommodations for myself and others by highlighting the student’s deficits which on standardized psychological tests fall in the below average range.  As a general rule, in order to get accommodations on these types of tests, regardless of how high your child’s IQ is, their performance in relevant areas must be below average.

Remember that the testing boards get thousands of applications for accommodations for each test date, and don’t have the time to sift through multiple documents to make their determinations.  Your best approach is to write a cover letter in as straight forward language as possible high-lighting those relevant areas in the student’s psychological evaluation which are below average.  Also, the boards tend to deny accommodations the first time a student applies for them.  Be persistent – just as your disabled son or daughter has to be every day.

© Copyright 2009 Florida School Partners, P.L.

How Do I Know if My Child Needs Accommodations?

If your child is capable of learning and demonstrating his knowledge, but not in the same way, at the same rate or under the same conditions as his or her typical peers,* your child may be legally entitled to accommodations.  The first step is to find out if he or she has a disability usually by getting a psycho-educational evaluation (i.e., a set of standardized tests given by a psychologist who can determine if a student has learning difficulties or not).  If your son or daughter is a public grade school student, and you or the teacher believes they may be disabled, you can request an evaluation by a school psychologist at no cost to you. You may also hire a private evaluator, usually a psychologist.  Private evaluations can be very expensive and unfortunately, a high price does not always mean a high quality report.  I recommend contacting your local university’s psychological services center – they often provide relatively lower cost evaluations of better than average quality.  Both the University of Miami and Nova Southeastern University have such centers.  As part of that evaluation, the psychologist should include a set of recommended accommodations to remediate any disability. 

*Students with disabilities may have difficulty, for example: knowing how to organize information meaningfully;  relating new information to previous knowledge and; remembering large quantities of information.  Thoseare all struggles which your child’s teacher can accommodate, if they are the product of a disability.

Even If You Could Get a 1:1 Aide, You Don’t Want One. Here’s Why . . .

I hear it less now than I used to, but parents still routinely ask whether I can help their child get a 1:1 aide (meaning a paraprofessional who is ostensibly hired only to support a single child). My first response is that it’s always been very difficult, but due to budget cuts, it’s more difficult now than ever.  My next response is that aides are not usually the answer to helping kids stay in a mainstream or gifted class.

I recently heard a prominent Miami-Dade school official say at an IEP meeting for a disabled who qualified to be in the gifted program but needs support – “Aides are for students who can barely keep their heads above water, not for a child like this.”  But I think that response was disingenuous because most school districts don’t offer aides for kids who “can barely keep their heads above water” either – their solution for those kids (despite the federal legal requirement to keep kids with mainstream kids as much as possible) is to place them in “self-contained” classrooms of purely disabled kids. Who can blame them really. Assigning a 1:1 aide to a child means spending that person’s salary on only one child.  That’s an enormous amount of money in these tight-budget times.  But my point is this: 1:1 aides in and of themselves don’t generally help kids stay in mainstream classrooms.  As a matter of Florida law (and the laws of many other states), only certified teachers can teach kids, not aides who generally have paltry qualifications and need not even have mastery of the English language. So, officially the aide can only keep the child on-task and following directions. I’ve observed a few aides who without formal training are simply natural educators and actually help kids to “access their education.”  The majority of aides in my experience have no training in education (e.g., former bus drivers) and no training in behavior management – so they don’t even know how to effectively keep a child on-task, let alone keeping his or her impulses or emotions under control. Most of the aides I’ve observed are useless, quite honestly, to help the kids their assigned to; sometimes the aide causes the child to act-out against her aggravating the child’s behavior problems.  As a child gets older he or she becomes very self-conscious, even resentful, of having an aide sit next to them.  The aides often become the teacher’s helper with administrative tasks, like passing out worksheets, and the child makes little progress accessing his or her education.  Ultimately, the child can’t survive in the mainstream classroom and is moved to a more restrictive special education environment. So, rather than fighting for an aide, I suggest getting your child the proper accommodations for his or her disability.  One effective accommodation, is a peer “buddy” who is strong in the areas your child is weak will sit next to him or her, model good behavior, and depending upon his or her personality, will actually help your child follow directions and stay on-task.

UPDATE - September 20, 2009 – My position on this issue has changed and deepened slightly in the past few months to a year.  Safety is a key and necessary justification for a 1:1 aide.  Certainly there are those with physical or medical disabilities who absolutely could not join in a mainstream public school classroom without an aide.  And some students with behavior problems (I’m thinking right now of high-functioning students on the Autism Spectrum, but there are others) can rise to the occasion, even flourish,  in a  mainstream classroom with the extra support of an aide.  Those are often children who would pose a threat to themselves or others (usually unintentionally) without an aide.  True miracles to see.

© Copyright 2009 Florida School Partners, P.L.