See our listing, which was referred to as “Inspiration and forward thinking about special education,”  ( thanks for the kind words, Teaching Master!) by clicking here.

Be sure to read up on all of the other links provided, as well!  ”Top” lists are a great way to find many useful resources at once.

Debate still rages in certain circles over performance-based pay for public educators; taxpayers and parents are mostly in favor of it and crappy teachers who would find themselves failing to profit from such a system or even losing their jobs are mostly the ones against it, though this is a gross over-simplification of the issue.

Most people, however, get that our public schools are failing on a large scale and the issue of teacher quality in light of teacher shortages is a serious component of our educational quality issues.  Teacher quality issues are felt throughout the public education system, but they become particularly hurtful when students with disabilities become involved.

Children already compromised by handicapping conditions need more expertise than the average student and poor quality teachers can easily compromise these children further, putting them even further behind and creating compensatory education claims that their employers will have to make good on if their parents are involved and capable enough to pursue due process.  In situations like these, teacher quality issues are contributing factors to  special education litigation and their associated costs, which is why Denver’s ProComp program caught my eye.

The questions that came to me as I read the article was, “These numbers look great, but what kind of growing pains has the program been experiencing since it launched and as it has grown?” and “From what data are the conclusions being asserted about these numbers being drawn?”

As Mark Twain pointed out, there are three types of untruths in the world: “lies, damn lies, and statistics.”  I know what kind of bureaucratic BS goes on within school districts.  And, Denver Public Schools is a big district.  The bigger they are, the harder they fall down on the job in my experience.

So, I did a little research of my own to get a clearer picture of the situation. The Denver Public School’s web content on ProCamp paints a very constructive picture of the program, as do many of the articles out there that talk about the district’s innovation with performance-based compensation for teachers.  Just Google it and see for yourself.

The thing to keep in mind when examining a limited aspect of an overall organization’s functions is that it is just one piece of a very complex puzzle.  Creating a performance-based pay structure means implementing a means by which performance is monitored and measured.  Denver Public Schools is using student scores on testing done under No Child Left Behind as part of its teacher performance metrics, but there has to be more to it than that.

Making a cause-and-effect connection between the actions taken by a teacher and the outcomes achieved by his/her students involves more than just looking at test scores.  For example, in some communities, it is the norm for parents to supplement their children’s public educations with outside tutoring support.  The school districts in these communities gladly take credit for their students’ performances on standardized testing, but the reality is that it’s the private tutoring that’s making the difference.  The public schools themselves are actually pretty terrible, which is why parents are paying for tutors in their communities in the first place.

The thing with a local dependence on third-party tutoring centers is that this model only makes a significant impact on overall student performance when the local community is affluent enough for most parents to afford private tutors.  In low- to middle-income communities, the children simply fail to learn or receive inadequate additional support due to cost considerations.

In any event, the metrics have to establish that teacher performance has a causative relationship with increases in student achievement.  These means that all of the local education agency’s human resources and student progress monitoring ducks have to be in a row.  The Denver Public Schools has chosen to use a solution developed by Lawson Software to accomplish the data management needed to track all of the relevant pieces of data.  This is evidence of actual eGovernment, or Gov2.o, in action in the education community, though at its most fledgling stages in light of all the other bureaucracy that plagues public education across the board.

What I’m more interested in hearing and seeing than PR bits from Denver Public Schools itself and media interviews of its staff is feedback from parents, students, and the teachers themselves about how they perceive any success the program may be generating.  As Stephen Sawchuk noted in Education Week, the research regarding the impact of ProComp provided data that is correlational but doesn’t establish clear, indisputable cause-and-effect connections between the ProComp program and increased teacher effectiveness.

As an advocate for children with special needs, I completely appreciate the need for quality programming delivered with fidelity, along with data collection and analysis to figure out what is working and what isn’t.  My concern with efforts like ProComp is that not enough variables will have been controlled for and these programs will come close to solving the problems for which they have been created, but fall short in the end due to the ridiculous politics that go on within public agencies such as our schools and/or a failure to recognize which variables are important to control for in designing the program in the first place.  There can’t be holes in a program like this or the whole thing will fall apart.

If we’re going to truly regulate the truancy process, based on what we at KPS4Parents have seen over the years, we need to build in language that protects against abuses of authority in which truancy proceedings are used to retaliate against parents and blow smoke in an effort to cover up an education agency’s failures to deliver a FAPE.

Below is a copy of an email that I’ve sent to Senator Leno.  As the state legislator who has proposed this legislation, we think it is important that he be given the opportunity to consider all of the relevant factors so that holes like these can be plugged.  We have to presume at this point that this is an issue of which he is simply unaware.  How Senator Leno responds to this input remains to be seen, but I’ll update you once I hear back.

An Open Letter to Senator Leno

Dear Senator Leno,

I am writing in light of SB1317 to provide input regarding the inappropriate application of truancy laws by local education agencies to students with disabilities who are eligible for special education services or supports pursuant under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 but who are not being provided with the appropriate supports and services that they require. It has been my experience in over 19 years as a special education lay advocate that many children engaging in school-refusal behaviors due to manifestations of their disabilities and failures by their local education agencies to support their unique educational needs are being inappropriately targeted for truancy proceedings when what they should be receiving is competent special education or 504 supports and services, instead.

Truancy is also used as a weapon against parents of these children once they begin to advocate for them. Truancy proceedings are used as a tool of retaliation against parents who are demanding appropriate supports, including mental health services, for their children with school-related phobias, severe social anxiety and agoraphobia, and other maladaptive behaviors resulting from their disabilities that interfere with school attendance.

Ventura Unified School District and the Ventura County District Attorney’s office has a truancy hearing process that has proven to be nothing short of unconstitutional. I have personally witnessed it as a kangaroo court proceeding in which parents and their representatives are prevented from speaking, badges are flashed while threatening statements are made by assistant DAs, and misrepresentations are made to parents and their representatives regarding the confidentiality of the proceedings. Had I not witnessed it myself first hand, I would have never believed that such a thing really goes on. It was the most appalling display of Gestapo tactics that I’ve ever seen in the public education arena and it’s my understanding that nothing about it has changed since I witnessed it myself a few years ago.

The Ventura County DA’s office has marketed itself to area school districts to provide truancy hearing services for many years. Truancy hearings are a revenue source for the DA’s office and it’s marketing message to area schools has been that it will help them increase their Average Daily Attendance dollars. The emphasis has clearly been placed on fiscal considerations rather than ensuring appropriate student outcomes. It a business-to-business type approach that de-emphasizes each agency’s responsibilities to the citizens of Ventura County in favor of money-grubbing cronyism.

By no means am I suggesting that truancy laws should not be applied to students who are ditching school for no good reason or those parents who are truly engaged in the educational neglect of their children. But, it does no good to compel student attendance if the students are not being properly educated once they arrive at school. For many of the children with special needs who are being targeted by truancy proceedings, this is exactly what is happening. They are being denied a Free and Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”) but are being forced to attend school lest they and/or their parents be prosecuted. So, they languish in classrooms where they fail to receive appropriate instruction or intervention and the entire purpose of compelling their attendance is utterly undermined.

Truancy laws should not be abused to target parents who are demanding appropriate educational services for their handicapped children, much less with retaliatory intent, nor should they be used to punish children whose attendance is compromised by their handicapping conditions. There is no language in the current version of SB1317 that speaks to the issue of these types of abuses.

Clarity and guidance needs to be provided to both local education agencies and district attorneys regarding how to determine if a student is truly truant or if a handicapping condition is playing a significant role in a child’s decreased attendance such that truancy proceedings are inappropriate. Consequences should be provided for local education agencies that use truancy proceedings as a tool of retaliation or to otherwise mischaracterize the nature of a handicapped student’s attendance issues that are actually directly impacted by his/her handicapping conditions. Truancy proceedings should not be allowed to serve as a tactic to undermine legitimate FAPE claims asserted by a student and his/her parents.

Abuses of power occur within government agencies all the time. Preventing them requires insight into how such abuses occur in the first place. As important as it is to target legitimately truant students and compel their school attendance, it is recklessly irresponsible to make the language of the legislation that provides for it vulnerable to exploitation by those in positions of authority who would use that language to retaliate against children with special needs and their parents or otherwise use truancy proceedings to cover up their own denials of FAPE.

The cost to society of such abuses are severe. Children with disabilities who are inaccurately treated as truants rather than appropriately served as special needs students most often have mental/emotional health issues, autism, and/or processing disorders that negatively impact their judgment, frequently with resultant behavioral problems. Once they are funneled into the truancy system and are prosecuted rather than served, the likelihood of them ever getting the appropriate special education or 504 supports they need dramatically decreases and the likelihood of them ending up in the juvenile justice system contemporaneously increases to a significant degree.

This hole in truancy legislation contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline that sees society bearing the otherwise unnecessary expenses of institutionalizing and/or incarcerating disabled people who should have received far less costly intervention before things were permitted to get so far out of hand. Once these troubled individuals become involved with the juvenile justice system, and often the foster care system, their odds of coming back from those experiences whole as productive members of society are very, very low. We as a society end up bearing the fiscal consequences of all of this for the rest of many, if not most, of these individuals’ lives.

I am asking that this information be taken into consideration as SB1317 moves through the legislative process. I sincerely hope that this hole in the truancy legislation can be plugged.

Respectfully submitted,

Anne M. Zachry, CEO
KPS4Parents, Inc.

Many people are already familiar with Chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, an effort to combat the growing rate of morbid obesity and related health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.  In the United States, his efforts have gotten the most publicity from his television show in Huntington, WV.

Given the direct relationship between student nutrition and student performance, I followed this program with great interest, signed Jamie’s petition, and have continued to follow the Food Revolution through email alerts from Jamie’s web site.  The hard reality is that nutrition plays a critical role in children’s abilities to pay attention, stay focused, and learn.

That’s what makes this pending legislation so important. The Child Nutrition Act is due to expire at the end of September 2010, which means that it needs to be reauthorized in order to protect our students from being nutritionally compromised.

School districts looking to save money will order easy-to-find processed foods that are nutritionally unsound rather than make the effort to source healthy foods at good prices and streamline their cafeteria operations to keep their overhead down. Buying processed foods permits redundancy and waste to occur with the increased overhead being offset by the prices of cheap, unhealthy foods.

Children who are already compromised by disability are even more impacted when their nutritional intake is poor.  The brain runs on glucose, which is a simple sugar converted from the different foods we eat, but it’s entirely inaccurate to think that a diet rich in sugar helps the brain operate.  

The reality is that all of the other parts of the body have to be properly fueled in order to convert the right foods into glucose and properly regulate the brain-fueling process. But, the other parts of the body run on lots of things other than sugar which means that our children’s diets have to be diverse enough to provide a wide variety of nutrients.

For that reason, the role of nutrition in special education student performance is something that should, in my opinion anyway, be subject to detailed data collection and study.  It could also be tied into RtI.  The relevance of student nutritional intake to behavior, concentration, work completion, the need for repetition, and other measurable objective criteria related to learning and memory would make an excellent research study.  Is anybody doing research into this?

Here’s a bit by Jaime on sugary drinks:

The 19 finalists are: Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

For more information, see http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/18-states-and-dc-named-finalists-race-top.

There was a time in my life when I gravitated to drama.  Many people do.  It’s more exciting than the mundane business of doing the dishes, doing your homework, cleaning your bathroom, paying your bills, and all of the things that are actually necessary to keep your life moving forward.

Other people’s drama can sure be a lot more interesting than facing your own issues, which makes it an engaging distraction.  Creating your own drama to which other people flock is also a way to successfully avoid dealing with the real issues in your life.  It’s like hosting a party – you’re too busy making sure that everybody else is having a good time to think about yourself.

And, there are plenty of opportunities for drama in special education.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a parent, a teacher, an administrator, or even a student. There’s usually something going on that you can make a big deal over if you really want to.

If the student is getting the raw end of the deal, the drama may very well be justified.  Deaths of handicapped students in licensed care facilities is a legitimately dramatic example of just how wrong things can go.  The inadvertent drama that arises from situations like these serve the critical social function of fostering public outrage, thereby hopefully leading to significant change in the status quo.  This is why the media tends to sensationalize everything – it engages audiences at an instinctive level.

But, some people crave drama.  Inadvertent drama from life’s already plentiful surprises doesn’t seem to be enough.  They blow things way out of proportion or otherwise milk every iota of drama out of a legitimately terrible situation to create “super drama” for a wide variety of reasons.  In the special education process, this can greatly hamper the resolution of disputes to the detriment of the handicapped child.

It is far too often the case that parents are accused by public school personnel of having a Factitious Disorder (commonly referred to as Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy) when they keep making a big, fat, hairy deal about their children’s alleged special needs.  In every case I’ve been involved in where this accusation has been made against the parents, the children had legitimate special education needs that were not being appropriately served by their local education agencies and the agencies were just blowing smoke to try and shift the attention away from their own missteps by calling the parents’ competency into question.

It’s a despicable practice utilized by a small handful of very unscrupulous people employed within the public education system, sometimes in collaboration with mental health professionals, who are all looking to save their own skins after neglecting the educational needs of a child with disabilities or otherwise engaging in wrong-doing.  It’s a tool used by the corrupt as part of a cover-up campaign.

However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t parents out there who are using their children’s legitimate disabilities as a vehicle to generate sympathy, attention, and drama for their own selfish purposes.  There are some really jacked up people in the world (as the aforementioned corrupt school agency employees and their pals go to show), and lots of them reproduce.

And, even though parents like these are relatively small in number compared to most parents, it’s important to acknowledge that they exist.  Using true injustices done to their children is one really powerful way to stir up drama because the harm done is real.  They don’t have to make mountains out of molehills because their school districts have provided them with real mountains.  This only reinforces the drama-seeking behavior.

If a parent really is a drama-seeker, then he/she will be disinclined to actually resolve the special education disputes provoked by the school district’s errors or misconduct.  If the problems get solved, the source of the drama goes away.  So long as the school district keeps screwing up, or the FAPE claims arising from the district’s missteps remain live, the drama-seeking parent may try to continue investing energy in harping about it and trying to rally support from anybody who will listen rather than legitimately engage in the dispute resolution process.

Because the behavior of such a parent is practically identical to what any responsible parent would do if their kid was getting shafted by the system in the very beginning of a dispute, it’s pretty much impossible to tell that you’re dealing with a drama-seeking parent right away.  It’s only after reasonable efforts have been made to settle the case and the parent is still balking at every proposed solution, including the ones that make sense, that you start to realize what you may be dealing with.

If you’re an advocate or attorney assisting/representing someone like this, you’ll get a knot in your stomach as soon as what is really going on starts to dawn on you.  It’s not that the case is without merit or you presumably wouldn’t have accepted it.  It’s that you’re being prevented from resolving it because actual resolution would knock the wind out of your client’s drama-seeking sail and he/she is going to find fault with every solution proposed until you finally put your foot down.

Putting your foot down is a hard thing to do.  If you’re an attorney, it may be impossible without risking a malpractice suit, which a drama-seeking parent may gladly embark upon in order to stir up a whole new batch of drama.

However, there’s another type of drama-seeker that commonly undermines the resolution of special education disputes: the parent representative who regularly pounds the table rather than the facts or the law. Being that special education lay advocacy is an unregulated field, anyone can call him- or herself an advocate. That’s a problem because it prevents quality control across the profession and not all lay advocates are equally competent.

Many of the advocates out there who conduct themselves in a less than professional manner are just pissed off parents with axes to grind.  They apparently didn’t see enough action with their own children’s cases, so they go out and seek other parents of children with special needs so they can keep the drama coming.  If they’re not embroiled in a heated dispute with someone, they’ll go find one.   And, they will make mountains out of molehills, dwelling on relatively unimportant issues while ignoring the real ones for which resolution is desperately needed.

The damage advocates like these can do is significant.  Very often, they don’t really understand the regulations or how to judge the competency of assessment data or the efficacy of special education intervention.  They don’t necessarily know if they’re looking at a real problem or not.  They’re just opportunists looking for dissatisfied parents who will give them the opportunity to squawk.

Attorneys who drag out the dispute resolution process unnecessarily, regardless of which side they represent, are often accused of doing so for financial gain, but this isn’t always the motivator. Sometimes, they are drawn more to the on-going drama than the billable hours. The unfortunate thing is that if they actually make a decent living by engaging in drama-seeking behavior, their inappropriate behaviors are strongly reinforced.

Advocates and student attorneys like these hurt the children they’re supposed to be serving.  They hurt the credibility of the parents they’re representing. They undermine the successful resolution of the legitimate claims their clients may have. They undermine the legitimate efforts of their colleagues.

This is only made worse if the parents are drama-seekers, too.  When drama-seekers team up, watch out. They will fuel each other’s frenzied efforts to escalate the drama into a destructive force of unparalleled magnitude.

And, I’m not talking about legitimate effort to publicize a tragedy to generate public support for an appropriate resolution.  I’m talking about over-the-top, consequences-be-damned behavior that puts the generation of drama before the actual resolution of the problem, if not actually seeking to prevent the problem from being solved in order to perpetuate the drama.

This kind of behavior is certainly not limited to the parent side of the IEP table.  It’s just that parents are more often accused of engaging in it, regardless of whether they really are or not.

I have certainly seen my fair share of teachers and related service providers making a big stink over the purportedly “unreasonable” expectations of the parents that they actually comply with the law.  I’ve seen administrators literally burst into hysterics over statements of fact as though they were unfounded accusations being directed at them personally.

For example, during the 2008-09 school year, I wrote a letter to a school district administrator on behalf of a client pointing out that his district’s failure to implement the compensatory remedies agreed to in a settlement agreement between his district and the family was not only procedurally non-compliant, it exposed the district to a FAPE claim.  I was explaining to him the degree to which it appeared his school district was exposed to illustrate that it was in the district’s best interests to appropriately serve the child.

What I said was not framed as, “If you don’t do what we say, we’ll sue you!!!!” Actually, what I said was that we were hoping to avoid litigation if at all possible but the district was making that pretty difficult by failing to abide by the settlement agreement and the family was being left with pretty much no other recourse at that point. I then asked him for appropriate remedy.

The administrator’s response was to call me on my cell phone on a Saturday afternoon during a holiday weekend and spend nearly an hour freaking out, saying things like “How could you say something like that in a letter?”  (Meaning, “How could you put our mistakes on the record like that?”)  All I had done was state the truth and ask for remedy.  I didn’t call anybody names.  I didn’t make snide remarks.  I just called it like it was and asked the district to make things right.  But, by his reaction, you would have thought I’d slandered him personally in the local paper.

I have to say that after providing lay advocacy support to students with special needs and their families for over 19 years, my tolerance for hysterics and drama-seeking behavior is pretty much non-existent.  I’ve certainly learned not to take it personally because it doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with me.  It’s a behavior engaged in by other people and if I weren’t conveniently around, they’d find somebody else to target.

One of the tools that really helped me get a grip on this kind of thing was a book titled, Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry.  It’s written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner about a very serious issue.  The author relates various types of personality disorders to pop culture perceptions of vampires to help illustrate his points and it’s an effective vehicle that makes these somewhat complex issues more understandable to the average person.

The bottom line is that people who engage in drama-seeking behavior are taking emotional energy away from other people to fuel the insatiable hunger of the monsters they create.  It is exhausting to be all riled up all the time.  The only way to keep the momentum going is for other people to get all riled up and feed into the issue until it takes on a life of its own.

Because I refuse to respond to drama-seeking behaviors in the manner desired by those who engage in it, I no longer attract it. Some people are surprised to find that I’m not a drama magnet given that I deal with such troubling issues all day long.  I honestly don’t see why something that is already horrible needs to be made even more horrible than it already is. I don’t have any spare energy to invest in drama. I’m all tapped out from using what energy I have to deal with the truly bad things that are legitimately going on; I’m not going to waste it on things that aren’t going to lead to a solution.

My focus is fixing problems and I highly recommend that everyone else dedicated to resolving the problems of special education remain focused on solutions as well.  To the extent that increasing public awareness of the issues is necessary to see them resolved, I am willing to seek the public’s attention.  But, I’ll leave the drama-seeking behavior to Amy Winehouse, Jenny McCarthy, and Rush Limbaugh. They apparently live for that sort of thing.

Click here to listen to the podcast version of this article.

This event is limited to 20 logged-in computers.  This is an online event and pre-registration is required.  Registrations will close once all spaces are filled or on August 27, 2010, whichever comes first.

For more information & to register, go to http://kps4parents.org/Goals/?page_id=107.

can a school deny a iee provider

This is kind of a gray area.  A school district has only two choices when a parent requests an Independent Educational Evaluation (“IEE”) in terms of whether it will pay for one or not:  1) agree to fund the IEE, 2) refuse to fund the IEE, at which point it must file for due process against the student to assert the appropriateness of its own assessment.

However, this has nothing to do who will actually perform the IEE.  In my experience, this is usually negotiated between the parents and the school district to arrive at someone who is mutually agreed-to by both parties.  The issue is that neither side wants to use an assessor who is a total sell-out to the other side.

Some assessors are total school district shills and others have axes to grind against the public education system or will otherwise say whatever the parents want them to say.  The proper assessor is someone who is qualified, responsible, and objective who call it like he/she sees it.

But, there are no federal regulations that describe the process by which an IEE assessor is chosen.  And, I know that my personal experiences are skewed by the fact that by the time I’m involved, things have gotten at least a little bad and the school district has done something wrong, so the district is more likely to work with me on coming up with a mutually agreed-to assessor.

I have heard from parents who attempted to get IEEs on their own that they were told that they could only use someone from a school district’s list of “approved” independent assessors, which is not supported by the law in most places, if it’s supported by state law anywhere at all.  There’s nothing independent about that at all from a common sense standpoint, but so long as the assessor isn’t actually employed by the school district, he/she is still considered to be independent under the federal regulations.  34 CFR Sec. 300.502 regulates IEEs at the federal level.

Most parents are wise to presume that a list of pre-approved independent assessors provided by a school district is just a list of all the private assessors the district has in its hip pocket.  That’s a broad generalization, but it’s a safe bet for parents who don’t know who is a reliable assessor and who isn’t to presume that any assessor listed as “approved” by the school district is financially motivated to say whatever the district pays him/her to say.

In any negotiation, either party can say “no” to something the other party proposes.  Whether or not that’s the right thing to do is another issue.

When a parent proposes a specific assessor for an IEE, it’s not at all uncommon for the school district to counter with the names of other assessors.  If a school district refuses someone proposed by the  parent, the parent should insist on a written explanation as to why the district is declining to use that assessor.  34 CFR Sec. 300.503 requires that prior written notice be given by an education agency to parents when it refuses to take a requested action, including when the requested action pertains to evaluation.  An IEE is an evaluation.

A good tactic for both sides to use when an assessor has been proposed with whom a party is not familiar is to ask for a copy of the assessor’s curriculum vitae (“CV”).  This is fancy talk for résumé, for all practical purposes.  People with advanced degrees, publication histories, teaching experience at the university level, etc. have CVs that include their lists of published works, lectures and courses taught, and professional memberships.  An assessor’s CV can help inform a party’s decision as to whether that assessor might be appropriate or not.

Another resource can be a redacted copy of an assessment report produced by the assessor in question.  The idea is not to get the personally identifying information of another student.  The idea is to see the quality of the assessor’s work: the depth into which the subject’s needs were explored, the expertise demonstrated in interpreting the assessment results, and the credibility of the assertions made by the assessor in his/her sample report.

I had a situation during the 2009-2010 school year in which I was negotiating an IEE for a student with apparent emotional problems and possible learning disabilities.  All of the assessors proposed by the District specialized in autism.  Autism wasn’t even a remote suspected disability for this kid.  Having him assessed by autism experts wasn’t going to help figure out what his needs were.

Had I not seen their CVs, I wouldn’t have known the degree to which they were inappropriate.  Of course, I asked around about them, too.  That’s the benefit of being dialed into membership organizations for advocates and attorneys.  What I found out from others in the field was pretty much what I had deduced from looking at their CVs.

So, to answer the original question asked, yes a school district can say “no” to a particular assessor, but they better be able to give a good reason or they’ll waste precious time and end up staring down the barrel of a timeline violation.  IEEs are assessments for special education, so they are subject to assessment plans.  As such, they are bound by the same timelines that apply to special education assessments conducted by school districts.

If they take way too long, they can be found to have effectively denied the IEE without filing for due process, which is a procedural violation.  However, take this with a grain of salt.  If the reason that things have stalemated is because the parents are being legitimately unreasonable (not just the school district saying they are), then the delay is not the school district’s fault.

In some instances, parents have gone out and paid for the IEEs themselves when their districts started throwing fits over who would do it and then used the letter documenting the district’s agreement to fund the IEE as evidence in a compliance complaint to have the school district ordered to reimburse them.  But, this is a huge gamble.  There’s no guarantee that a state education agency will rule in favor of the parents in a situation like this.

Plus, in some states (I’m thinking of NY in particular) there are some weird state regs about limiting how much is spent on the IEE.  Bearing in mind that independent assessors have overhead costs that don’t apply to in-house district assessors or that the amount of work that has to be done may be a lot more than what the district did (otherwise, why would an IEE request even be on the table?), these spending caps may be entirely unrealistic.

But, so long as the law provides for them, parents who need more testing done than what the district is willing to pay for are likely facing a legal battle over the appropriateness of the testing that needs to be done according to the federal regs versus the arbitrary spendings caps imposed by the state regulations.  And, that’s what it really comes down to – appropriateness.

If what the district is proposing is inappropriate to the situation, then it isn’t part of a FAPE.  The “A” in FAPE stands for appropriate.  If what the district is proposing is appropriate, parents are not helping their children by fighting against it.  It’s when the assessor is not appropriate but the parents aren’t sure how to prove this is the case that things become difficult.

do parents have to consent to additional assessments iep

The straight answer is “no, they don’t.”   The bigger issue here, though, is what circumstances would justify a parent declining assessment.   If a school district is convinced that additional assessment is necessary in order to render a FAPE – or worse, if it thinks it can successfully assert such at hearing even when it really has ulterior motives – it can file for due process to override the need for parental consent.

This is the situation I encounter when parents are balking at additional assessment:  the District is trying to build a legal case rather than legitimately identify their child’s needs and the additional assessments are only being proposed so that the district has “evidence” that what it has been doing is okay in case things go to hearing.  This is a really hard pill to swallow for parents who find themselves in this situation because the only way out is through, which means subjecting their child to bogus assessments that aren’t going to do the child any good.

Afterwards, the parents can disagree with the district’s assessments and ask for IEEs, but only after they put their child through a round of unnecessary testing.  And, then, once the IEEs are performed, the kid is so fried from the last round of assessment that he/she can become uncooperative with the IEEs, thereby compromising the results.

Plus, if the district used every standardized measure known to man in its assessments, none of those measures can be used again in the IEEs because they would be invalidated due to the rehearsal effect.  The producers of most standardized tests claim that if their tools are administered too close together (usually within a 12-month period), the second administration is compromised because the subject may remember the questions from the last time the test was administered.

This is a dirty, rotten stunt that some school districts pull in order to win a legal battle at the expense of the child and there’s a special place in Hell reserved for people who pull this crap on purpose.  When their day comes, Satan will be checking them into their reserved suites himself.

When this is the situation, it’s no wonder that parents are inclined to refuse the assessments.  This is a terrible place for parents to find themselves.  Their options are to go through the painful ordeal of unnecessary biased assessments followed by IEEs (even presuming the district agrees to fund IEEs) and probably end up in due process, move to another school district, or enroll their child into a private school for children with special needs on their own dime and just turn their backs on the public education system altogether.

If this isn’t the situation, then there is usually no reason to refuse assessment altogether.  If the parents are kooks and are depriving their children of what they need in order to receive the educations they require, then their school districts should take the parents to hearing to override parental consent.  No child should be deprived of the skills and knowledge necessary to be a productive member of society, no matter the source of the deprivation.  The taxpaying public has a vested interest in seeing all children grow up to be contributors rather than dependents.

iep without parental consent

This is similar to the the issue discussed immediately above.  As with assessments, an IEP generally cannot be implemented without parental consent.  However, I’ve heard that in at least one state (I’m thinking NJ, but I could be confusing it with another state), school districts argue that parental consent is only required for the initial IEP (the IEP that finds the child eligible for special education in the first place) and after that, parents be damned.  I don’t know what to say about that except that the special education pros in states where this concept is being rammed down parents’ throats are probably going to get extra spa service in a lava pit once Satan checks them into their suites in Hell, come their final days.

In the rest of the United States of America, where parental consent to each new IEP and each amendment or addenda to an IEP is legally required, it is unlawful to implement any portion of an IEP to which parental consent has not been given.  This is significant on a number of levels.

First, procedurally, if a school district proposes something via an IEP and implements it without parental consent, that’s a compliance issue.  A parent could file a compliance complaint and the district could get into a lot of trouble.

Secondly, it can become a substantive issue because the education rendered must comport with the IEP.  An IEP is not an IEP until the parents consent to it in writing.  Up until they give their consent, it’s simply an IEP offer.

This means that if the district implements something that the parent hasn’t yet consented to, the education rendered fails to conform to the IEP and a FAPE has automatically been denied.  There doesn’t even necessarily need to be an examination of whether any substantive harm arose from the procedural violation.

This is a plain statement of regulation at 34 CFR Sec. 300.17(d) and is discussed in Rowley, which is the legal authority that school districts try to use to low-ball special ed students all the time (conveniently forgetting the fact that Amy Rowley was making As and Bs without special ed when the case was originally decided).

According to Rowley:

The term “free appropriate public education” means special education and related services that—
(A) have been provided at public expense, under public supervision and direction, and without charge;
(B) meet the standards ofthe State educational agency;
(C) include an appropriate preschool, elementary, or secondary school education in the State involved; and
(D) are provided in conformity with the individualized education program (IEP) … [emphasis added]

So, it stands to reason that if the parent has not consented to the IEP, barring any kind of legal maneuvering that makes parental consent unnecessary, an IEP cannot be implemented without parental consent.  See also our articles regarding partial parental consent, Partial Parental Consent on IEPs and Assessment Plans and Implementing Partially Consented-To Assessment Plans and IEPs.

Sometimes they’re mentally ill and/or emotionally unstable and their judgment is impaired.  Sometimes they’ve done something wrong and they’re trying to cover it up.  Sometimes they don’t know what the heck they’re doing and don’t want anyone else to find out.  Sometimes they are pursuing an agenda that has nothing to do with the welfare of the child involved and don’t care who they hurt in their pursuit of that agenda.

This article isn’t about who the liars are or even really why they lie.  It’s about what you can do, regardless of your role in the IEP process, to deal with the lying behaviors of others.

I was inspired to write about this topic by an article that appeared in the July 2010 edition of Entrepreneur magazine.  While KPS4Parents is a non-profit organization, the information being produced by Entrepreneur for start-ups and CEO wannabes is all about how to make it on a shoestring, including free web-based business solutions and social media advice that help us achieve our charitable goals.  In truth, there’s not a whole lot of difference between running a start-up and a non-profit in terms of the day-to-day just-trying-to-get-by-until-our-ship-comes-in kinds of stuff.

So, I read this magazine along with several others, going through boxes of highlighters and little paper sticky flags in the process, to help me identify ways to organize and run KPS4Parents as leanly, efficiently, and effectively as I can.  Which is how I came across this little gem of an article about lying behavior in the workplace.

The article, titled “Liar, liar” is found on page 20 of the print edition of Entrepreneur, but you can click here to view the online version.  It is an interview of Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception.

While framed in the context of an employer dealing with a deceptive employee, the advice given can be easily applied to the IEP process.  And, this is really important because the first thing that most people – parents in particular – want to do the moment that they realize they’ve been lied to is  call somebody on the carpet.  But, when a child’s educational future is at stake, becoming immediately confrontational is usually not the best way to go.

The advice that Meyer gives when a lie has been discovered is to take a deep breath and then gather evidence, schedule a face-to-face meeting, and take appropriate action.  I’m not going to re-write the entire Entrepreneur article here; you can read it yourself by clicking on the link above.  But, I do want to validate some of the things it says.

The most important thing that jumped out at me was the bit about gathering evidence.  It amazes me just how much people will jump to conclusions and put words in other people’s mouths once they become angry.  This is a very dangerous thing because, unless you have proof of what you are saying about other people, you’re just being a jerk and you’re going to lose credibility when it comes time to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about.  At that point, anything you had to say that was meritorious becomes tainted by all the things you said that you couldn’t back up and your credibility goes out the window.

Before you go accusing anybody of anything, you need to have facts and evidence. This can include emails, notes, work samples, data collected, grades, correspondence, standardized test results … whatever is relevant to the assertions you believe you have grounds to make.  (See also our earlier article, “Get Your Facts Straight When Filing a Complaint.”)

Meyer indicated the need to call a face-to-face meeting.  Here, this could be an IEP meeting.  But, as Meyer points out in “Liar, liar” it’s not an interrogation.  She recommends keeping things professional and making it easy for the other person to save face and say, “I’m sorry.  I must have misunderstood,” then ask simple, open-ended questions.

If you’re the parent, you have the right to audio record your IEP meetings.  If you have called an IEP meeting to confront a lie that is hurting your child’s receipt of an education or your ability to meaningfully participate in the IEP process, I strongly recommend that you audio record this meeting.  You have to give written notice of your intent to do so at least 24 hours in advance of the IEP meeting and the school district will have to then audio record, as well.

If you’re audio recording and you give the person whom you suspect of lying the opportunity to save face and do the right thing, the record is made of that person doing so.  If he/she fails to come through, whatever he/she said on the record becomes evidence that you can then use to pursue accountability.

If you are the local education agency and it is the parent who is suspected of lying, things become trickier.  You may still be able to audio record the meeting, but you’ll want to check your state regulations – or even with your attorney – about that.

If you are the LEA and it’s a third-party contractor, inter-agency partner, or employee that’s doing the lying, you probably want to try to address it directly outside of the IEP process and come up with a solution before involving the parents.  That way, you’ve already fixed the problem before bringing the parents into the loop and you can start out the conversation with “We encountered a problem recently that we had to solve, but we wanted to let you know what has happened and what we did to fix it and what we’re going to do to make sure that your child has not lost educational benefit as a result of all of this.”

Approaching parents with an already-solved problem is usually better received than blindsiding them with a hysterical phone call to let them know that something horrible is going on.  However, this presumes that you are moving swiftly to solve the problem before any significant harm is done.  If you wait too long to tell the parents, even if it’s simply due to the fact that the solution is going to take time to pull together, you could be accused of withholding information from them necessary for them to meaningfully participate in the special education process and deliberately keeping them in the dark about something that denies a FAPE to their child.  That never looks good.

In terms of taking appropriate action, it really depends on who is doing the lying and what your options are.  Parents can file complaints of various types depending on the situation.  LEAs may be stuck dealing with union issues, binding contracts, or inadequate recourse depending on who is doing the lying and how significant the harm is that’s being done.

But, Meyer makes the case for avoiding paranoia.  The deception or fraud only matters if it’s hurting the student’s right to a FAPE or the parents’ right to meaningful participation in the IEP process.  Says Meyer, “Social interaction sometimes relies on white lies, and deception is a fact of … life.  If everybody was completely honest, we wouldn’t have any friends or colleagues left.”

In preparation for the new school year that’s just around the corner, KPS4Parents has developed another resource to help teachers in the public education setting.

The General Education Teacher’s Special Needs Students Log Book has been created by KPS4Parents to aid teachers in the regular education classroom understand and successfully implement those portions of special needs students’ interventions for which they are responsible.

By understanding the regulatory and policy requirements that govern the SST, 504, and IEP processes, and tracking his/her compliance, each teacher protects him- or herself against wrongful allegations; fosters the achievement of appropriate student outcomes; and facilitates honest, reliable communication among all the stakeholders in a special needs child’s education.

Click here to find out more & order. Available in electronic download (PDF) format for only $7.99.