Learn Your Special Education Laws, Special Education Rights, and Share IEP Goal Ideas

Inclusive Programming Is Beneficial For All Students

The compulsory education system aims at providing children with the tools they need to succeed in the academic school environment as well as life beyond the classroom. For the purposes of ensuring that every student receives an appropriate education, sometimes schools are required to divide students based on ability. In such a system, children with special needs are often separated from their mainstream peers for a portion, if not all, of the school day. While this division may be ideal from an academic perspective, it creates an artificial separation between children which might be mistaken for a natural division. In order to ensure that children internalize the inherent value of every individual, schools need to find a way to demonstrate the value of students, no matter what their ability levels are. Inclusive programming both during the school day and in extracurricular activities has the power to show all children the value of every individual. Read the rest of this entry →

Recently, the Office of Civil Rights submitted a report to the President on Helping to Ensure Equal Access to Education.  This 76 page report is nothing short of shocking and shows we have a very long way to go on the issue of student’s with disabilities.  Since I could not do it justice below are some points taken directly from the report.

• Over the last four years (FY 2009–12), OCR has received 28,971 complaints—more than in any previous four-year period in its history, and representing a 24 percent increase over the previous four-year period. Over half of them addressed disability issues, about a quarter pertained to Title VI concerns, and the remaining addressed sex and age discrimination, 14 percent and 6 percent respectively. Read the rest of this entry →

The phrase “Elephant in the Room” has been a part of the English language for a very long time; I’m sure as adults we’ve all used it in conversation at one time or another.  Wikipedia defines it as “is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed.”  The two words that I think stand out the most in the definition are “ignored” and “unaddressed.”  Let’s now apply this definition to children with disabilities; the “Elephant in the Room” in many schools or households is a child with a disability.  There are many reasons why a child’s disability may be ignored or not addressed.  Read the rest of this entry →

Last week I wrote a blog entitled, How we change the world is as important as the actual change where I challenged both Parents raising children with Autism and Self-Advocates to think about how they approach the current civil rights movement for individuals living with a disability.  I asked them to consider Martin Luther King, Jr. as their role model and gave advice on how to approach each other in a calm, thoughtful manner.  I sent this blog to Mama Be Good via twitter and waited for a response.  Although she never officially responded she wrote her own blog post two days later entitled, Good Trouble: Autism and the Neurodiversity Movement.  In it she writes: Read the rest of this entry →

Discrimination has been around for centuries, if not millenniums, and will continue long past my lifetime.  Today’s form of discrimination, in my opinion, is a little different from what we have seen in the past but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from history and the people that came before us.  Historically, the discrimination that we have heard the most about has been based on race, religion or sex.  Most notably against African Americans, Judaism and Women but today’s version of discrimination includes all forms of disabilities and of course sexual orientation.  In this article I am going to focus on the autism and disability community.  I see discrimination against the autism and disability communities as unique because the families of the parties being discriminated against are not necessarily also disabled themselves.  This has created a split between how some parents want to advocate for their children and how some adults living with autism or another disability want to advocate for themselves and others.  This divide between parents and self-advocates is becoming increasingly nasty with the autism and disability community members lining up on each side ready to strike each other down at any moment. Read the rest of this entry →

Dear Principal, Assistant Principal or Dean of Students that has lost perspective;

Over the past school year I have seen an increasingly troubling trend among a FEW of you entrusted to protect and educate our children.  You have adopted a military philosophy known as, “Kill one, save a thousand.”  At this point I’m sure many of you are screaming foul and yelling at the computer screen that nothing you do actually kills a child.  I would argue that your actions in many ways can have this affect on a child.  At best you are killing their dreams and at worst you are emotionally scaring them for a lifetime in ways you may not even be aware of.  I know you think your actions are justified because you have an entire school full of other children to think about but you are going about it all wrong.  If you want to embrace a philosophy how about the Doctor’s Hippocratic Oath to, “Do no harm.”  Work with the child’s parents and find a solution that helps the situation for all involved and doesn’t harm even one child.  Read the rest of this entry →

Over the years, there have been many famous quotes about the responsibilities of a father.  As Father’s Day approaches this Sunday, the three that speak to me the most are:

“Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Dad.” (Anne Geddes);

“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.” (Sigmund Freud); and

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.” (William Shakespeare) Read the rest of this entry →

Last year at this time I had written, “As many of you are aware, autism occurs in 1 in every 110 births in the United States, and for boys, the rate is closer to 1 in 70.” As of today March 30, 2012, almost one year later the CDC as updated their most recent numbers on Autism. According to the CDC:

CDC estimates 1 in 88 children (11.3 per 1,000) has been identified with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Read the rest of this entry →

A couple of months ago I was touring an inclusive charter school that my wife and I want my son to attend for middle school. As we toured the different classrooms I noticed a sign hanging over the blackboard in every class. The sign read, “Fairness is not getting the same thing as everyone else, but getting what you need.” This motto seemed appropriate since the charter’s school inclusion “model allows for the individual needs of each child to be addressed in a manner that enhances each child’s strengths while also addressing learning needs” all within the general education setting.

Being the curious type I snapped a picture of one of the signs and went home to research the individual who came up with this philosophy. After doing some Google searches I found the following YouTube video from Rick Lavoie. Read the rest of this entry →

The Mayo Clinic recently reported that researchers have found that children exposed to anesthesia multiple times before the age of 3 have double the incidence of ADHD than those with no exposure to anesthesia. You can read the report here. In a 2009 report Mayo linked multiple anesthesia exposures before age 4 to learning disabilities.

Great. My son, has arthrogryposis and had three major surgeries and at least four smaller surgeries before age 3. Nothing we can do about that now. He has had many more surgeries since then. We have long noticed that he is inattentive. We also see that his memory suffers after surgeries. Nevertheless, without those surgeries his ability to walk, run, write, and feed himself would all be more severely impacted.For my child, and many like him, surgery is a necessity. Read the rest of this entry →