Transition to the “Real” World from FL Public Schools (in a bleak economy no less)
Jan 29th
The IEP meetings are crucial for not only diploma planning, but also for transition planning and career preparation. Good transition goals in the IEP (which are critical years prior to high school graduation) can include workplace experiences that help students learn about employment settings and vocational opportunities and specific plans for developing self-determination skills. IDEA requires that in addition to parents, the student, and school personnel, the other agency representatives that are likely to be responsible for providing or paying for transition services must participate in the meetings. Outside agency representatives may include: vocational rehabilitation counselors, county social workers, secondary education or technical center staff, independent living center staff etc.
If your son or daughter cannot attend a college or university, consider enrolling him or her in one of Florida’s local technical centers. Technical centers have a variety of vocational/technical training programs for standard and special diploma students, career preparation workshops, and apprenticeship programs. The PASS program at the FL Atlantic Technical Center, for example, is a transition employment program for 18 to 22 year old students with disabilities. Other opportunities for community based employment and internship opportunities for your teenager include: Project SEARCH, STEPS (see Special Needs Section) or the Florida High School/High Tech (HS/HT) Program.
More FL Transition Services Resources:
· Broward County Transition Services
· Dade County Transition Services
· NICHY Transition Guide
. UM/NSU CARD – for ASD kids
Charter Schools Should Serve More Disabled Students
Jan 9th
Increasing the Number of Students with Disabilities Served by Public Charter Schools
Posted using ShareThis
What’s New in Schools? – It’s Called RtI
Sep 9th
In this budgetary climate your school district has probably been very busy implementing some big changes – and one of the biggest directly affects how all students will be taught reading and math, but particularly impacts if and when the learning disabled get special education services. That change is known as “RtI” (Response to Intervention) and many school districts, including Miami-Dade, are using part of their economic Stimulus money to fund it.
Starting now it will be much harder (in fact, I think nearly impossible in Florida)to get your learning disabled (“LD”) child special education services. That said, special ed services historically haven’t helped LD kids very much. So, let’s hope these changes are all for the good. Children with behavior problems may not receive special ed services as easily as before either.
Basically, 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.” Now that RtI is in effect, there are a new series of steps between your child and special ed services, and those steps make up the RtI process. RtI is a multi-step process of increasingly intensive and individualized instruction above and beyond what usually happens in the classroom. For more about the RtI process read some of my other posts in this blog.
RtI will hopefully be more effective for struggling learners and students with behavior problems than special ed services have been, but the fear is that RtI (which is very complicated and labor-intensive) will be nothing more than an ineffective roadblock to an IEP. The BOTTOM LINE is this: If your child is not progressing well (academically or behaviorally), sign your written consent to a psycho-educational evaluation immediately. That will start the special education ball rolling and put a legal time frame on the RtI process, which could take as much as a year or more if left to it’s own devices.
If RtI Is Not Working – Your Child’s Legal Rights
Sep 8th
RtI is not only becoming a part of the general education curriculum, but it is also becoming a part of the eligibility process for special education services. Thus, 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 public 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 or behavior disorder:
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
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.
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.
RtI – the details
Sep 7th
RtI is a 3-tiered process of increasingly intensive research- based instruction which is part of federal law (IDEA 2004). At the end of the process (Tier 3), students who are still struggling in reading, math and/or behavior will be eligible for special education services (an “IEP”). The theory of RtI, which is to catch struggling students early and provide high quality research-based instruction, is great. Students will undergo periodic assessments or short tests to determine who is not progressing well and needs to move to the next more intensive Tier of intervention.
The motivation behind this truly revolutionary change (which will impact general education students almost as much as special ed. students)is that too many struggling students are labeled “disabled” when actually they are just not getting the proper intervention. There’s definitely lots of truth to that theory – I’m sure there are many kids who are not learning to read well, for instance, because the curriculum is just not good enough, intense enough or delivered well enough for kids who need that extra push of help. The first Tier offers instruction to all students in the general education classroom – I predict that this instruction won’t differ much from the norm.
In Tier 2 students who have not progressed well in Tier 1 are supposed to receive small group intervention in addition to their regular curriculum. Tier 3 is designed to give even more intensive one-to-one intervention to students who fail to progress well in Tier 2. Throughout RtI, school personnel must assess your child’s progress regularly document on graphs whether the intensive instruction is working (this is called progress monitoring or Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM)). (Tip: Ask who is providing RtI instruction to your child in Tiers 2 and 3 – under the law the person must be “qualified” but may not be someone with a credential in education.) If a student receives extra assistance in reading under Tier 2, for example, it is crucial that the teacher or school psychologist collects information about the child’s reading levels and continuously (if not weekly) charts his/her progress. This data-based documentation will be necessary to help you obtain special education services if and when the time comes. (Tip: Ask for a copy of the progress monitoring data on a regular basis so that you can follow your child’s progress).
Visit The Florida Response to Intervention site or the National RtI Center for lots of good information.
Make School Work for Your Disabled Child
Jul 27th
Did you ever wish you had someone to sit on your side of the table? Not just a lawyer. Not just someone with first-hand experience teaching kids with disabilities. But also a passionate advocate for your child’s needs. Well, you’ve finally found one – me, Allison Hertog. I am one of only a handful of professionals in the country who has both a Masters degree in special education and is a lawyer.
Simply put, I do not take “No” for an answer. I founded Florida School Partners because I struggled throughout her school years with multiple undiagnosed learning disabilities. I was retained in second grade and my disabilities were not accommodated nor even understood until my adulthood. My parents were told early on that I would never attend college. How wrong they were.
The mission of Florida School Partners, the law firm which I founded, is to help South Florida children with autism, ADHD, learning and other disabilities to 1) obtain more and better services in public school, as well as accommodations for standardized tests; 2) find the right school and; 3) navigate the process of attaining significant private school McKay Scholarships for their disabled children. When parents work with Ms. Hertog they get personalized attention and a passionate advocate who does not get intimidated and will not give up on your child. Florida School Partners is a Miami-based organization that works with children who struggle with all types of special needs, including autism spectrum disorders, learning disabilities, physical limitations and ADHD.
Congress Comes to the Rescue of Learning Disabled Students: Now Easier to Get a 504 Plan
Jan 29th
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.
Getting Accommodations on Standardized Tests
Dec 2nd
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.
Even if You Could Get a 1:1 Aide, Here’s Why You May Not Want One . . .
Feb 24th
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.
Finally Some Good News for Gifted and Disabled!
Feb 6th
One of the most challenging and infuriating areas in which I practice is advocating for the gifted and disabled (called “twice exceptional”) these days. I feel particularly passionately about these cases because I fall into the category of twice exceptional (I suffer from multiple learning disabilities) and when I was a student in public school, I was left back in second grade and misdiagnosed as cognitively “slow.”
I am continually arguing to the school districts in South Florida that a gifted student should not be denied special education and related services soley because they are capable of performing at or above grade level. I understand that the denial of special ed. services to the gifted is a national problem and not just limited to Florida.
Well, now for the good news! On December 26, 2007 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to all public school districts in the country stating that students with disabilities who otherwise qualify for enrollment cannot be denied admission to challenging academic programs, such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. Some school districts nationwide have made it a practice to deny students with disabilities admission to accelerated programs (even though they are cognitively capable of doing the work) or conditioning their admission to these programs on giving up their special education services.
For a variety of reasons, I see that problem less often than the situation where a gifted or high-achieving student is denied special education services because they are capable of performing at or above grade level despite their disability. The OCR letter addresses that situation only indirectly, but I think there is language in the letter which could be helpful for a student who is being denied services.
Here is how the letter may be helpful to you in advocating for your twice exceptional child. The OCR states the following:
a) “Discrimination prohibited by these laws [Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act] includes, on the basis of disability, denying a qualified individual with a disability the opportunity to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s aids, benefits or services, and affording a qualified individual with a disability with an opportunity to participate in or benefit from the aid, benefit or service [i.e., the accelerated program] in a manner that is not equal to that offered to individuals without disabilities.”
b) “A public entity also may not impose or apply eligibility criteria that screen out or tend to screen out an individual with a disability or any class of individuals with disabilities from fully and equally enjoying any service, program or activity, unless such criteria can be shown to be necessary for the provision of the service, program or activity being offered.”
c) “Section 504 and Title II require that qualified students with disabilities be given the same opportunities to compete for and benefit from accelerated programs and classes as are given to students without disabilities. ”
In my opinion, one implicit interpretation of the OCR letter is: If your child is qualified to be in an accelerated program but their disability prevents them from competing fairly in that program, your child is entitled to receive special education and related services in that program (in the form of a 504 plan or IEP).
I know this is a complicated area and please feel free to email me at AllisonHertog@gmail.com. Knock them dead in your next school meeting. 
