Partners for Special Needs

How Teachers Can Effectively Collaborate with Parents and Other Advocates

Douglas J. Fiore, Julie Anne Fiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138714700
• eBook ISBN: 9781351858236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learn how to collaborate with parents and special education advocates to ensure student success. This practical book shows you how to navigate the tricky path to meeting special education goals and outcomes. It also provides strategies to help you communicate and partner more effectively with families and specialists.

Part I of the book offers key information on how special education has evolved over recent decades and what the Individualized Education Plan process entails. Part II features techniques for strengthening communication so you can avoid conflict and create as strong a partnership as possible. You'll learn the specific roles of advocates and parents, and you'll gain practical strategies for communicating proactively and managing communication breakdowns. You'll also uncover how to overcome the challenges of working with people during difficult times.

The book is filled with tips, examples, and reflection questions to help you implement the ideas immediately. With the essential strategies in this book, you can become the best support system for the child or children you serve!

Part I
The Practice of Special Education

1
The Development of Special Education Practices

Throughout this chapter, we set the stage for the current, contemporary notion of special education, best methods for educating students with special needs, and legal challenges that may be yet to come. By illustrating some of the most significant changes to happen in special education practices and advocacy over the past half century, we can best understand how we got to where we are today in special education.

Historically, teachers educated students in classrooms where learners were more alike than they were different. In the early 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s most instruction was developed and implemented according to grade level, age, and ability. Other considerations may have included arranging students according to sex or particular interest. The result of these homogeneous groupings meant that the planning and focus of student learning was more aligned with the teacher and the whole group rather than the individual learner. The “outliers”, specifically students with exceptional learning needs, typically were forced to mold to the majority. This practice of educating students as a group often prevented the “outliers” from developing to reach their potential. Thus, the gifted student and the special needs student rarely worked within what Lev Vygotsky (the Soviet psychologist and founder of cultural-historical psychology) coined as the “Zone of Proximal Development”, meaning where learning is not too challenging or too easy, but right at the student’s appropriate level, which enabled the student to learn independently, with minimal support. Students falling outside the norm were typically considered educational afterthoughts. The gifted student was given more work – not necessarily challenging work, but a greater amount – while the special needs student was given less work or alternative activities like coloring or listening to music, because the work was “just too hard”. Teachers often worked independently: planning lessons, implementing instruction, and grading work. Teaching was, at times, a lonely profession. The collaborative aspect of teaching occurred after instruction ended: at staff meetings, parent–teacher conferences, and at the occasional evening event planned for families for mostly fundraising purposes. These after-instruction events were often where teachers worked with colleagues and parents to “sort out” problems in the classroom. This left teachers and parents feeling like “islands”, alone in their perspective of the student/child.

Naturally, over time, evidence of this type of educational system showed that teachers and parents were not focused on working as collaborative team partners, but as competitors in a race to see who would “win” at making sure the child’s needs were met. Oftentimes, teachers felt that parents didn’t care about students, and parents felt the same way about teachers. This did nothing to promote a sense of community, nor did it help foster a rapport between the school and the family. These ills that occurred over time are prevalent in many schools today.

Special education advocacy or support for those with disabilities developed as a result of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which was reauthorized by the US Congress in 2004. (Further information about IDEA can be found in the Appendix.) Both parents and teachers found the laws and mandates of IDEA and the procedural implications for following IDEA to be incredibly complex. As a result, there was often a need for a third-party neutral interpreter to listen to the desire of both the parent and the teacher and to help find a workable solution that met the requirements of the law, but also demonstrated compassion for the child in his/her learning environment. Today, advocates for students with disabilities come from all walks of life. Some are former attorneys, while others are former teachers. Many refer to themselves as “educational consultants” and charge a fee for working with a family. Some attorneys do work for their clients “pro bono”.

Advocacy has developed quite a bit since the 1970s, and legal challenges and interpretations are large parts of the reason why. Since special education regulations were often designed and written with little clarity, it has taken some big legal challenges, many ultimately heard by the United States Supreme Court, to more clearly define what the parameters are for educating students with special needs. Furthermore, it has taken the work and research of advocates to assure that procedures and policies are being followed in the best interests of the students they serve.

The Legal Environment

Never intended to be a “legal” environment, education in the latter part of the previous century was steeped in litigation. It began because of a sincere desire on the part of all teachers, parents, and community members to meet the needs of all learners. That, as we all know, is easier said than done in all cases.

Although our intention with this book is to help educators collaboratively work with parents and advocates so that all children receive the best education possible, it is unwise to ignore the legal parameters that govern our ability to do so. Oftentimes, we think of the law as something that describes minimums, regulations, and standards. Many educators get turned off by these discussions because they feel as though most teachers go far above and beyond what it is that they are “supposed to do”. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that much of the behavior governing education for students with special needs has its roots in legal standards. These standards of care have arisen because of things that were not being done for children in schools. These legal decisions only came about because students were not having their rights met by their teacher or their public school district.

What follow are summaries of six highly significant legal cases spanning a period of more than twenty years from the early 1980s through the early 2000s. It was during this period that many of the legal requirements placed on public schools and the legal rights of students that are taken for granted in most schools today were born. These six cases also gave rise to many acronyms, such as FAPE (free appropriate public education), that we regularly use in special education conversations today.

1 Board of Education v. Rowley (1982)

The decision in this US Supreme Court case set the standard and the baseline for many cases that have followed and really helped to frame the discussion about what schools were required to do relative to assuring a free appropriate public education (FAPE ) for all students.

In a New York school district, prior to the 1976–1977 school year, parents Clifford and Nancy Rowley met with the principal of Furnace Woods Elementary School to discuss accommodations for their hearing-impaired daughter, Amy Rowley, who would be starting kindergarten there the following year. Amy was placed in a regular kindergarten class and was provided with a hearing aid. After a successful kindergarten year, Amy was promoted to first grade. An Individualized Education Plan (IEP) was created for Amy which included the continued use of her hearing aid. However, Amy’s parents also wanted the school to provide a sign language interpreter. The school, in consultation with the district’s Committee on the Handicapped, contended that Amy did not need an interpreter. They stated that Amy was achieving educationally and socially without the interpreter. The parents disagreed, and after several lower court rulings, the case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court. Before the Supreme Court decision, the parents had won at each level and the school was being chastised for not providing an interpreter.

On June 28, 1982 the court handed down a 6–3 decision which helped determine what is meant by FAPE. The decision, written by Justice William Rehnquist, stated that the purpose of IDEA was not to allow each child to achieve their full potential, but to simply provide sufficient resources for handicapped children to access education. Without the interpreter, the court reasoned, Amy did not have the same access to the curriculum as other students had. While the interpreter would not make Amy’s educational experience optimal, it was considered a necessary accommodation to ensure that Amy was provided sufficient resources to, at least, access education.

The Rowley case has been cited by more than 3,000 court cases since 1982 that involved questions of a student’s educational rights under IDEA.

2 Irving Independent School District v. Tatro (1984)

This landmark case involves an 8-year-old girl who was born with a defect known as spina bifida. As a result of this condition, she suffered from orthopedic and speech impairments and a neurogenic bladder, which prevented her from emptying her bladder voluntarily. Consequently, she needed to be catheterized every few hours during the school day to avoid serious injury to her kidneys. To accomplish this, a procedure known as clean intermittent catheterization (CIC) was prescribed. CIC is a simple procedure that can be performed in a few minutes by a layperson with less than an hour’s training. The Irving School District refused to require that a school nurse perform the CIC for the student. They claimed that, despite the fact that CIC could easily be performed by a layperson, the procedure was medical in nature and outside of a school’s scope of responsibility to a student. Making it all the way to the US Supreme Court, this case stands out as the Supreme Court’s first attempt to define the distinction between school supportive health services, which officials must provide under IDEA as related services identified in students’ IEPs if they are necessary to assist children with disabilities to benefit from special education, and medical services, which they are not required to supply unless they are for diagnostic or evaluative purposes. In determining that the school district was required to provide catheterization, the court stated that because this service was required in order for the student to remain at school during the day and because it was a simple procedure that could be performed easily by a layperson with less than an hour’s training, it qualified for coverage under IDEA. This was a very significant decision, as it had been unclear where to draw the line with any services that appeared to be medical.

The court’s differentiation between supportive health services and medical services stands today as the definition upon which decisions about medical care in schools are made.

3 School Committee of Town of Burlington, Massachusetts v. Department of Education of Massachusetts (1985)

This US Supreme Court cased focused on the rights parents have if they are dissatisfied with results of the IEP process under the (then) Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHCA), now IDEA.

The case involved a family of a third grade student and the Burlington (Massachusetts) School District. The student’s parents, believing that their child’s learning disabilities were the result of serious neurological issues, disagreed with the level of services the school district proposed in the child’s IEP. The school district based their IEP accommodations on their belief that the child was instead suffering from emotional issues and that additional accommodations were unnecessary. The dispute between the two parties continued throughout the school year, and the child continued to struggle under the school’s IEP. During the constant debates on the merits of the IEP, the parents finally opted to remove the child from the public school and place him in a private school that better addressed his specific needs. The family then sought reimbursement from the school district for the cost of the private school fees because the school district had not provided the child with FAPE.

In the ultimate 9–0 ruling, the US Supreme Court determined that if a private school can be considered a proper placement, then school officials would have to create IEPs that permit students to attend the private schools and to reimburse their parents, retroactively. Furthermore, the court indicated that reimbursing parents was only paying what the school district would, or should, have spent in the first place had officials initially developed a proper IEP.

4 Honig v. Doe (1988)

Another case that reached the US Supreme Court and has had a dramatic impact on how schools discipline students with special needs is Honig v. Doe. At issue in this case, the US Supreme Court’s first case on the topic, were the acceptable limits of disciplining students with disabilities under the (then) Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. In its analysis, the court refused to create a dangerousness exception in EHCA, affirming that its “stay-put” provisions prohibit school officials from unilaterally excluding students with disabilities from school for dangerous or disruptive actions that are manifestations of their disabilities while review proceedings are under way. Also, the court affirmed that state officials must provide services directly to students with disabilities when local boards fail to do so.

“John Doe” was an emotionally disturbed student who explosively responded to the taunts of a fellow student by choking the student and then breaking a school window as he was being taken to the principal’s office. John was suspended for five days as a result of this behavior. On the fifth day of his suspension, the San Francisco Unified School District Student Placement Committee notified his mother that it was recommending his expulsion and that his suspension would continue indefinitely until the expulsion proceedings were complete.

John, who qualified for special educational services under EHCA, sued the school district and the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, alleging that their disciplinary actions violated the “stay-put” provision of EHCA. Under EHCA “stay-put” provisions, children with disabilities must remain in their existing educational placements pending the completion of any review proceedings unless parents and state or local educational officials agree otherwise. John alleged that the pending expulsion proceedings triggered the “stay-put” provision and that his rights were violated when he was suspended indefinitely.

This case also reached the US Supreme Court, as the issue of John’s dangerousness was a contentious one, in light of the desire not to exclude any student from school, per EHCA. The Supreme Court held that the “stay-put” provision of EHCA prohibited state or local school authorities from excluding disabled children from the classroom even for dangerous or disruptive conduct resulting from their disabilities. Honig v. Doe also is a landmark case as it put to rest the idea of expelling any student from school if the behavior in question is the result of their disability.

5 Sacramento City Unified Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Rachel H. (1990)

This case centered around Rachel H., a young girl with an intellectual disability, and it represents a landmark victory regarding the right of students with disabilities to be educated alongside their nondisabled peers. Rachel’s case is considered to be the standard-bearer in helping to determine the least restrictive environment (LRE) in which a student with special needs should be educated.

In this case, Rachel’s parents requested that she be placed full-time into a regular classroom for her kindergarten year. The district rejected this request and offered a placement that would divide Rachel’s educational time between a special education classroom and a regular education classroom. This placement would have required Rachel to be moved six times each day between the two classrooms. Her parents appealed this decision and, ultimately, enrolled her in a private school.

Once Rachel enrolled in the private school, she was placed into a regular education classroom, where she performed well and did not require significant amounts of the teacher’s attention. Wanting her back in the public school but in the appropriate educational environment, Rachel’s parents took the school district to court.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• PART I THE PRACTICE OF SPECIAL EDUCATION
• PART II COLLABORATING AND COMMUNICATING
• Afterword
• References
• Appendix: About the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)