Childrens IEPs not being followed?

If you’re feeling there are lots of people having this problem in your state, I would suggest calling the state department of education (you should be able to find it on the web) and ask for organizations focused on the education of parents of children with disabilities. It’s now part of federal law that parents MUST be included in decision making (at all levels), and I believe this mandate included provisions for parent education. Usually these organizations do a lot of advocacy as well. They will very likely be able to tell you what is going on around this issue in your state. Your lawyer may already know the name of this organization.

I checked it out just now – why don’t you start with this website? There are lots of names of people you can contact to try to get some info!

http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/sac/parent/

This is not just a MA problem, it’s happening ALL over the country. Does your area have an ARP?(Association for Retarded Persons) You may be able to find some trained or volunteer advocates to help from there? Is your sister, a high, mid or low functioning Downs student? Is she being mainstreamed? How old is she? The earlier and more appropriate the interventions, the better the results. The

Federal law requirew FAPE (Free Appropriate Public Education) It sounds as though your sister is only getting FPE (Free Public Education) How much time does she spend in a Resource class? Does she have an aide? a shadow?

Has the school given written documentation to your mother about parental/student rights? I recommend your mother start keeping records, logging phone calls, taping IEP meetings, taking someone into the IEP with her, noteing members participating, note the time they come in or leave during the IEP. (if they do not participate during the ENTIRE session) Mom should not be coerced into signing an IEP she disagrees with. She may be threatened that no service will be given if she doesn’t sign. Tell her to sign BUT make a notation that her signature represents “attendance only, not agreement with”.

MA being the Kennedy”s home state, and that family has a personal connection with Special Olympics, etc. check it out to see if they can provide access to Advocacy Services.

Go to www.collier-ese-reform.com to review Floridia Due Process and OCR complaints regarding special education issues. Google for other sites as well.

The deck is stacked against parents. Teacher’s who advocate for their students get turned on by administrators and are forced to knuckle under or leave the profession.

Due Process has become a joke. Many “hired” witnesses will “whore” their profession for paid testimony. Others will give false witness in order to keep their job.

I hope her lawyer is knowledgable about Special Education Issues (an IDEA attorney), or an attorney knowledgable in Disability (504 issues). they are usually one or the other, not both. If her attorney is neither, she will be spending a lot of money educating him and will probably be disappointed with the results.An attorney that is savvy on these issues will be able to be straight forward about costs and prospective outcomes.

Until the media gets enough grass roots complaints and the public becomes aware of the problem, parents of special needs children will continue to be considered overly demanding, administrative teacher abuse will continue and teaching careers ruined, and ALL children, not just special needs children will be the brunt of our declining educational system.

There are cases of what you described in every school system across the country. Oten times, there is little intentional malice (they aren’t denying services to be cruel) but other issues that keep the school from compliance…usually related to budget issues. While it is never an excuse for being out of compliance on an IEP, which is federal law and MUST be followed, it can be a good indicator of if the school and district even has an outside chance of ever being able to comply. It sounds like your mother is taking all the right steps and retaining a lawyer at this point is definitely a good choice. I would suggest (and this comes after years of advocating for my child as well as many others) trying to find out why the school hasn’t been able to comply. If the issue is the school has problems retaining special ed staff, speech therapists and other support specialists, your mother may want to investigate the possibility of moving your sister (at the school’s cost of course) to another school with a better reputation. A revoloving door in the special ed areas of a school usually point to a lack of support from administration, an overload fo students and severely limited resources. I would also suggest checking around to see if the school (if it is a special ed school) is scheduled to be shut down in the next 3-5 years. Again, this tends to lead to cuts in funding and a lot of the staffing problems above. Finally, depending on your sister’s needs, I would have your Mom and her lawyer look into whatever private school placements the district has used is the past. Placing a special ed child into a private, specialized school is always the very last resort for a school system. They would much prefer to keep the child within the district schools. However, with the on-going compliance issues, it may be that the school system does not have the appropriate services in any of it’s programs and moving to a private, specialized program may be the answer.

Yeah, it’s pretty systemic, I live in Oklahoma and had two kids who’s IEP’s were not being followed. I fought the school for two years before pulling them out to homeschool. Everyone was so surprised because our city is supposed to have one of the best sped programs in the state. Not so much….

There are dozens more parents in the same school who are blindly believing everything the school tells them, and probably would be shocked if they were able (or willing) to spend a day at the school. And many more who suspect something’s not right, but aren’t educated as to their children’s rights in public education. It certainly isn’t in the school’s best interest to educate them, now is it?

Good luck. The best luck we had was calling an emergency IEP meeting and insisting that the special ed director of the entire district was in attendance. It was the ONLY time the school worked outside of their little box to help my children.

Do you imply IEP plans are beign written with out father or mother concentration, IEP conferences are being held with out father or mother concentration, or each? In both case, each are unlawful. First of all you ought to alert the mother and father. They are an EQUAL member of IEP groups and they’ve the authorized correct to understand what’s going on with their little one. As a ways as having an IEP coordinator so the academics can instruct, I believe this can be a well factor until I’m lacking whatever??

i do not know much about MA… but i am a special educator in illinois. according to the federal government, if an IEP is not followed, the family can file for due process. i have no doubt in my mind that the family will win. tell the lawyer you want to file due process. once paperwork is started, the school will usually own up and fix the problem because they will get tons of bad publicity, as well as cut in funding and people could possibly get fired.

I don’t live in MA and when my daughter’s IEP wasn’t being followed I got them to do so by going to the press and to my city Representative or go to your congressman or woman or Senator Kennedy’s office as if they aren’t following an IEP they are breaking Federal Law. Believe me if you do this you won’t have any other problems again as they school system won’t want to get the bad publicity and they won’t want the Senator’s office on their backs. Have your mother do it now so that it’s in place before September.

Kathryn’s advice sounds good to me. Strong measures are required, as school systems are professional at cheating on this and sometimes teachers who are aware of the pertinent state laws can’t make their districts comply.

You need to hit them where it hurts – publicly question if they are spending the money the state appropriates for each student like your sister properly.

please contact the people at the Wrightslaw web site.