Elements of a Free and Appropriate Education

Elements of a Free and Appropriate Education

Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) is a legal term used in the United States that ensures that children with disabilities have access to an education that is tailored to their individual needs and is provided at no cost to their parents or guardians. FAPE is a critical component of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which is a federal law enacted to protect the educational rights of students with disabilities.

Under IDEA, all eligible children with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 21 years are entitled to receive special education and related services that are designed to meet their unique needs and help them make meaningful educational progress. These services are provided in the least restrictive environment, which means that to the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities are educated alongside their non-disabled peers.

Key Elements of FAPE

Individualized Education Program (IEP)

FAPE recognizes that each child possesses a unique set of strengths and challenges. To provide the most effective education, Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are crafted for every eligible student. All IEPs guarantee all these elements of FAPE.

Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)

Students with disabilities should not be isolated from their non-disabled peers. FAPE ensures that education is delivered in the Least Restrictive Environment, allowing students to participate in general education classrooms to the maximum extent appropriate. This approach fosters an inclusive culture and promotes social growth for all learners. (Stay tuned for a blog post on this.)

FAPE aims to create an inclusive educational environment where students with disabilities can develop their skills and abilities alongside their non-disabled peers, promoting a sense of belonging and equal opportunities for all students. It recognizes that each child is unique and requires an individualized approach to learning to reach their full potential

Equal Access to Opportunities

FAPE removes the barriers that have historically hindered students with disabilities from accessing quality education. FAPE ensures access to specialized services and assistive technologies, so your child can fully participate in the learning process, explore their interests, and develop their talents alongside their grade-level peers. This includes having the same access to grade-level field trips, assemblies, and birthday parties to the best of your child’s ability. (Sometimes these things are too over-stimulating.) This is also where teacher-parent collaboration is important.

Collaboration and Parental Involvement

An essential point of FAPE is the collaborative effort involving parents or guardians, teachers, specialists, and school administrators. This teamwork ensures that all stakeholders work together to design your child’s IEP.

Zero Cost to Parents

FAPE requires that the services and support provided to students with disabilities must be provided at no cost to their parents or guardians. The government funds special education programs to ensure accessibility to all eligible students. This can include transportation to and from school if your child’s disability impacts their ability to access their education, assistive technology, wheelchairs, or walkers to name a few but this list depends on what your team determines your child needs to access their education.

Procedural Safeguards

IDEA also includes procedural safeguards to protect the rights of students and their parents or guardians, such as the right to participate in the IEP process, the right to dispute decisions through due process, and the right to access educational records.

FAPE aims to create an inclusive educational environment where a child with disabilities can develop their skills and abilities alongside their non-disabled grade-level peers, promoting a sense of belonging and equal opportunities for all students. It recognizes that each child is unique and requires an individualized approach to learning to reach their full potential.

If you have read my previous posts, you should be seeing some common threads within the world of special education. Everything is interconnected. Starting with the law that tells teams what they need to do to create a rock-solid IEP that drives FAPE and your rights as parents. I’ll be back to share more. If you have questions or what me to answer a specific question, please send me an email at Alison.Whiteley@toad-allyexceptionallearners.com

Note: It’s important to note that FAPE is specific to the United States educational system and may have different equivalents or variations in other countries’ special education laws and policies.

 

 

 




10 Strategies to Get Your Child Excited About Learning

10 Strategies to Get Your Child Excited About Learning

Each fall most students return to school and are excited about their new grade level and teacher assignments. Some become anxious because school is challenging for them. Others may have a history of struggling to learn or functioning successfully in a classroom setting. These students need added intervention support to ensure that they will succeed in school.

Here are ten proven strategies that parents can reinforce at home:

  1. Identify a response for your child that motivates them to respond positively when encountering a challenging situation or difficult task.
  2. Consistently reinforce each positive behavior with this motivating response.
  3. Many children become overwhelmed when they must rush through life with too many scheduled activities. Pace their lives with balanced times for eating, sleeping, family activities, exercise, chores, and screen time.
  4. Give your child time to chill. Some children need to find a quiet place to decompress when they are overstimulated or agitated about a situation. Give them the space they need away from too much stimulation or annoying situations.
  5. Respect your child’s individual differences. Children need to feel valued and supported by their parents. Encourage them to reflect on the value of their many strengths and how they can effectively overcome various challenges.
  6. Give your child the gift of your personal attention. Today’s parents are busy. Their children are busy. Slow down and find time to talk with your child daily. Hug them and love them for who they are.
  7. Schedule time for your child to socialize with other children. Today’s families are overly scheduled with work, planned activities, and life’s responsibilities. Ensure your child has opportunities to play with other children and make friends. These experiences will help them learn how to plan and work more effectively with classmates and lifelong friends.
  8. Limit screen time. Ongoing research indicates that children are more anxious, depressed, and challenged with too much screen time. Some children stay up late at night monitoring electronic devices. Others become addicted to online games and texting instead of building personal relationships.
  9. Walk your talk. Apply what you say to what you do. For example, do you balance your daily life and allow time for eating, sleeping, family activities, exercise, and limit screen time?
  10. Finally, express gratitude for all that is good in your life, your children’s lives, and in your community

Happy new school year of many successes!

 

 

 

 

 




Recycling and Environmental Conservation

Recycling and Environmental Conservation 

I am passionate about conserving resources and mindful recycling (or reducing waste). Each school year I want to help students become aware of what is going on around them in relevant and useful ways. My hope is for each child to connect with something that interests them as they become an advocate or steward for change and making a difference in their community.

Get Kids Excited

Initially, I get the kids excited about their learning environment by adopting a class mascot. Last year our class adopted sea otters. We learned that sea otters are important in managing sea urchins and keeping the ocean’s kelp forests healthy. Students were excited as they learned more about these topics:

  • Sea otters are aquatic engineers and balance harm to ocean environments.
  • Kelp feeds sea otters and absorbs carbon in the ocean.
  • Management of microplastics and single use plastics in the environment can reduce pollution.
  • Effective conservation strategies in the home, community, and the environment can have a significant impact on waste reduction.
  • Kids can make a difference in their communities.
  • Honey bees are important in balancing the ecosystem.

Learn About Recycling

Our end of the year project was to invent and create new objects on collage boards after collecting recycled trash at school and in neighborhoods. The students worked as teams to build a honey bee playground. They used plastic tape, food packaging, bubble wrap, cereal cups, straws, and plastic bags. As students worked on their projects, they learned it takes 20 years for a plastic bag to decompose and 200 years for a plastic straw. Now their next challenge will be to study products that can made from these byproducts. For example, I recently purchased a recycled purse made from cork and gave a friend a recycled cosmetic bag with recycled soaps.

Limit Waste

As we enter our next school year, what can students, parents, and teachers do together to limit the pollution and waste in our communities? Please share your ideas in the comments section below this blog.

 

 




Keeping the Peace at Home

Keeping the Peace at Home 

School is starting in the next few weeks. I am having various combinations of grandkids spend the final days of summer in my home. As a parent educator and teacher, I have learned a variety of effective classroom management strategies that work well at home as well as at school. Here are my top 10:

  1. Make time for each child every day. Our children need time to talk and feel our affection for each of them. Young children love to talk right before bed and early in the day after they wake up. Teens love to talk at 10 p.m. or later when we are very tired and our listening skills are depleted.
  2. Solve ongoing conflicts by meeting with each child to discuss their feelings and to brainstorm new ways they can relate and communicate with their family and friends.
  3. Help your children live with the consequences of their actions. When they misbehave, have them work with you in identifying an appropriate outcome. Sometimes, children must lose a privilege for a day for acting aggressively toward a sibling. Others may need to pay or fix something they have broken.
  4. Drive the carpools to and from school, for sports teams, and for various after-school activities. It is amazing listening to the conversations of our kids and grandkids at different developmental milestones. The most shocking was when my teenage grandson wanted to discuss his sex education workshop with me and his friends when driving them to a track meet. I was unsure of how to respond so I kept redirecting the conversation back to what they learned and how they felt about the what they learned.
  5. Get to know your kids’ friends and their parents. It takes a village to raise children and my children’s friends spent hours at each home throughout the school year. The parents shared childcare even when the kids gave each other various viruses.
  6. Celebrate life and various milestone events. These memorable occasions will stay with your children for years.
  7. Take family vacations and capture with photos. Once again, these are cherished memories for life.
  8. Engage children in completing chores around the house. Plan for weekly allowances as part of being a member of the family to help children learn how to manage money.
  9. Model kindness in your various actions within the home and while participating in community service activities with your family.
  10. Convene weekly family meetings to plan family outings, vacations, identify chores, and resolve ongoing conflicts.

May the final days of summer be filled with loving memories and preparations for a heathy and restful start of a new school year.




New State, New School, New Challenges

New State, New School, New Challenges

When we decided to move from California to Illinois, my first panicked thought was, “What about school for the kids?!” I felt completely overwhelmed by the idea. How would I support them in a positive way and find educational solutions for each of them? My oldest son is extroverted, very involved in extracurricular activities, and will be a sophomore in high school. He loves his charter school here in California. I currently homeschool my other two daughters under the support of a charter school.  I had no clue about homeschooling laws in Illinois. My middle daughter also has an extensive IEP. How would her services transfer in a new state? I spent a few sleepless nights thinking about their unique needs. To be honest, it was less thinking and more like frantic worrying.

One Day at a Time

We are now only a few days away from our big move. At this point in our transition, we have a plan in place for the next school year and I feel more confident. Unfortunately, I don’t have a nicely packaged, “one size fits all” solution that will work for all families facing a cross-county move. I can only offer this:  take deep breaths and move forward every day, even if that means taking baby steps toward a solution. Nothing about my kids’ education for next year came together all at once. I tackled one question at a time, and eventually it all came together. Eventually, I started sleeping better at night.

 When to Move

First, we decided on a timeline. Since we had the luxury of choosing when we would move, we decided to wait until the end of the school year. This allowed my kids to be able to finish the year in a familiar place with their friends instead of trying to transition to something new in the middle of the year.

 Different New Schools for Different Needs

Once we answered the question of when we would move, I started working on what the new school year would look like. I researched public schools, private school options, and Illinois homeschool laws. I called school districts. I talked to superintendents, principals, and special education directors. My husband and son took a spring break road trip to our new state, so he could tour his new school. I talked to a few parents with kids in local schools to get their perspective and input. One step at a time, we made a plan that worked for our family.

And now, it’s time to pack the U-Haul. Deep breaths. Once box at a time.