Advocating for Your Child’s Special Education Needs

Being a parent of a special needs child is not easy. Working with a new team each year is hard. It’s hard even when the only thing that changes is your general education teacher.

As a special education teacher, parents, you play a critical role part in your child’s education. Advocating is empowering and HARD. By actively participating in your child’s education and collaborating with educators and professionals, you can ensure that your child receives the support and resources they require to thrive. In this blog post, I will share 8 valuable insights and practical tips to help you become a strong advocate for your child and their needs.

Educate Yourself

Knowledge is power! Take the time to familiarize yourself with special education laws and regulations in your country or state. Understand key terms and acronyms commonly used in special education, such as Individualized Education Program (IEP), 504 Plan, and Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). Learn about different disabilities, accommodations, and instructional approaches that can support your child’s learning. Understanding these concepts will help you to communicate and collaborate with teachers and school administrators. (I’ll share more on each of these soon.)

Build Relationships

Developing strong relationships with your child’s classroom teachers, therapists, and administrators are essential. Attend parent-teacher conferences, IEP meetings, and other school events to establish open lines of communication. By fostering positive relationships, you can create a supportive network that works together to meet your child’s unique needs.

Maintain Communication

Effective communication is the cornerstone of successful advocacy. Regularly communicate with your child’s teachers to stay informed about their progress, challenges, and any emerging concerns. Share your observations, insights, and goals for your child’s education, IEP, and post-high school. Collaboration ensures consistency between home and school.

Document Everything

Maintain a record of all correspondence, meetings, evaluations, and assessments related to your child’s special education. Keep copies of IEPs, progress reports, and any relevant documentation. This documentation can help you track your child’s progress, identify patterns, and support your advocacy efforts.

Be an Active Participant in the IEP Process

The Individualized Education Program (IEP) is a vital tool for ensuring your child’s educational needs are met. Actively participate in the development and review of your child’s IEP. Share your insights, goals, and concerns, and be prepared to negotiate and collaborate with the school team to create an effective plan. Remember, you are your child’s voice during these meetings.

Know Your Child’s Rights

Familiarize yourself with your child’s rights under special education law. Take the time to read them and ask questions if you don’t understand your Parent Rights and Procedural Safeguards. Understand the services and accommodations your child is entitled to and ensure they receive them. If you encounter any challenges or obstacles, advocate for your child’s rights respectfully but assertively, seeking guidance from organizations or parent support groups if necessary. (If you are not sure where your copy is, go to your state department of education, download, and read it.)

Seek Additional Support

Don’t hesitate to seek additional support from professionals, advocacy organizations, or parent support groups. These resources can provide guidance, mentorship, and valuable insights to help you navigate the complex world of special education. Share your experiences and learn from others who have walked a similar path.

Foster a Collaborative Approach

Remember, you and the school team share a common goal—your child’s success. Approach advocacy as a collaborative effort, working together to ensure your child receives the best possible education. Maintain open lines of communication, listen to different perspectives, and find common ground to create a supportive and inclusive learning environment. Explore differentiated instruction techniques, such as varied assignments, flexible grouping, or modified assessments. Collaboratively find ways to adapt the curriculum to meet your child’s individual needs.

Advocating for your child’s special education needs is a powerful way to ensure their educational journey meets their unique abilities and challenges. By educating yourself, building relationships, maintaining communication, and actively participating in the IEP process, you can effectively advocate for your child. Remember, you are your child’s greatest advocate.

Safety Plans for High-Risk Kids

As our students become more anxious with home and school challenges, we find that we become fearful about their health and well-being. Some children will demonstrate their anxieties and stress by having nightmares, not eating, over-eating, sleeping too much, spending hours on screens, or isolating. As parents, it is our job to try and understand what is troubling our children and seek support when needed. We should not be afraid to ask for help. The longer we ignore or avoid a problem, the more frustrated and troubled our child may become.

How to Solve a Problem

Here is a sample script and worksheet you can use with your child to identify and troubleshoot a possible problem.

Children Own Their Solutions

The sample script and worksheet provide an example of how we can support our children’s healthy development on their terms and according to their personal growth needs. Once we entrust our children with taking responsibility for their own actions and outcomes, their learning is more significant. Our children are more confident in their personal growth challenges. And our kids have the skills and abilities to be in charge of their lives and life choices.

How to Improve Your Children’s School Successes 

As an elementary school principal, I provide guidance and resources to support our students’ social-emotional and academic successes. Our school also uses Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) to reinforce positive social behaviors and define consequences for problem behaviors. We focus on ensuring a predictable, consistent, positive, and a safe school environment for all students. By using a common language on school-wide expectations, less time is spent on discipline. More time is focused on instruction, building a positive school climate, and promoting positive interactions between staff, students, and families.

Student Success PBIS School-Wide Strategies

Effective strategies at our school that may have immediate results include:

• Providing a weekly student leadership recognition program for grade levels and teacher assigned classrooms
• Clarifying school-wide and individual classroom expectations and routines so students understand the consequences of their actions
• Providing active supervision in the classroom, during recesses and at lunch time to ensure students are experiencing a positive school climate of support and respect
• Using individualized praise and encouragement for expected behaviors
• Ensuring students can earn privileges and rewards for expected behaviors and classroom supportive collaborations

Added PBIS Student Success Strategies

Added effective PBIS strategies that can be implemented at schools include:

• Providing a weekly student leadership recognition program for grade levels and teacher assigned classrooms
• Encouraging students to become school leaders and collaborative problem solvers through school-wide clubs and leadership councils
• Hosting school-wide community activism days and sports activity days for students, their parents, and the school community
• Creating expanded after school programs that promote academic successes, leadership, citizenship, sportsmanship, performing arts, STEM programs, and community partnerships
• Facilitating collaborative grade level and school-wide team meetings for effective problem-solving and to create innovative solutions to ongoing challenges

Qualifying for a Silver Medal

As we continue to establish our PBIS program, we submitted first year school year outcome data to qualify for a silver medal. I believe that the commitment and grit of our teaching staff empowered the students to work beyond their traditional achievement levels. We are excited about expanding our academic support programs this coming school year. My next post on October 26th will focus on our social-emotional programing plans for students this upcoming school year.

How Covid Affected Student Learning – Part 2

The Community and Schools Shut Down

Businesses were shutting down and asking employees to work from home. My husband was one of the last employees to work at his computer company. It made absolutely no sense to me why he was being required to go to work when the barista, serving coffee in the company lobby, was staying home. Finally, my husband received a phone call from his boss to work from home. I guess that Wednesday was the last normal day I can remember during the Covid pandemic. The next day, my husband worked from home and I worked at the school.

Then came Friday, March 13th. The day started out normal. One student complained about another as we entered the classroom after the morning bell rang. All of a sudden, the power flickered. My heart skipped a beat as the power generator kicked on and power was restored. Five minutes later, the school phone system went down, the power went out, and the internet was down. I think my heart stopped beating at that moment. My thoughts were that we are being invaded. What am I going to do? Will I have to evacuate and take my students up to a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill to stay safe? I could not imagine how I could evacuate and keep 24 fearful seven-year-olds calm while hiking up a hill? Most pictures in my head looked like hysteria.

I took a breath, got out my phone, and called my husband for many reasons. We live around the corner. I needed to know how widespread this was. I was in full panic mode. I thought that was pretty clever for the terrorists to shut down the internet. Cutting off communication made this a whole different ball game. Feelings of isolation started to settle in and my own fear was getting the best of me. I needed to hear his voice. My first question was is the power out at home? He said no. A wave of relief spread across my entire body. I think I felt all my muscles relax. Then I asked is the internet out at home. Another no! Thank goodness. Okay, now I can begin to think again. The question now was what the heck is going on? The level of anxiety was hitting like a roller coaster in the classroom. (Many of you who are teachers right now are thinking what in the heck were the students doing while she was on the phone. All this took place during my lunch break.) With the time remaining, I headed up to the front office for a bio break. I arrived in the staff room simultaneously with the principal. She was sitting down and looked as though she was in shock. She delivered the news to those of us on the second lunch period that she has to shut the school down. She couldn’t believe her own words.

How Do I Say Goodbye to My Students?

What I hate most about what happened next was that my gut instinct was right. I was only told to pack the students up because we are closing the school down. The virus was spreading and we could no longer keep students and staff safe. The immediate thoughts around campus were that we would be back in three weeks. Maybe it was my degree in Biological Sciences that guided me that day, or my work in biotech for five years. But my instincts that day led me to pack the students up with their workbooks for the rest of the year. It’s never a good feeling being right about difficult things and this was one of them. I taught the rest of the day as normal as possible. When the final bell rang, I walked the students to their parents and returned to my classroom. Friday, March 13th 2020 marks the last day that my second graders would see a classroom for 18 months.

Flake by flake, traumas continued to fall upon us. Power outages, failed internet connectivity, massive California forest fires, not to mention teaching seven-year-olds how to video conference. We needed time to heal. We needed the snow to melt.

Welcome New School Year

The 2020-2021 school year could be a novel on its own. The distance learning curve was brutal and the expectations were incredibly unrealistic. All that aside, where are we now? I was crushed by my own personal obligation to close the student’s learning gap and the trauma caused by online learning.

This coming school year my expectations have to shift. The students in front of me are not the students I have known during my teaching career. They need social emotional lessons grounded in team building and resiliency. STEM projects, music, art, and literacy intervention will be focus of what these children need to heal the trauma from the last two years of learning.

How Covid Affected Student Learning – Part 1

The Week of March 4th, 2019

The country had been going crazy with the politics of President Trump. Protesters were wreaking havoc in cities. Random fires were being set. A real threat to our safety was felt throughout the neighborhood, school, and home.

My first experience/awareness of the panic with COVID-19 was a routine Thursday evening trip to Costco. The parking lot was full like it was a day in December getting close to the holiday season. We could barely find a place to park. The store was packed and buzzing with people. This is super unusual for Thursdays. The main reason I shopped on that day of the week was because it was not packed. On this particular Thursday you could find some people masked while shopping.

The next unusual thing I noticed at Costco was the empty refrigeration meat containers. Not a single piece of chicken was in the store. This was so hard to believe. I bumped into a former coworker. After exchanging pleasantries, I asked her if she felt something strange going on or was it just me. That is when she said that she thought people were reacting to the threat of the Covid virus spreading. Her feelings were confirmed when I rounded over to the toilet paper area and discovered the entire floor to ceiling stocking area was completely depleted of any kind of bathroom tissue.

Small Changes at School

Leading up to the next week at school, students were discussing Leprechaun traps. We were also beginning our unit on double digit subtraction with regrouping. (As any second-grade teacher will tell you, subtraction with regrouping is a challenging hurdle for seven-year-olds.) Although the students were ready to take on the many ways they could decompose numbers, it was a transition period. Mild anxiety was already lurking in the perimeter of the classroom. It just hadn’t taken a front row seat yet.

As I mentioned earlier, our anxiety wasn’t unwarranted. The Covid pandemic and school closures matched all the terror, fear, and anxiety our school community had experienced the previous summer when the foothills next to the school were set on fire by an arsonist. The amount of political unrest at that time, coupled with this act of terror, really caused our community to panic. It was hard to separate truth from fiction. Was this an activist? Were activists setting random fires to split the city’s resources so they could then pillage through local residential homes? For the first time in my life, I felt a serious personal threat to myself and my family. Although the fire was put out and an arrest was made, the fear of the upcoming Covid school closure added to the anxiety that had previously unfolded in the lives of these seven-year-olds. It felt as though each new event fell like a snowflake to an ever-increasing imminent avalanche of tragedies.

The Week of March 13th, 2019

Anxiety took center seat on Friday, March 13th. That week, students started seeing a heightened level of cleaning taking place. Each day, school desks would get wiped down. Door knobs were disinfected. Procedures for coughing and sneezing socially were being reviewed in the classroom. There was a definite undercurrent flowing on campus of unspoken fear and concern. And that’s when I heard the words that will stamp my timeline forever. “Mrs. Gentry, is it here yet?” My mind was split with trying to decipher the question. Is it here yet? Is what here, I’m thinking of what could this little one student possibly be talking about. Such a vague question. And that’s when I took the leap and asked, are you talking about the virus? To which more than one student replied, “Yes!” And that’s when I knew we had a problem and it was time to address it.

How Do You Describe Covid to a Child?

I sat my students down and explained that it’s not quite like a green cloud of evil crawling over the hills or like a blanket of thick fog in the early mornings of February. We talked about colds and how this virus was similar and different. I reminded them that they already knew what to do and we would just have to practice it more often. I doubt my little conversation helped calm the fears they were seeing develop over time, both at home and within their classroom.

By midweek disinfecting after class became routine. The struggle to understand why children seemed to be safe but not the elderly was becoming an uncomfortable familiar conflict in my head. It led to a lot of questions about the students being the carriers and should the adults start protecting themselves.

Note: How Covid Affected Student Learning  – Part 2 will be published on August 9, 2022.