There’s an organization in Phoenix called Raising Special Kids. One of the things they do is provide training. I’ve seen the trainings advertisements, but never went to any of them until last week. They had a class on parents’ rights in special education. Since a few things during Maria’s IEP meeting made me feel a bit uncomfortable, I thought it was timely.
The instructor (Vicki) was excellent. She has a 12-year old daughter with similar issues as Maria, so she could relate. 5 parents were there, which is a good size since it was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. She went over IDEA, Title 15 of Arizona Revised Statutes, R7-2-401-405 of Arizona Administrative Code, Section 504 of Rehabilitation Act, ADA. She talked about the steps of the IEP process (evaluation, needs, goals [IEP], placement) and said that the parent is the leader or facilitator (can’t remember her exact words) of the IEP meeting (really?), and differentiated between the parents’ rights and their responsibilities. It was valuable and enlightening. The only two downsides were that we didn’t have time for much discussion among the parents (where much of the learning occurs), and the traffic was horrendous on the way back. Other than that, no complaints!
The other recent training I went to was at Southwest Human Development, another beautiful building downtown-ish, on feeding. It’s a series of 10 workshops (1/month) by Marsha Dunn-Klein on children’s feeding challenges. The first one was very crowded. They combined the parents and therapists into 1 session because of budget woes. She provided an overview of the “get permission” approach to feeding your child. The premise is the parent determines what the child eats, where, and when. The child determines the pace. It’s all about building trust and reading signals, etc. It’s similar to what we do with Maria–with a few tweaks. I’m looking forward to attending more sessions, this one was rather general. Again, it was short so not much time for parents to talk about their stories. The website, PopsicleCenter.com, has more info.
I suppose I’m going to have to read the laws and regs to become an even stronger advocate for Maria. I’m curious how much of a challenge her new school will be. Since they’re only in their 4th year of including special needs kids in with the general education kids, they’re new at it. They seem overwhelmed by all of Maria’s needs, but as Andy said, Maria will teach them a lot! I just need to work with them to make sure they and she are successful… (and finish the taxes, and complete the assignments at work that I’m behind on, and, and, and…)
At work, they’re getting even more serious about ensuring all the documents we put on our website are 508 compliant (section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal governments to make all electronic files accessible to their employees and to the public). I thought we were already doing that, but apparently there’s a few steps we forgot. I told the division chief who’s in charge of it that this is very important to me because of my daughter and he told me that he thinks of her everytime we do something with 508. That was a nice compliment. I’m never sure how much my co-workers know about Maria…so that was real nice to hear.