Children are our priority. Ensuring their needs are met is our goal.
Short version: Founder and editor of Special Education Action. Mother of two. Wife of 25+ years. Daughter, sister, and friend. Army Brat. Reader. Writer. Believer in action, change, and walking the talk. Books, skiing, and family are my happy places.
Long version: I’m an Army Brat who grew up in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Fort Ord, California; Fayetteville, North Carolina; and Heidelberg, Germany; and who landed at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, where I obtained a B.F.A. in creative writing.
After college and marrying my oldest friend, I moved to Virginia, launched a company, had kids, spent 20+ years helping bestselling authors and journalists, publishing houses, award-winning indie and documentary filmmakers, and other entrepreneurs and business leaders create what mattered to them and connect their creations with what mattered to their audiences—to include propelling their projects to bestselling and/or award-winning status, featured by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Howard Stern.
Along the way, I saw J.M. struggle to obtain services from Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) for her son who struggled with Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia. For years, I listened to her talk and cry as we ran (and often walked) laps around Burke Lake, training for the annual Army 10 miler. During those laps, she schooled me on special education.
And then Dyslexia and other surprises entered my home—and I realized special education was a foreign language, that the years of listening to J.M.’s experiences were more tip of the iceberg than master class. I made it a few pages into J.M.’s copy of Pete and Pam Wright’s Wrightslaw before giving up and spending a lot of time crying. Nothing made sense. How could one of the largest and most well-funded school districts in the U.S. refuse to help children in need?
And then one day things started clicking, Wrightslaw became my constant companion, and I realized I knew more about special education law than the educators at the IEP meetings. Unfortunately, that knowledge came too late to fully address the Dyslexia and other surprises that FCPS refused to address for so long. When those surprises introduced themselves to my family over a decade ago, I wish I’d had then the knowledge I have now.
I can’t change the past, but I hope that some of what I learned might help other families, educators, and students change the future for children who have special education needs—whether it is learning to write IEP goals or state complaints, filing Office for Civil Rights complaints or Freedom of Information Act requests, or simply learning enough about special education rights to ensure decisions made are in the best interest of students.
In 2020, I deep sixed the company I launched in 2002 and pivoted 20+ years of researching, writing, editing, and community outreach toward special education. The Special Education Action site launched the same year and Special Education Action obtained 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit publisher in 2022.
There is no one-size-fits all answer. It depends on the student and it could depend on the class, too.
Any number of things could lead to students experiencing fatigue, headaches, eye strain, and/or other struggles that impact them as the day progresses.
What should be in Individualized Education Program (IEP) progress reports and what actually is in IEP progress reports often are two different things.
Imagine it is time for your annual work review. Your employer presents a report that states you didn’t make progress, or didn’t make enough progress, toward your goals for the year. However, when you read the report, there’s no data backing your employer’s decision, nor is there a performance plan for moving forward. You don’t know why you didn’t progress and you don’t know what you need to do in order to progress.
The same issues occur with IEP progress reports.
I’ve never understood why Individualized Education Programs (IEP) include goals for quarterly measurements. As a parent, if my kids failed to do their chores for a week, I wouldn’t wait until the end of the quarter to assess the situation. Why wait an entire quarter to address a problem that’s clearly getting worse? Why not assess sooner and narrow the goal until it can be expanded in full—or expand the goal if the student achieves the goal sooner than expected?
OCR states the document “is intended to respond to questions frequently raised to the U.S. Department of Education (Department), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by individuals who file complaints and/or contact OCR for technical assistance.”
“The IEP will share reading data with parents on a monthly basis.”
After six months of meetings, your internal parent alarm starts going off because the data provided by the school doesn’t match what you’re seeing at home.
You submit a FERPA request for all reading data related to your child.
The FERPA response provides you negative reading data that the school didn’t previous share with you.
You want to complain to the school and/or submit a complaint to the state, but . . .
The school followed the IEP. It did share reading data on a monthly basis. There wasn’t anything in the IEP that stated all data had to be provided.
