Children are our priority. Ensuring their needs are met is our goal.
“Reduced Load” is an accommodation that is wordsmithed like a politician’s speech. It doesn’t matter if your gut reaction to it is good or bad. Either way, you’re left wondering what it really means.
A reduced load is exactly what it sounds like: it is a reduction of the load the student must address.
What’s confusing about that?
However, being taught the necessary skills to read and write involves more than teaching children encoding and decoding. It involves learning how to hold a book and a pencil, tracking words on a page or screen, learning what strategies to use when fatigue or frustration overcome them, learning how to best advocate when they are struggling, identifying assistive technology to help them and teaching them how to use the assistive technology, and identifying and providing the specially-designed instruction needed to teach students this other side of reading and writing, and how to practice and perfect it.
Here’s another curious comment that appears in the same document:
“This is my justification for the length of the narrative in this case—they made me do it!! ? I wanted to separate the three categories of requests that Parent had initiated las summer — IEP, ESY, Reevaluation, Reading inventory testing. Sheesh. It shows the confusing atmosphere that FFX handled professionally. She was making lots of FFX staff work, sometimes in conflict with others. Please edit and make it better, ML.”
Parents have key roles in evaluations preceding eligibility determinations, in the actual eligibility determinations, and in IEP development following determinations. For evaluations, as one example, members must draw upon information from various sources, including parent input. This doesn’t mean schools simply have to consider parent input and then decide if they’ll use it or not. They are required to draw from parent input.
In this article, you’ll find federal regulations (as well as Viriginia regs for those in the area), that define and guarantee parents’ rights.
If something is accessible, it is often an alternative method of access.
For example, a student might need a ramp and an elevator as alternatives to the stairs used by his peers.
Another student might need Braille or large text as an alternative to the text provided to her peers.
Young students might not know their accommodations, while high school-aged students might be embarrassed to request accommodations in class, where their peers can hear them make the request.
In all age groups, the students might struggle with advocacy skills, which result in the student being afraid to ask for accommodations—or in a student feeling it is useless to ask for accommodations, because the school will still do whatever it wants to do.
When compensatory education is proposed, you might face a school district that wants to provide it within a set period of time. Consider, instead, asking that it be provided until each minute owed has been provided in full.
Why?
In its fact sheet, titled “Providing Students with Disabilities Free Appropriate Public Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Addressing the Need for Compensatory Services Under Section 504,” USDOE Office for Civil Rights ( cited 34 C.F.R. § 104.6(a) and Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U.S. 181, 189 (2002) in support of the above definition.