Getting Started with Self-Advocacy
Learning how to support your child’s education with self-advocacy is a process. It can be rewarding, difficult, empowering, and time-consuming. With training and an advocate to guide you through the process, you will be better able to ask for what your child needs and their right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE).
Each of these videos covers a topic you will encounter at an IEP or 504 plan meeting. There is additional information on self-advocacy available here.
If the IEP process worked the way it was designed to work: needs drive assessments, assessments drive goals, and goals drive supports, services, and placements. Every step of this is key, and must be done thoroughly and appropriately.
When parents are new to IEPs, they often hope that the school district will present them with all the supports and services their child needs. They assume that the district has tested the student in all suspected areas of need. This is rarely true.
There are times we—as special education advocates—see assessments where a student is in the first or second percentile, and the District calls this ‘low average’ and says the child doesn’t need services. This is unacceptable.
On a daily basis, we see evaluations that only cover some aspects of the child’s needs or even under-report those needs. We see poorly-written, hard to measure goals. Many parents think if there are percentages in a goal, the goal must be specific and measurable. Many goals are written so that ‘progress’ measurement is entirely subjective. The services your child receives moving forward depends on these goals.
The challenge for many parents is they are working, have young children at home, and do not know the special education rules the way schools know them. Schools can object to something parents suggest by coming up with a perfectly reasonable sounding explanation. It may or may not be true. It is challenging to figure all this out, real time, while in a meeting with 10 people looking at you.
School districts are skilled at withholding or ‘interpreting’ information that you could use to benefit your child. Advocates are specifically trained to ensure school districts are truthful during the IEP process.
These videos are for informational purposes and are not considered training to become an advocate.