The home/school connection and shooting the moon.

Image by Brandy Shaul via FlickrWhy are administrators required at case conferences? Simple. They commit funds and services. The end.

Administrators are the final authority on what can and cannot be implemented. Now, does the law say cost is not to be considered? Yes, it does, but the unspoken truth is that it is considered and will always be. That's why you have to have the admin present. Though the teacher is widely considered the primary representative,  his or her boss is the heavyweight.

And while parents hold directors of special education responsible for results in the classroom, school boards and superintendents squeeze them in the pocketbook more often than not. So what if we took the administration out of the picture? What would parents and teachers do if left to their own devices? Imagine a case conference with no politics involved.

Probably, teachers would do exactly what they wanted to do all along; write the perfect program for the student before them. What are they doing with an administrator's oversight? They are considering how best to meet the student's needs on the budget understood from the get-go. We all see the practical side. You have to know how much something costs, right?  You can't dream big on a budget.

Besides the obvious benefits of early intervention, there is a cost effectiveness to early investment in disabled children. Most development will happen during the school years, and the potential for development is the foundation for independence later in life. Clipping special education funding now will lead to larger bills in the future. It's the difference between 24 hour hospital care or assisted living with minimal assistance.

How do we get school districts on board?

We could do what we do now, and trust administrators to do the right thing. We could pass even more laws that we will weakly enforce. We could take a different road altogether, since what we're doing isn't working. How bout we take the administrator out of the conference till the end? And then his job is to get the desired services on his budget or broker some sort of solution with the family to keep impact on the child minimal.

We could put a premium on the parent/teacher relationship by removing external pressures to ensure that all recommendations are made in good faith and by the two or three most appropriate people in the child's life. Goal centered education should consider all the possibilities, and then break down the logistics. It's corny but true, that old saying; Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you land among the stars. Why not let our teachers shoot the moon?

Medical systems, education and juvenile courts; filling the doughnut hole

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A common occurance in Indianapolis, perhaps around the country, for special needs kids is slipping through the cracks. Usually when we hear that phrase, we think of kids in schools getting failed forward, moved on to the next grade without the performance to back it up. However, there is a much bigger crack in the pathway special needs kids are walking these days, and it begins with behavior.
As any parent can attest, behavior is a challenging aspect of developmental disorder. Quirky, jerky movements are the commonplace assumption for those outside the circle of a family dealing with disability, but this is the mildest kind of behavior. Aggressive behaviors happen in households all the time; hitting, pinching, biting, kicking. These behaviors can start a kid climbing the ladder of more and more restrictive educational environments. What happens when the ladder ends?
Professionals call it the doughnut hole. Just like Alice, a kid can disappear in that hole.
Let's Suppose . . .
A kid has severely aggressive behaviors. He's moved from general education to a special education inclusion classroom. He can't make it there, so he's off to a separate facility like RISE Learning Center or Damar, a live-in facility on the southwest side. He eventually lands in a six week program to work on his behaviors and tweak the medication. Medicaid or Insurance pays for it because a doctor sent him.
This child returns to the classroom after some improvement where he gets into a fight, and there have been a lot of fights because he has an emotional disability. Here's the trap; remember that medicaid or insurance already paid for a six week program that didn't work, so the school is left to make the call. However, if they do, the school district pays. This makes schools hesitate to make the call.
What will inevitably happen is a round of suspensions and placement changes while parents and teachers alike pull their hair out by the roots. This will go on until someone pulls the plug. That someone is usually a juvenile court judge. The child will then be placed in an extended treatment program using department of correction funds.
What's the solution?
Easy answers are hard to come by. Our medical system could change the way they do business and pay for unlimited hospitalizations, but that isn't likely, nor is it guaranteed to work. Our juvenile justice system actually has no choice by the time they are involved. Some action is required. That leaves the school, and funding just doesn't grow on trees.
We have to find the solutions and methods that work if we hope to close the doughnut hole. General education inclusion has to become far more successful than it generally is by utilizing peer training and behavior interventions that work in practice, not just in theory. Schools systems will have to become more aggressive in their inclusion programming, perhaps even better staffed.
Schools will have to recognize the importance of social training, especially for children on the autism spectrum. Right now, in Indiana schools the typical IEP reads that social skills training happens twice a week for fifteen minutes. It's important to realize that social skills training can happen all through the day wherever the opportunity presents itself, and educators have to take those opportunities.
It is inevitable that tax dollars will be spent on the children who slip through the cracks, but schools can intervene early in a child's education to stop that spiral into the justice system through comprehensive intervention. Until society finds a cure for every developmental and neurological disorder, there has to be a plan. Education is the best shot at early identification of need and delivery of service. The money Americans save by early investment in special education is unlimited. Diagnosis isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card, and adults with disabilities who commit crimes or pose a danger to others will be housed somewhere in our system. Educational intervention may be the only chance they have to avoid the revolving door of the justice system.

Related articles

• What Is Juvenile Rehabilitation? (brainz.org)
• Adaptive Behavior Techniques for Special Education Classrooms (brighthub.com)

Oops, We Did It Again

Perry Meridian Middle School in Indianapolis and RISE Special Services have done it again. The story found here at channel 6's website charges that teachers have once again used bad methods to correct good kids. There are better ways to correct behavior, but the Powers That Be don't seem to know it.

Documentation. Documentation. Documentation. To change a placement for a student or start an intervention of any kind, a family needs to be able to produce raw data on that student. In the absence of data, the school can be forced to comply with the request. Within the townships, there seems to be a standing policy to avoid documentation of behaviors. Why? Because a more restrictive environment is costly? Perhaps. It could be laziness. It could be inattention to detail; but, whatever the cause, it's pervasive.

The Director of Special Services has repeatedly denied the consideration of cost at case conference committees discussing placement. He has also discussed at length the 20,000.00 per child cost for sending students to RISE Learning Center in Perry Township. When requested, parents have been told on many occasions that the 20k price tag cannot be, or simply has not been, itemized to determine what the facility truly costs line by line. Some parents charge that it shouldn't be that high. The cost of a satellite classroom is a comparable 7,000.00, and GenEd settings cost even less.

School staff are blowing the whistle in all the townships, telling others that they have been told RLC is not an option for new students. Preschoolers are directed to the least restrictive setting automatically, however, no new students are assigned to the comprehensive intervention classrooms each year. As a parent, I can be my own source on that point. My son's class does not grow. I'd be overjoyed at that fact, if so many kids didn't pop up in bad placements every year. Putting a child in a less restrictive environment should be based on data that is routinely not done in the four townships. I believe some of this is cost cutting, but some of it is something else.

What does a separate facility do for students? Some will tell you they promote discrimination as surely as any segregated school ever did for African-American students. Some say it allows peers to avoid contact with disabled students and sets them up for prejudice. That could be considered true, if general education settings weren't appropriate for verbal, high functioning individuals. Children who need less intervention should ALWAYS be placed in these regular classes. Some would call it warehousing. That is a matter of opinion. I would call a bad placement with insufficient services warehousing, and through no fault of the schools that is exactly what is happening. They just aren't set up for the severely disabled.

What happens at RLC that is so different? Focused attention on behaviors and concentrated effort to make a child as academically and socially abled as possible with the intention of dialing back the intervention is the goal of that facility, which is one of two in the whole state. The goal should be inclusion, but including students without skills makes little sense. Satellite classes are understaffed and under trained in Rise Special Services Program which brings us right back to where this article started. OOPS.

We did it again.

Most Restrictive Environments

Every one knows the phrase, but so very many educators don't understand. My son attends RISE Learning Center in Indianapolis. It's considered one of these environments. However, let me tell you why it's least restrictive for him.

Darrel couldn't be given the time and attention in a gen ed setting or even a simple special ed. classroom to learn simple things like walking in the line or not hitting others to get attention. His understanding and his behavior would cause him to be ostracized socially and under-educated in a less restrictive environment.

D can't sit down for very long, and it's not just behavior. He CAN'T sit down for long periods of time. It is painful, uncomfortable, distressing. Regular academic environments have the restriction that you must. It must be done this way, and that makes them too restrictive for Darrel. This is the reason a more restrictive environment belongs on the continuum of services for special education students.

It shocks me everyday to meet professionals in education who are against these environments touting inclusion, inclusion, inclusion like it's the magic cure. We have numbers that inclusion has good side effects, but my question is; Has anyone actually looked at its effects in terms of effectiveness compared with intensive, comprehensive service environments like RLC? I doubt it. The severe end of the autism spectrum interferes with our preconceived notions. My hope is to see education truly individualized as we profess to want it. Inclusion isn't right for every child, or it may not be right for right now. With intensive work on behavior and symptoms of the spectrum, a child who would never be included like Darrel or who would never learn if included, might have a hope of inclusion in the future.

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Dick Lugar's Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Response.

Image via Wikipedia

After the economic recession in our country comes to a conclusion, a high priority may be extension of health insurance coverage and reform of many health care practices. When such changes occur, they are likely to be expensive and Americans will need to debate, even then, their priority in comparison to many other national goals. One reason why health care is likely to remain expensive is that major advances in surgical procedures, prescription drugs, and other health care practices have prolonged the lives of tens of millions of Americans and improved the quality of those additional years. The Washington Post, in a front-page story on July 26, 2009, mentioned that "the fight against heart disease has been slow and incremental. It's also been extremely expensive and wildly successful." Americans should not take for granted all of the advances in health care that have enriched our lives, but we sometimes forget that we require and even pray for much more medical progress in years to come, which is likely to be expensive.

This came in a response from Sen. Lugar this week to my letter about health reform. While I see his point that Americans are extending their lives through medical advances, he is a bit off here. You see, people in this country are not extending their lives beyond other industrial nations' averages. It just isn't factual to say healthcare is expensive because we're saving lives.

According to Opensecrets.org, these are Sen. Lugar's top 5 contributors:

arnes & Thornburg	$39,050
Eli Lilly & Co	$34,850
Ice Miller	$29,000
Cinergy Corp	$24,250
NorPAC	$20,710

Those numbers are not wholly representative as they are only individual contributions, but you get the point. Living in Indianapolis, I see the Lilly lobby machine at work. It makes government officials forget cogent facts like record-breaking profits that do NOT go back into research and development. In fact, even big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are recognizing that they need to get on the bus or be left at the stop, so why would the senator make the above argument?

Why would any of them? Because of campaign finance, in my opinion. Our system has a glaring, gaping hole in it. By allowing any industry subject to government regulation to give funds for campaigns, we are basically putting the fox in the hen house. Of course, our representatives should have the guts to go with their beliefs, but they obviously don't. I say this in optimism, because I hope Sen. Lugar knows these things to be false but said them anyway. You can fix corruption, but there is no known cure for stupid.