Special Education Information

When searching the web for legal information in special education, it often seems as if though much of the information is geared towards parents. When searching for answers for the litigation case that is currently going on at my school, with parents, I often find it hard to find any information to help the school. There is a lot of information out there to help parents and when reading through the articles on the WETA television website, I have once again come across information geared towards the parents.

Peter Wright and Pamela Darr Wright (2007) write an article geared towards helping parents understand what information they need to obtain and understand in order to support their beliefs. They write about how parents need to understand tests and measurements and need to have accurate evidence to support what they believe. They provide some great examples of different cases and what reasons parents may have to argue about their child’s education. One example they give is on a child named Shannon Carter, who has a learning disability. When Shannon finally became eligible for special education services, through a private evaluation, the parents felt that she needed a more intensive program because, she would only gain four months progress in a whole year. After Emory and Elain Carter brought their concerns to administration and were denied a more intensive program they requested a special education due process hearing. Hearing officer agrees with the school in that the school IEP was appropriate. The parents then had to enroll Shannon in a Trident Academy, asked for reimbursement and received it. The authors offer some great examples by using real life examples. It is great that they actually take the given examples and explain...

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...use of working at a private school for autism and now working in the public school, building a program for autism. So, all three of these articles contain information important for my professional environment.

After reading through these articles on the WETA website, it has just added to my judgment that much of the information contained on special education legality issues, is geared towards parents. It’s sad to say but often times the parents are correct about their child’s needs. There are times when they are not and they may be just setting their child up to fail, but most information that I have come across shows how the parents are often correct. These three articles are a wonderful resource of parents, but are also great resources for college students or anyone of interest to look at because; they do contain a lot of important and informative information.