Get Organized to Advocate for Your Child with Special Needs 

There is no better advocate for a child than a parent or guardian. Fortunately for my son and me, I am an educator with extensive background and experiences in elementary and special education. But how do we truly empower parents who come to an IEP meeting without a background in education? I grapple with this question every time I attend a meeting on my son’s behalf.

I think some basic organizing and preparing would help many parents and guardians feel better informed, more empowered, and truly enabled to advocate for their child. If you have child with special needs, examine the following key strategies.

Organize! Organize! Organize!
Organize two binders for documentation.

• A health binder. Insert a calendar in the front for marking illness, medical appointments, medication, and examining patterns. Depending upon your child’s needs, sharing knowledge of his health may be very important in educational planning and updating for the teachers.
• An education binder. Keep all academic information related to special education, including IEPs, home-visit reports, and other important materials. For filing ease, place the most recent paperwork on top. Insert a blank pad of paper in the interior pocket of the binder for note taking. Make sure a writing implement is always accessible to you in this binder.

Simple tabbing with logical headings will suffice in the education binder, such as “eligibility information,” “progress reports,” “parental rights and responsibilities,” and “IEPs.” Just entering the special education meeting with your binder in hand will make you feel more confident and prepared for the agenda. Such preparation will appear to be a notation of a solid investment in your child’s education—and that you care and take the team approach very seriously. It claims “you are a stakeholder” and expect to be treated with respect and dignity.

Keep these binders in an accessible location in your home so that you can find them easily, write down questions, and remind yourself of goals.

Request! Request! Request!
Request therapy providers share any documents that present baseline data on typical development (e.g. a chart that delineates which speech sounds normally appear at what age).

Use! Use! Use!
Use parent resource centers for research and to find support groups. These resources are for you and typically are free. The time invested in resource centers and communicating with support groups will benefit you and your child two-fold.

Ask about government-funded programs for your child. For example, the federal government funds an excellent books-on-tape program for visually impaired and physically handicapped persons.

Go! Go! Go!
Go to every meeting with your list of questions. Date and number each question and allow space for the responses from the education team. Keep this pad in the education binder for future reference and use.

It might be a powerful message if school districts were to provide parents and guardians the education binder at the very first meeting. We know parents and guardians leave every IEP meeting with a stack of papers that should be stored someplace. This method keeps the paper trail more organized from the start.

I am well aware that a simple binder cannot fully prepare parents and guardians for all of the special education meetings in their future. I do strongly believe that being (and feeling) organized is a very important step in helping parents and guardians feel more empowered as their child’s best advocate.
 

Dr. Shannon Melideo is an assistant professor in the School of Education and Human Services at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. This article is reprinted with permission from Parenting Special Needs Magazine.

October 2009