How well are we educating our disabled children in the US? It is a hard question to answer, but we can use US Department of Education data to make a start. This is the first part of the Disability Almanac report on the state of Special Education in the US for 2023. IDEA, the Individuals…
While it is great seeing so many parents here fighting for access to higher mathematics, I’m here asking for Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) to bother to teach my son to add. There are around 60 to 90 specific common core standards for each grade in elementary school which get turned into the 30…
Palo Alto Unified School District’s 504 Plan demographics are substantially different than California’s or the rest of the US states with around 7% of our students having a 504 plan (see attachments) vs. the national average of 2.7%, California at 4% and the highest state average New Hampshire at 6.2% (tab 2 of “Enrollment-Overall”) Thank…
Question – is PAUSD under-identifying SWD Issue – data is not available on students who only have 504 plans This is depressing across the board. There is a substantial excess number of SWD absentee students. This number usually surprises people by how high it is. The proportion of SWD suspensions vs. total suspensions is appalling…
Disabled students in segregated education settings get 23 percent fewer minutes of instruction per day… and it adds up My son is autistic. Shortly after his diagnosis by our insurer, we started the Special Education process. We didn’t know anything. Though we were given “Procedural Safeguards”, we had no clue and we trusted the school…
I am attending a mini-writing retreat today and tomorrow and just wrote this from a prompt. Thinking about Rosemerry Watola Trommer’s poem, “Hope.” I hate the word hope. I always have. This could be a reflection of my lifelong battle with clinical depression or my adult life as the mother of a now 33 year…
The IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) guarantees that every student eligible for special education receives an Individualized Education Program (IEP) documenting how their disability impacts their learning, describing their educational needs, setting annual goals in all areas of need, and outlining the services supports and placement in their least restrictive environment they require to…
How inclusive are our schools for Students with Disabilities? According to the latest Department of Education Report for 2021, 15.5% of all disabled students in the US are in highly segregated settings (either in a separate classroom for more than 60% of the day or a separate school). Top 5 inclusive States Bottom 5…
This video shows an excellent example of Proactive Inclusion for a disabled student, in this case an autistic girl. Proactive inclusion is not merely physically including a child in a classroom or other environment, but working to ensure that they are as fully incorporated into the educational, social, and other aspects of the program as…
A major report on the state of Special Education in California finds that big changes are needed. California has one of the worst rates of inclusion in the US – in the bottom 3 of the 50 states using data from the US Department of Education. Some selected findings For students with an IEP, including…
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