The Paternalism Problem (and a fix?)

Picture your local school board. Except all of its members are school principals appointed by their fellow school district principals.

No problem… at least you have an parent advisory board, …

BUT the superintendent controls the parent advisory board member list (which they keep private), when the meetings are, what gets put on the agenda, and in many cases, just doesn’t bother to keep the board going.

Sound insane? Undemocratic? Foxes guarding the henhouse?

Welcome to the world of Special Education governance in California.

… and what does Disability Services oversight look like for you?

California has a bizarre and convoluted system for overseeing special education. Each county in the state has one or more Special Education Local Planning Authority (SELPA). It has a director and is overseen by a governing board (typically composed of local district superintendents). There is a California Education Code required Community Advisory Committee (CAC) that is supposed to provide input into the system, but they are often non-functional or kept under the thumb of the local SELPA Director. The CAC has no formal relationship to the Governing Board.

Formally, special education funding from the state and federal government pass down through the SELPA and reporting passes up through the SELPA to the state and federal government.

In some sense, the SELPA is kinda-sorta a separate county-level oversight organization for special education.

Note the lack of actual accountability to the public in general and special education parents in particular.

It is a broken piece of a broken system.

We need real, democratic oversight – either a publicly elected SELPA Governing Board or one made up of community members appointed by our county school board members.

The entire idea of a CAC reduces the role of parents of disabled students to second class citizens in the oversight of their own public education programs. While some CACs do good work similar to a PTA for local disabled students – that function is not the same.

Public election or public appointment of SELPA board members can be started today, but it also needs to be addressed at the state-level.

Contact your county school board members, state representatives and senators to push for this change today.

This is a draft Letter to the Editor and set of talking points for my local elected officials (at least one of whom is on this mail list)… if you have comments or are interested in helping to address this issue, let me know!

I don’t think this is an anomaly.

Who oversees your disability services and education programs?

How much effective public oversight is there of these programs where you live?

….I write this in July 2025 as the US Congress and President Trump has just passed a bill that will gut the Medicaid program in the US which funds both healthcare for many disabled people as well as the actual disability services programs in the US.

While disability rights have done pretty well in court, we haven’t focused on, or been successful in changing the politics of disability programs and our culture…

More to follow.