[blindkid] Justifying a Specialized Environment for a Visually-Impaired Child

Fri Oct 14 18:56:36 UTC 2011

Never take legal advice from school personnel.  They are often not well versed in the law and what they think is the law is often not the case.   You must educate yourself on the law and your child's rights.  The suggestion to check out wrightslaw.com is a very good one.  It is full of information regarding the law, your rights and how to deal with school personnel.  

Always make sure you document your requests and conversations.  Remember what Pete Wright says, if it wasn't written down it wasn't said.  If it wasn't written down it never happened.

I have a 8 year old son who has some vision.  His early education was in a small class with 3 or 4 other children who had some vision loss or was blind.  His last semester in early education we moved into the typical pre-school class so he would be exposed to a larger classroom with sighted peers.  He is currently in 2nd grade and has been in a mainstream classroom since K.    He receives one-on-one Braille instruction and O&M.from his blindness skills teacher.  We incorproate his Braille into his classwork as he is a dual media learner. 

Chantel L. Alberhasky
419 Boonville Avenue
Springfield, MO 65806
417.865.4444

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From: Richard Holloway <rholloway at gopbc.org>
To: empwrn at bellsouth.net; "NFBnet Blind Kid Mailing List, (for parents of blind children)" <blindkid at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: [blindkid] Justifying a Specialized Environment for a Visually-Impaired Child

Excellent point Marie. That makes me think of one really critical detail as well. Hopefully this never happens, but if it comes up-- in case you disagree with an IEP-- that is, if a meeting comes to an end and you feel the IEP is not right or not complete, simply don't sign it. You have no requirement to sign it just to close out the meeting for them.

Further, if you do sign and then you change your mind, you can call for a new IEP at any time. They don't have to like it, but they do have to deal with it. The problem there is that they end up with a current  IEP "in force" until you change it in the next IEP, so they are less motivated to act quite as quickly to resolve things.

it will probably never come up, but just in case keep it in mind! I will mention for example, that in our case the worst we've ever had in an official IEP was that it ran really long before things were worked out. I think our most grueling meeting ran a little over 4 hours with around a dozen people in it. On the other hand, our last one was less than an hour. (They aren't all terribly painful!)

There was post fairly recently with a link to some IEP resources I think. If I can find it I'll repost or maybe the author of that will recall it.

Richard

On Oct 14, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Marie wrote:

> Hi Mary,
> 
> Other people here are much better informed about the specialized environment part of your question so I'll let you hear from them on that one. 
> 
> As far as the IEP process, I think it's very important that you understand your role and power as your child's first advocate. I highly recommend the Wrightslaw website (google Wrightslaw, sorry I don't have it readily available). There is lots of great information on the site and they have books which explain the IEP process and your role quite well.
> 
> Above all, if your child is to remain in public school or under public school services, remember that you need a team and though your team members do not always agree with you, it is best to keep things in a team frame of mind. Then if things get bad and you ever go to court over team squabbles, you are the reasonable person that maintained the cool head and understood the law.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> Marie 
> 
> sent via the Verizon Network from my Blackberry
> 
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