Time of Change: IDEA, FAPE and Educational Benefit

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One consequence of the recent presidential election for American families with autistic children in school is that the frameworks for special education that we have grown accustomed to are under threat.

Tara Haelle writes in Forbes about US Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions' hostile positions on inclusion and ill informed depictions of FAPE and IDEA:

Sessions also believes that the primary issue for most special education students is lack of discipline.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/ ... ec43db5dd8

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is hearing Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District. That case centers on defining what an "appropriate" public education is. Whatever the outcome of that case, it will impact all decisions that involve interpreting FAPE standards.



https://www.understood.org/en/community ... st-provide

Betsy DeVos is a worry, as well.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ans ... n-hearing/



DeVos seemed to have no understanding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, which requires public schools to provide free and appropriate education to all students with disabilities.

DeVos said that states should have the right to decide whether to enforce IDEA, but when Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) later told her that IDEA is a federal civil rights law and asked DeVos if she stood by her statement that it was up to the states to follow it, DeVos responded, “Federal law must be followed where federal dollars are in play.” Hassan then asked, “So were you unaware when I just asked you about the IDEA that it was a federal law?” DeVos responded, “I may have confused it.” DeVos did not protest when Hassan said she was upset the nominee didn’t understand the law and urged her to learn about it.

[Betsy DeVos apparently ‘confused’ about federal law protecting students with disabilities]

We have struggled so hard to figure this stuff out over the last few years.

Now our daughter is in a therapeutic private school, placed there by the school district because of the details of her IEP and IDEA. My son is in honors classes in high school, but this only works because of the details of his IEP.

It is very disturbing to me to think that almost every detail of all these processes and rules that we have learned may change and may be in the hands of very ignorant people.

I hate this.

I know. I think this is a scary time for a lot of people due to the uncertainty about competency and a host of other issues.

That said, I think the most vulnerable have the most to lose (as per usual).

A lot is going to depend on how much of an outcry there is amongst the Republican base. Disabilities affect people across political boundaries, and if there are enough (or important enough) people that care about this issue, maybe that will make the difference.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics ... 924413.php

A U.S. Department of Education website, empowering families of students with disabilities, has disappeared -- and already embattled Trump education chief Betsy DeVos may be to blame.

U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell want to know what happened to the vanished website, and have asked Education Secretary DeVos to put it back up.

The website was set up under President George W. Bush so educators, advocates and parents could get a "one-stop" explanation on the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), as well as know their rights under the disability law.


The resource has been inexplicably taken away. In a letter to DeVos -- whose confirmation both senators vocally opposed -- Cantwell and Murray explained:

"We are deeply concerned that prior to your confirmation and arrival at the Department, the centralized resource website for the IDEA became inaccessible to the public for more than a week, and is now redirecting people to a site for the Office of Special Education Programs.

The new website "lacks much of the information previously available," the senators wrote.

"The Department's failure to keep this critical resource operational makes it harder for parents, educators and administrators to find the resources they need to implement this federal law and protect the rights of children with disabilities," the senators told DeVos.

Edited to delete related stories link I did not realize was in there.

Last edited by ASDMommyASDKid on 13 Feb 2017, 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People are going to realize that a big mistake was made in electing Trump?

People were looking for a "change." We got "change," all right.

All those are relatively minor issues. Autism education truly is a minor issue. All the problems we have today come from the failure of educating neurotypical students. What I see is that most students lose their creativity by the time they get into high school, and most adults stop learning in their 20s. The scary part is not that only high-school graduates stop learning, but I've seen it also in young PhD holders. We never really solve the root problem, and then we worry about all the problems down the stream. Trust me, I've held a few sessions to teach parents how to make animation video clips on their devices (phones or tablets). It's very simple, a few strokes with your finger and a few clicks and you get a video done. They can't do it. These are things that 7-year-olds are doing nowadays in schools. Yet adults simply cannot acquire the skills of 7-year-olds. I had to give up. No wonder their autistic children grow up to be comatose adults. Our school system is churning out adults that cannot pick up any more skills once they are out of school. That's the root problem that we really ought to be solving.

Do people realize the pace of technology? Look at this video. I particularly like a sentence around 6:31, it says for college student in technical fields: "Half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study." Do people even realize that knowledge is not power anymore? Do people realize that knowledge is only a commodity?



Because our work force today is so unfamiliar with living inside the Technological Singularity, we have parents/educators and the whole society stuck in the same view of autism as Leo Kanner from 74 years ago. Nobody has a clue how to raise children on the spectrum. You tell parents to draw pictures, and they'll argue with you for years and years, until their children all turn into comatose adults, unable to get jobs, unable to hold on jobs. Everyone just keeps pushing for verbal and social development, and in the process waste their children's intellectual development away. Adults only want their children to be molded into an average neurotypical Joe. Driving a square peg into a round hole, so to speak. Adults celebrate big time when their autistic children can mimic one iota of neurotypical behavior. Yeah, keep celebrating, until your children go out there and all of a sudden realize, hey, if people out there want to hire a neurotypical Joe, they'll hire a neurotypical Joe and not your children. And that happens from one family to another. It's like a non-stop pipeline of doctors/parents/therapists/educators pushing one child after another off the cliff. What can you do? The failure did not just happen today, the root of the problem came from way back, when these doctors/parents/therapists/educators were themselves in school. Our education system has failed them.

Okay, what's your solution?