Anon

There is a steady, measured campaign going to in this country to deny children of protections of their civil rights. A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a link to a late-2017 WaPo article describing how the federal Department of Education rescinded 72 policy documents that outlined the rights of children with disabilities. It is now almost ten months later, and what's going on has gotten worse--IMO, much worse. Links to Obama-era documents, including documents about countering exclusionary discipline and mitigating the school-to-prison pipeline, have been removed from Department of Education websites. In addition, the federal Department of Education recently changed its policy regarding the investigation of alleged civil rights violations, saying that it was an unreasonable burden to investigate settings where multiple violations had been reported, and so those investigations are being dropped. As expressed by the New York Times, the "new protocol...allo

Let's talk IEPs. It's coming to the time of year when parents and teachers are thinking about thinking about returning to school. In the social media world, families are once again beginning to share templates for cute little cheat-sheets that summarize the strengths and deficits of their kids with disabilities, listing the accommodations and teaching strategies that have been included in their children's IEPs. I know that teachers appreciate this. And I know that parents do this all the time. Such cheat sheets can be helpful. After all, teachers have a lot of children to teach. The children have many needs and the teacher is just one person. Teachers have countless IEPs and 504s, and it's a lot to handle. But, for a moment, imagine people in other professions making the same sort of statements. Imagine a surgeon saying that it's hard to keep track of the information about all of his or her patients. Imagine a sports coach saying that it's diffic