Law Blog Entry # 3 (February 23, 2020): Getting Your Ducks in a Row Parents contact my office for a lot of reasons. For example, some parents have children who are transferring from the Early Intervention Program to Preschool and fear losing important services such as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) or related services. The same may happen when a child goes through the "turning five" process in New York City as their child transfers from preschool to kindergarten. Other parents have children who are older and even though the parents have cooperated with the school district and in many cases have paid privately for tutoring and after school services, are still not seeing a sufficient amount of progress. It is very important for parents to keep in a safe place their child's entire educational file and to show these documents to the special education attorney who is reviewing their case. If a parent does not have these documents, they need to ask the school to provide the entire educational file. Very often, there are still unanswered questions concerning why a student is not making sufficient progress at school that require additional testing and evaluations. Sometimes, it is possible to obtaining funding from the school district for these evaluations. A private evaluation frequently makes the difference between obtaining an appropriate program as opposed to being locked in to a program that does not work. It is imperative for parents who suspect that their child's educational program is not meeting their needs to act quickly to allow time to obtain necessary testing and evaluations and the opportunity to meet with the school district to discuss the results and offer an appropriate program. It is also important for parents to begin educating themselves as early as possible about their child's special education needs and the types of programs and services that are available. In these situations, time is of the essence! Law Blog Entry # 2 (February 23, 2020): Since I wrote the article on "The Power of Pendency," I have been successful in obtaining pendency orders for students who have been attending private schools pursuant to stipulations of settlement that order the school district to fund the private school as the pendency placement because it is the operative placement that is actually functioning at the time that the parent's due process complaint was filed (see Example # 3 below). This is enormously helpful to the families, the schools, and of course the students who will benefit from pendency protection which maintains the "status quo" and obligates the school districts to pay the private school tuition on an ongoing basis while the parents and the school districts litigate. | |
Law Blog Entry # 1 (February 25, 2019): | |