Telephone and Email Consultation
Telephone
and Email conferences and consultations form an essential part of every
advocacy intake and review. Often what brings parents to an advocate or
attorney is a school crisis that seems to need immediate intervention and is
most often a symptom of a failing school environment or untreated
disability. It is through this review dialog that the advocate can
pinpoint the issues at hand so that parents/clients can make informed decisions
about the next steps in advocacy before investing time and money.
Review of Records
A Records Review is where the skilled advocate can get an overall
feel for what schools and professionals have done to aid a student. The
records should disclose what the school sees as the issues, what the
educational strengths and weaknesses of the student are and what the school is
doing or not doing to address the students’ individualized needs.
Advisement and Interpretation
of Diagnostic Reports
Another critical component in making informed decisions about the
future education of your child or adult student is understanding what the
testing results indicate, what the professionals’ impressions are and how the
professional interpreted the collected data. A tremendous amount of
diagnostic testing can be impacted upon by outside factors, such as the
training of the professional, what organizations the professional belongs to,
economic and political pressures placed on the professional by their employers
and the general bias and prejudges that affect us all.
Here the advocate can provide unbiased interpretations to the raw
testing results that have not been influenced by outside factors or at least
are biased toward aiding the student. The advocates’ role here is also to
help the parent/client understand the technical terms and critical indicators
revealed by the testing.
Reports are written for other professionals. This often creates a
language barrier between the diagnostician and a parent or student.
Unfortunately, the technical terms are an important form of shorthand that
professionals use to convey a tremendous amount of information in only a few
words.
Here a trained advocate can identify key terms in the diagnostic
reports that have significant impact on the education of the student that an untrained
individual might not see or understand.
Plan of Action and Strategy
A plan of action can include doing nothing, requesting an
independent evaluation, requesting an IEP meeting, asking for changes in the
student’s program and sometimes a change in placement (school). In
general, a plan of action is a step-by-step outline of what we plan to do and
who’s responsible for doing the specific tasks.
Educational/Historical
Memorandums
Some clients choose is to have a detailed memorandum
written (part educational, part historical) laying out your child’s educational
issues in a narrative that chronicles a historical view based on fact, of the
events that led to the current issue(s). Additionally this memorandum can not
only illustrate specific non-compliance issues, it can contain the appropriate
interventions needed to allow your child to lead, as much as possible, a
productive and successful life. This memorandum is also good preparation
for due process. In the event that your case may wind up in Due Process all of
your child’s records along with the memorandum can be handed off to an
attorney. Otherwise parents and/or myself can then use this memorandum as an
intervention outline and depending on its content, it can even be used to
convince the local educational agency to make the necessary educational
adjustments for you child.
Letters setting out Reasonable
Accommodations and Auxiliary Aids
These documents are designed to accompany the students’ Educational/Historical
Narrative Memorandum. The letters lay out our position and a resolution
meeting is requested to return to the table and come to an agreement.
