STRATEGY: Be Selfish for a Moment for Your Child in Special Education
Are you the parent who is attending the PTO meetings looking to see how you can help the organization change special education habits or policies because you are confident it will trickle down to your child eventually. (Hint: Eventually is too late.)
Are you the parent who is out educating other parents on how parental rights work because you know if you educate just a few more (hundred) parents you can all ban together for change?
Let’s take a reality check. Your child needs you to be their advocate first. In real world of special education advocacy, big changes don’t happen often and they do happen to late for the parents who were advocating for the issues.
What’s a better approach?
Keep your focus on your child, your family priorities and working with your special education team on assuring special education services are meeting your child’s needs.
Work on large group issues or district policies less than 25% of your time. Yes, we need help in creating long-term solutions for the district programs as a whole, but your child’s school career is too short to spend a large amount of time on these issues. A lot of people putting in a little bit of effort goes a really long way.
Please continue to educate parents about special education rights, services in your districts and share your positive and negative experiences in special education. Do not spend hours on the phone in these conversations. Those who want the information and help and plan on doing something for their children don’t have hours to spend on the phone with you either.
Bottom Line: If you want to win in the special education game, especially in this economy, it’s most important to keep your focus on the daily success of YOUR child and their program.
I’ve spent my time with parents for the past 15 years focused on preparing their children for the real world. My brother’s “real world” consists of no community job support available, no access to public transportation and no opportunities for furthering his education.
Bottom Line: If you live in Illinois – those things are hard to come by, if you can find them at all.
So in reality, I’ve decided to take my own advice. I will not be trying to fix the system. I will not be attending group rallies. I will not be finding families who want to work with me towards the bigger change in the future.
The time is now to focus on the home-front and put my brother first for more than just a passing moment. With changing focus onto my brother’s quality of life, we have achieved the following.
- He owns his own business and is working towards being the first person with Down Syndrome to walk across the corporate stage with recognition from the CEO at Shaklee.
- We assisted him in networking the opportunity for commercial cleaning with green products for improved safety of all. He now works in the community 2 days a week at a local therapy office. Thank you BDI Playhouse!
- We have advocated for him to retain his job at Walgreens through the down economy. Sure it’s only once a week, but we’ll take it as another positive opportunity out of the home.
Now is not the time to be shy about advocating for your child or your sibling. Our systems are broken and you need to tell people what you need, what your working towards and how you want to be part of the solution first for your family and second for the community at large.
