Action | Revisions to comply with the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004” and its federal implementing regulations. |
Stage | Proposed |
Comment Period | Ended on 6/30/2008 |
Good evening, I am speaking tonight on behalf of my son, a special education student who will have life-long disabilities to deal with, and I am here to express my opposition to the proposed regulations and to offer the BOE several alternatives for inclusion into the proposed regulations to level the playing field for children and their parents.
You have heard tonight a long list of changes proposed by the VDOE which will have major impacts and will detrimentally affect children with disabilities and their parent’s advocacy efforts. The changes are extensive and unnecessary.
Examples of some of the major issues include, but are not limited to:
· eliminating parental consent to end some or all of a child’s special education and/or related services
· Increasing the federal time frame for eligibility from 60 calendar days to 65 business days. That is an additional 3-5 weeks.
· adding limitations to when schools need to provide PWN
· eliminating statewide referral procedures and timelines for Child Study Committees
· adding the arbitrary refusal of LEAs to convene an IEP meeting if the LEA thinks a parent’s request is unreasonable
· shifting the responsibility for the entire due process hearing system exclusively under the supervision of the VDOE
· allowing schools to amend a parent’s due process complaint but not allowing parents to amend a school’s complaint
· allowing VDOE to remove itself from being a party in a due process
· inappropriately using federal authorities to add restrictive and unnecessary eligibility criteria for some disability categories
· allowing school personnel to “diagnose” (versus “identify”) autism if the child is over 3 years old when they have no qualifications to do so
· eliminating the use of short term objectives except for those pre-determined children being educated under the VAAP system
· eliminating the due process implementation plan
· reducing the number of progress reports provided to parents that measure the status of a child’s education
· removing parental input from the functional behavioral assessment team
· eliminating LEA requirement to submit copies of school policies and procedures to the VDOE for approval
All of these changes are to the detriment of the children whom the IDEA laws and regulations are designed to protect. As you have heard tonight, the changes proposed by the VDOE are written to benefit school districts.
The proposed regulations were not revised in an attempt to bring
How is it possible for the BOE to make decisions that will affect children with disabilities when you and the public were not provided a side-by-side comparison identifying the changes proposed by VDOE and the reasons for the changes? When the BOE did not request this vital information, parents and advocates did, but we were denied such a comparison by the VDOE.
How can the BOE rely solely on the accuracy of the summaries developed by the very organization that proposed the massive changes in favor of the school districts in the first place? Isn’t this the fox guarding the hen house? Why hasn’t the BOE insisted on an impartial organization to review and summarize the comments and the impact that the changes will have on children and parents, and school divisions?
How could the BOE have accepted the Economic Impact Analysis done by the VDOE? What kind of analysis is: Quote “The benefits likely exceed the costs for one or more proposed changes. There is insufficient data to accurately compare the magnitude of the benefits versus the costs for other changes.” End quote. If there is insufficient data to report on the costs v. benefits then leave the regulations alone until the VDOE produces the data for public review.
It is clear from the list of examples that I just presented that the VDOE and its staff are advocates for the LEA's.
The facts speak for themselves. The proposed VDOE changes leave no alternative for parents but to force them into financially draining due process situations.
To bring this unbalance back to a level playing field I recommend that the following changes be clearly and succinctly added to the proposed regulations.
Governor Kaine has made his position very clear. Unless there is some incredibly persuasive explanation why the regulations have to be changed to diminish the role of parent’s involvement in key educational decisions, he says we’re going back to the drawing board. We need to go back to the drawing board. The impact of these proposed regulations will diminish decades of hard work that has established FAPE for students with disabilities. The current regulations are superior to the proposed regulations and do not require the wholesale revisions that is being proposed by the VDOE. I urge you to reject the proposed regulations in its entirety.
Thank you.
Jackie Simchick