Parent Involvement and Special Ed Reform Podcast by David Poeschl.

Hello, my name is David Poeschl and I'm a parent adviser with Matrix Parents at Marin CIL. This is another in our series of monthly podcasts for the year 2024 to 2025.

So let me ask you this. You are the parent of a child with the disability, and you are at an IEP meeting. And what the school staff was saying just doesn't fit with what you know about your child. There may be like, glowing reports of excellent academic progress being made, but progress compared to what? They're three years behind in math.

And you're terribly concerned about graduating from high school and what's going to happen to your child. And so this in this talk, this, you know, this expression of confidence in your child, you're just not feeling that. Or how about the fact that your child's been removed several times from class this year for behavior issues, but the staff's telling you everything is fine, but you're seeing your child come home with the stress from school, discouragement, and the problems they're having with homework.

You're seeing this and a lot of times teams just aren't expressing that. An IEP meeting. So, you're not alone if you've noticed this at all. And almost to a person with the parents I speak to when I'm doing intakes and again, this is several hundred parents a year that I'm speaking, doing and having pretty deep conversations with. And there's often this feeling of disorientation when they're dealing with staff.

And it's I guess the most commonly expresses are my nuts, or is there something I'm not getting? And one of the most common things I have to do when we're, again, having that initial consultation is to assure them, no, you're not nuts that the reality is what you're perceiving it to be. And that's disconnect between the schools of the parents is not from the parent, it's from the institution.

So let me talk about, first a story that illustrates what I'm talking about. And I also want to talk about the biggest factor in who's gaslighted in this institutional way and who's not. And that one reason is the wealth and the sophistication of the parents involved. And there is research that shows that or indicates that this is the case.

And I had two personal experiences with this. And first, I was a coordinator in a district in one of the wealthiest areas of Los Angeles, and I was the secondary special ed coordinator. And during the time I was there, I chaired well over 2000 IEP meetings and a good percentage of those meetings. I'd say the majority of those meetings had either an attorney or an advocate president.

And sometimes both. So, there was a this sophistication, first of all, from the parents that, you know, usually had had significant amounts of money, and they brought attorneys, they brought advocates. They also knew what was going on in the classroom. These are the folks that were getting weekly reports. And, you know, behavior analyzes and getting progress and goals frequently.

And having conversations with the teacher and being fully informed about what's going on in a class. So you can imagine what that media was like. There were no secrets. There was no staff hiding any information or, you know, hiding is the wrong word. It's really, I guess, parsing the information. It's a way of kind of funneling the information into the format it needs.

It needs to be, that doesn't happen because everybody in that meeting knew what was going on. Everybody knew the legal issues. Everybody knew what the what the practice issues were. So we had really good IEP meetings with open discussions and problem solving. Okay. That was there. Let me let me move on to my next district where I was, I got a job as the pupil personnel services director in a relatively small elementary school district in the poorest community in the adjoining county to La Union and Shawnee County, to L.A.

And, there I think we had a dozen elementary schools. So it was it was a smallish district. And what I was a pupil personnel services director, which not only included special education, but also included oversight of attendance and discipline. And there was a community schooling program. So it was a variety of positions. I was there, and so I got a pretty good overview of what, of what the issues were within, within the school district.

And so in those IEP meetings and many times the population we were serving, a large percentage of them, were from Oaxaca, Mexico. They were farm workers. And they spoke their indigenous language. There was a dialect of Mixtec from the mountains in Oaxaca. And so they didn't speak Spanish, nor did they speak English. And so it was very difficult in the communication.

And, even with some parents, though they could speak English, there was this, idea of a well, I wouldn't say so much a class structure as I would say, a way of speaking the parents that kept it formal and insulated the school from really working closely with the parents. And I'm not going to get into this whole phenomenon about culture and wealth, but it certainly brings into this.

I am highlighting it, obviously, but I'm not going to go into what I think a lot of the a lot of the issues are we'll cover that in future episodes. But I did want to point out that that difference between class and wealth and sophistication is a huge difference in the way people are treated within the system.

But today it's interesting. I'll go into, what's happening currently. And the way I see it in the, in the counties that I serve. But what I've noticed is that and I think it's due to lack of training and experience, that even in wealthier areas, parents are being treated much the way that they were in this district.

Right? I was in that was that was in the community with a lot of poverty. So I think it's, again, people not understanding that these parents are sophisticated and that there are consequences for not including them in the process. But, again, that's something else we'll get into later. It's mostly a middle class area that we're serving.

So, the examples I'm giving you are not what are happening in areas with a lot of poverty that are happening in, in most school districts, at least in our area. So one of the practices I've seen is the practice of going over a child's strengths at the beginning of the meeting, and the way I've seen it work is that everyone on the team is supposed to say something about a positive, straight trait or skill that the child has.

Another one example is that norms or rules that many districts insist on, that the parents agree to are read and agreed to before the meeting. And a final example is the when parent concerns, are taken, that it's how the team looks at those concerns. As far as the priorities of what the IEP meeting is going to happen.

So let's look at those three practices, one at a time. So the first one I talked about was going over the child's strengths and the issue. And I guess the thing that bugs me, and it certainly has bugged every parent again that I've spoken to about this, and it's really how universal this is, is that it feels very patronizing because there's not a connection between the strengths that the staff and the members of the team are coming up with, the fact that they're not put in the IEP any place.

It's just these things that are kind of thrown out into the universe and not really done anything with. So he's a very cooperative child. All right. So where is that cooperation being used to help the child meet their goals in the IEP meeting. They're not. So like getting it seemed very patronizing. Then it feels like to the paras as an exercise that has no value.

So it's not it's not relevant to their current concerns. And it wastes valuable time at an IEP meeting when you have an hour for an IEP and even for an addendum, if there's, if there's several issues involved, every minute is precious with that. And if it takes 5 or 6 minutes to do that, it's just kind of nails on a chalkboard from the parents that I've, I've spoken to.

And, and also the feeling that I have about it. The second practice that I see very commonly, and this has been going on for years, but I've seen it more, I think used more aggressively these days. And that's the use of norms and rules in a meeting. And usually what happens is that right at the beginning of the meeting, before we talk about child strengths, the district person or whoever is chairing the meeting will go over what the norms and the rules are that everybody will will, commit to that.

The problem I have with this is that those norms equate the professionals role in this meeting with the parents and expecting the same behavior from both. And I know from my own experience and taking parent concerns, and particularly in the district I attended, 99% of the IEPS I attended, which was the one I told you about, that I attended the 2000 IEP meetings.

The one thing is about taking our concerns and addressing those was of paramount importance because of how frustrating it is for the parents not to at least have that issue addressed and have a discussion about it, whatever those might be, and to expect them to do it in a way that is in the same, you know, tone and affect as a staff member is just absolutely unrealistic.

You know, parents are going through, you know, so many emotions each of these meetings. I'm most of the parents I've talked about hate these meetings. They're just, very intrusive in their lives. And they feel like they don't, that they're not heard, that nothing changes many times. And it's a very frustrating experience. And they have to express that frustration sometimes.

And I never had a problem with a parent raising their voice. I didn't allow, ad hominem attacks with attacking a, you know, a person about who they are. However, if a person made a mistake and the parent had a disagreement with that person over something, that to me that's a professional, that's fair game. That's something that needs to be discussed.

So as long as it were personal attacks, as long as there was no an excessive amount of, you know, just yelling that it's okay, a parent was emoting, that parent has to allow, you know, they have to be allowed to emote. So that's one of the issues I have with that. It also allows the, the staff to dictate the meeting by keeping the parent on defense.

And I have this is just going back to what I said before I had an example. A parent told me that an administrator told her that she wasn't being professional in a meeting. And, well, yeah, they're just I mean, it's like, yeah, that's pretty obvious. And the process, you know, it just stymies a parent's participation in the program.

And again, it wastes valuable staff time. The third one I want to talk about parent concerns. And this is related to the norms and rules and that the parent has just heard them. They've just heard, first of all, what the what the rules are. And secondly, they've every been been talking about what a how great the child is and how great they're doing.

And then the parent has to bring this back to reality by saying, here's what the issues are. And, you know, it's like this kind of throwing cold water on something. But why should that be? Because that's the reason we're here, is to talk about these things. So that's, that's another thing is that it just it puts them in that position of saying, gosh, I have to talk about all these negative things.

After all these positive things. We've talked, we've talked about. So anyway, those are my three main concerns right now and a little bit of history. And we'll talk about this a lot because there's new variations. And so I do want to end with a comment about staff and school cultures. And it's not easy being a general education teacher at IEP meeting when a parent is questioning and accommodations being, being made in there when the possibly the teachers that have been trained how to use the accommodations.

And the same goes true for other staff members there a lot going on there overwhelmed a lot of times they're not looking in this so much as a from a personal issue. They're looking at simply from something that they have to do because of the level of work. It's not because of their commitment. And so I'm not blaming staff on this.

What I am blaming is the system that first of all, doesn't fund, enough staff to be able to do this in a way that they can recruit staff, then pay them a reasonable wage. And so it it becomes institutional. And when an institutional feel institution feels threatened, when they feel that they're, you know, they don't have the resources they need in order to do things.
They become very defensive and so many times what will happen is that will find school, start blaming the children for behaviors, for instance, when the issue is that the school district hasn't provided the behavioral and social emotional supports that the school needs in order to address it. And so I want to make clear that, you know, we're in this all together, but at the same time, not putting pressure on the system as a mistake.

I think pressure needs to be put on the system to, to effect change. And of course there's children involved and that becomes the primary issue. All right. And the last part of this, what can you do about it. So there's several things that I recommend that you can do that may not solve the problem. That'll certainly make it go down in intensity and how much you're experiencing it.

So the first thing is I'd record the meeting always, if there's any kind of dispute or questioning of anything that's going on with the IEP, I certainly always recommend recording the meeting and just know that you have to give notice 24 hours in advance of the meeting to be able to do that. The reason I do it is because when you listen to recording of something and you're not involved at the moment emotionally, you can really take the emotion out of it much more.

And listen to the reality of what's going on with us. So you get a much, I think, clearer sense of what happened in the meeting. Also with your parent concerns, I would read them from a pre-prepared statement. Don't wing it. You'll forget something, I promise, because those times you're feeling stress and it's just natural to forget things.

So, and then let the team know that you expect each of your concerns to be noted, and that they will be addressed in some way during the meeting, at least a discussion of what each of those concerns are. When the team, if they talk about child strengths at the beginning of the meeting, I would say that the any strengths that are noted by team members must be reflected in the IEP itself, that you don't want any shouting into the universe as to how great your child is, unless those strengths are incorporated in the document that you were working on.

The next thing is that when, you're agreeing to the meeting norms. Agree. But note that as a parent, you have an emotional stake and expect the team to respect that. It is important that you make this stuff about your child and not so much about you. And so that way what it does is put the focus on the issues that are in the IEP and not a personality issue between yourself and the rest of the IEP team.

I would ask that sufficient time be left at the end of the meeting to read the meeting notes. I find many times when parents get meeting notes after an IEP that they say that they're just inaccurate. And I've experienced that also in meetings that I've been to. So I would ask that to be read. It only takes a few minutes to do that.
And that's a very valuable use of time. I did that in all of those meetings that I chaired. I insisted that we do that. I made sure that everyone agreed that the notes for accurate, demand that, real objective data be presented when making claims about progress or lack thereof. So if they're coming in and saying that your child's doing great in math, look at what math goals are on the IEP and say, okay, show me the data.

Where is the progress happening in real objective terms? I wouldn't allow the excuse of, staff team members, particularly general education. So even if your child is not in a general education setting, you most of the time need perspective that the reality that is going on in that setting. So if your child is in, a nonpublic school, for instance, you still may want to have a general education teacher there because you want to know what the differences are between what your child is experiencing in their setting now and what they could expect in general.

And there are exceptions to this. So the legal standard is that a child is or may be in a general education program. Now, I'm not sure of the length of time that that possibility is my understanding. And again, I'm not an attorney. Is that it's usually, I think, within the next school year, but that may not be the legal standard.

So again, as I mentioned, this is not going to be a panacea, but it can go a long way to making the IEP meetings more open and more productive and a better use of time. So hopefully this helps

Well, that's it for this broadcast of this podcast. Thank you very much. We appreciate you joining us. Remember to call our helpline at (800) 578-2592 for further assistance. Our parent advisers at Matrix Parents at Marin CIL are here to help. Take care now. Bye.

© 2025 Marin Center for Independent Living (Marin CIL). Podcast author, David Poeschl, Parent Advisor at Marin CIL.