“Cheat Sheet” For Parents Seeking Special Education Services in New Rochelle

Dear Blabby here to remind you that “spring has sprung” which means its time for the school district to spring its traps on gullible parents who still believe they can trust the District when it comes to providing services and accommodations to special needs students. We encourage all parents dealing with the Special Education department to carefully read:

Dear Blabby’s Cheat Sheet for parents seeking special education services in New Rochelle.

Be aware, that School District has been crowing all year in school board meetings about its “success” in declassifying students, taking away services and removing kids in private, full-time special education schools and forcing them back into “mainstreamed” public classrooms. While we all want to see the need to spend money on special education services go down and thereby reduce the expenditures, the District’s approach is often one of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Too often trusting, unsuspecting parents are bamboozled into signing documents waiving their rights — things like their right to ALL documents used in a CSE meeting before the day of the meeting, the right to have certain people at the meeting, the right to bring a tape recorder to the meeting, and so on.

The single most important message from Dear Blabby is never sign anything without taking it home, getting counsel and then, if you are advised its OK to sign, getting your own copies signed by both you and an official from the school district (it’s called an “executed copy”)

As non-English speakers are the most likely to be taken advantage of by the District we would greatly prefer to have a Spanish language version of the cheat sheet so if we have any volunteers out there who could translate these articles and the documents we would like to hear from (note: what does it tell you about “equity” in New Rochelle when about one-third of CSE meetings are held for children where a language other than English is the dominant language of household yet the meetings are conducted in English, all reports and records are in English, all the legal documents are in English and the IEP is not only in English but written in a way that few English speakers can decode the actual (not apparent) meaning of select terms and phrases designed to obfuscate and confuse parents.

If you have any questions be sure to drop Blabby an email.