From Kansas, comes an important question about how to promote family
engagement and support to the family of preschoolers with special needs, even
though there are no requirements or data collected for Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act--the part pertaining to children 3 years old and up.
First,
if IEP teams did Routines-Based Interviews, they would (a) identify
family-level needs, (b) get “authentic” and functional child-level needs, and
(c) give the family a good basis on which to decide what their top priorities
are for IEP goals. This puts the IEP team in the awkward but wonderful position
of knowing about family-level needs but not being able to do anything about
them, in the traditional sense, which is to write a goal to address them.
Second, the IEP team then has a moral and intellectual (because of our
knowledge of child and family development) obligation to help the family. The
problem is they don’t have a legal obligation to do so, and many school-system
personnel don’t consider anything other than what’s required by law. So
the two decisions to be made at this point are where to document these needs
and how to address them.
Third, I recommend that each school district or
program within a district have a policy for where family-level needs are
documented, so supervisors can check whether needs have been addressed. This
document should list the needs as well as all efforts to meet those needs.
Fourth, I recommend that each district or program decide whether the child’s
special ed teacher, a Section 619 local administrator (e.g., director of
preschool special ed), or another person be designated as the person to help
meet family-level needs.
Fifth, school personnel need good professional
development on how to meet family-level needs within the constraints of their
resources, which is often almost 0 time or money! The focus of that PD is on
providing information to families and following up with them. If a family
determines that a need exists for the mother to spend more time with an older
sibling, for example, the school people should be trained to ask about informal
supports for babysitting and, failing that, to give the family information
about babysitting or respite resources.
Sixth, school personnel need to ensure
that someone in the school system has a good handle on community resources for
families and that the designated family people know who that person is.
No
magical tools apart from the RBI exist. The rest requires a culture change, but
I firmly believe the way to change beliefs is to provide structures or
procedures that lead people to do the right thing. You can’t just preach at
them. So, in my experience in working through this difficult issue—difficult
because the law does not provide for meeting family-level needs, these six
structures need to be put in place if schools want to overcome the gap in the
law.
