Promoting Special Education Rights

Here’s another blogpost found in our digital files when I was working for Spirit Lake Consulting back in 2007.

The next few months will see us criss-crossing the country before winter sets in and makes travel in the Great Plains a test of death-defying nerve. On Monday and Tuesday, Erich and I will be in Savannah, Georgia, giving a workshop on Special Education Rights. Too often, we find that parents and students on the reservations receive LESS services than do people in very well-off communities like Edina or Malibu.

The reason is that people on the reservations are not always aware of their rights. We have heard too many stories from parents who paid for their child’s own evaluation or from students who did not receive the therapy that they needed and was identified on their IEP.

Reasons we heard were,

“The school said we have jobs and can afford to pay for it.” or

“The school district said we are a small district and can’t afford a speech pathologist.”

These kinds of stories make us angry and are the reason we offer the types of training we do. People on reservations are entitled to the same types of services richer, non-Indian people get. Federal laws say every child is entitled to a free, appropriate public education. Yet, we see these rights honored more in some areas than others.

In many cases, we believe, the difference is not due to outright racism (although Erich and I differ in our…