A gathering spot for warriors fighting for their special-needs children

If you're one of the many who have come to the realization that your public school system is out to get away with doing the absolute minimum for your special-needs child and is not actually interested in helping or educating your child, join the crowd. Bring some passion and some factual evidence and step into the fray.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is...

...the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

So let's see how smart you are.

Examine the following seemingly contradictory ideas and see whether you agree if both statements in each pair are true.

A. The Atlanta Public School system is doing a fantastic job transforming itself from the execrable wasteland it was before Bev Hall arrived into something better.

However,

B. The Atlanta Public School system is still, statistically, one of the worst-performing school districts in one of the worst-performing states in the country.

A. Bev Hall has been widely recognized and lauded by her peers around the country for the job she has done, especially given the severe difficulties any administrator would face in an urban environment like Atlanta with its terrible history of low standards, parent indifference and institutional corruption.

However,

B. Bringing your school district up from Horrible to Mediocre is not the same thing as creating excellence. In other words, Bev Hall deserves her accolades, but let's put her record of slow, steady progress in context. She has not taken something good and made it great. She took something terrible and made it acceptable. As a parent, though, do you aspire to "just acceptable" for your child's education?

A. The overall progress of the Atlanta Public Schools reform effort under Bev Hall has been steady and substantial, if not earth-shattering.

However,

B. Parts of the APS, such as the Program for Exceptional Children, have been badly neglected by Dr. Hall, who allowed the PEC to languish for a year and a half without leadership and who thereby created a catastrophic mess that her new PEC director, Aaron Fernander, will have to clean up.


A. The built-in inefficiencies and dysfunction in APS (or virtually ANY large urban school district in the U.S.) should preclude the existence of any truly excellent schools under the umbrella of such a bureaucracy.

However,

B. Schools like Morningside and particularly our new school Springdale Park, if they are lucky enough to have a truly great principal (like Ms. Brown and Ms. Pruitt) and great teachers (and we have them!) and a strong parent community (check!) can be little oases of excellence in a desert of mediocrity.


Here's what you should have gained from this exercise: just because APS is on the rise doesn't mean it is where it needs to be, or that we should be satisfied with its progress. Just because Bev Hall has won some awards (and is likable as a person) doesn't mean she gets a pass for her terrible neglect of the PEC or her other missteps, such as failing to swiftly identify and punish test-score cheating.

If you want a great school, it's your job to make it great. If that means you ride herd on the APS staff and the PTO to get some stuff done, that's what it means. You do not delegate your child's education to a large urban public school system and expect great--or even good. You only get great if you are relentless about pursuing it.

I Would Never Join Any Club That Would Have Me As A Member, pt.1

Are we really doomed to two political parties in this country, the Government Can Fix It, Just Give Us Another Few Whacks At It Party and the Government Is Evil, Government Sucks, Please Elect Us So We Can Show You Again How To Do More With Less (because we kind of screwed that part up last time) Party?

I can't call myself a conservative, even though I hold many strongly conservative views, because when people think of conservatives nowadays they think of idiots like Glenn Beck and megalomaniacs like Sean Hannity. (I don't mind Rush Limbaugh, though--although he's far to the right of me, and often intellectually dishonest, he's a legitimately talented and thought-provoking broadcaster and entertainer, and I am willing to accept him for what he is).

I can't let myself be identified with any group that would have Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and even poor beleaguered Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney as their Sunday morning talking heads.

And I can't really call myself a libertarian because I think most libertarians are deeply unrealistic about what we really need from government, and (much more importantly to me) they don't care about helping other people, they're just obsessed with how much their own government is trying to steal from them (in the only two currencies that matter to libertarians: liberty and taxes).

And I sure as hell can't be a Democrat. Democrats protect unions with great vigilance, but don't want to protect children from murderous radical Islamists. (If there are children in mass graves anywhere in the world, Americans aren't supposed to wring our hands and think about whether to fight. We are supposed go there (regardless of who else is willing to go or not go with us); kill all the bad guys, pack up our Humvees and leave. It is not that complicated).

Democrats actually think the same government folks who bring you the Department of Motor Vehicles are going to be able to make your health care experience better and cheaper. Do we really have to even dig deeper into their position than that?

As economists like Thomas Sowell (a fine thinker) point out, you cannot determine the price for something by assigning a price to it. The price is going to be what it is, and if you make it cheaper, there is going to be less of it available, and if there is too little of it now available as a result of your meddling, the fact that it has a cheaper price assigned to it is absolutely irrelevant, because now you can't get it.

I'm a big Barack Obama fan and I'm even a bigger Michelle Obama fan, but those two could take me to dinner and a show in New York and I would be no closer to ever voting Democrat.

But if I think the Democratic party caters to wimps and cowards and those unwilling (NOT unable) to help themselves to the American Dream (and I do), I am even more angry with Republicans, whose hypocrisy disgusts me.

You Republican creeps are anti-abortion, but also against providing young people with free birth control? This exposes you as being deeply unrealistic, because you can teach and counsel sexual restraint all day and all night, but then biology and human nature take over and shove you aside. You can't talk teenagers out of wanting to fuck. Okay? Update your list of things NOT to mess with, starting right now with biology, hormones and human nature.

You ever-classy Republicans are against the adoption of children by gay couples (and against gay marriage). What a principled stand. And all the while our world is overrun by horribly irresponsible heterosexuals who have children without the means to support them; who do a terrible job of child-rearing, and who don't deserve the children they were reckless enough to spawn.

You conservatives especially disgust me, because the parts you get right (emphasis on personal responsibility, emphasis on higher standards for public schools, focus on shrinking the size of government, keeping a strong military, being willing to stick our collective neck out when we must, understanding the responsibility that comes with being the U S of A) are the parts I hold very dear. But you totally blow it up on the social end, and this whole thing with you trying to shove your religion down my throat is just such an obvious example of a totally unfounded superiority complex it makes me want to vomit.

What this country needs is an ex-Marine secular conservo-libertarian who refuses to allow Christian nutcases to ever set foot in the Oval Office; who's married, yes--but to his partner, Ned; who has two super fabulous adopted children; who wants to kill every Taliban and Al-Queda thug in the world and has to be physically restrained by his Joint Chiefs from doing so, and who spends the people's money like it's his own and he's still living in base housing and shopping at the BX.

Yes, here I am, a married heterosexual guy, campaigning for my fantasy candidate: an openly gay ex-Marine. I realize that's going to make some of you think I'm a little swishy. Whatever. You don't have to act like a homophobe to project an image of masculinity.

Anyway, if you know of a candidate who matches this description, email me and I'll Paypal him a campaign donation right fucking now.

The decidedly unexceptional workplace culture of the Program for Exceptional Children

I have clients. If my clients email me with a question or request, I make it a high priority to answer their emails quickly--but always, always the same business day. No inquiry is so trivial that it doesn't get a comprehensive written response.

This doesn't make me special. This kind of behavior is so fundamental to success in the world of business that to do otherwise just isn't an option.

Let me put it another way: people who don't answer emails from their clients are unprofessional. They are not qualified to hold a job of high importance in, say, a program as critical to thousands of taxpaying Atlanta families as the APS Program for Exceptional Children.

But in the APS Program for Exceptional Children, there is a different ethic. An ethic that says, "we need not answer parent emails at all, but if we do deign to answer your email, you may expect a bureaucratic, ungrammatical non-answer that was typed in a great hurry without the benefit of forethought or, for that matter, spell-check."

Now, that's quite an accusation, so let's back it up with some facts.

Our family has had four permanent (and one very short-term temp) PEC liaisons in the three years we've been in the program.

Let's look at their track records:

LIAISON #1: (2006-2007) HILLARY MILLER, Morningside Elementary School
Claimed to not be able to operate her school-issued laptop. Rarely responded to email inquiries. Terrible follow-through on meeting requests and in general.

LIAISON #2: (2008-'09) CECIL DALTON, Morningside Elementary School
Ignored pointed and extremely important emails about our child's IEP throughout the school year, despite many follow-ups by phone and email. Flat-out refused to answer questions sent via email. When he did reply, this employee seemed unable to compose a single sentence in clear English.

LIAISON #3: (2009-2010) FAUSTINA THOMPSON, Springdale Park Elementary School
Failed to answer most emails, including a number of extremely critical, time-sensitive inquiries that had to do with the placement of our child in the new school. Behaved inappropriately at IEP meeting, and then quickly vanished altogether on medical leave, without bothering to inform any of her parents that she was abandoning their case files.

LIAISON #4: VERNITA BURFORD, Springdale Park Elementary School. Has refused to reply to most emails. When confronted about this at IEP meeting, only shook her head, as if to say, I have no real reason for why I have refused to correspond with you. (I'm not certain if this is what she was trying to tell me with her sad little head-shake; maybe it was more like, "you arrogant, insufferable bastard; how dare you put me on the spot in front of all these other people.")

And our liaisons are not the only people who have refused to answer our emails.

What is the problem with the PEC's workplace culture, that the employees feel emboldened to ignore inquiries from parents?

PEC employees exist to serve special-need children. The advocates for those children are us, the parents. We are the PEC's clients. We are also collaborating partners in the enterprise that is the IEP team.

PEC employees would probably think twice before ignoring emails from their bosses, Constance Goodson and Aaron Fernander.

But they have no problem at all ignoring questions asked by us, the PEC's real constituency.

When you run into this problem (for it certainly cannot just be the case that our family has happened to encounter the only four PEC liaisons who do not meet any sort of professional standard for communicating with their collaborating team members), speak up about it. Constance Goodson's phone number is 404-802-2612 and Mr. Fernander's number is 404-802-2686.

I suggest you telephone, rather than email. Yes, I know it's 2009, and we've had email for 16 years now.

But a workplace culture is a slow ship to turn around. I hope Mr. Fernander is tugging with all his might. He'll need to.




Start talking about your kid's IEP--now.

Getting an IEP for your kid in the Atlanta Public Schools (and, from what I've read, just about anywhere else) is like buying a car from a traditional car dealer. You go in there, you try to make a good deal for yourself; the salesman says yes yes yes, then mysteriously departs to check things out with his "manager"; he comes back shamefaced and says, "you know, I thought we could do this deal but my manager says we have to add the rustproofing back in."

You walk out of there not knowing whether you made the best deal you could or not, and not knowing whether the next guy who walks in there will make a much better deal than you did. Maybe you got screwed--but you've got no way to find out.

School IEP officials don't want us to compare notes on the services we secure for our children. They're banking on the fact that we're embarrassed to have to go hat in hand and ask for something special for our kids, or that we're reluctant to even admit to other parents that we have a special-needs child.

They will also invoke the idea of "confidentiality" whenever you even THINK of trying to compare your situation to another one you've heard about. This actually happened to us. The parents of another autistic child, whose condition was (in some key ways) remarkably similar to our child's, were generous to give us their child's entire file--his whole IEP.

We tried to use the precedent this child had set to secure a similar arrangement for our child, but our liaison wouldn't even let us describe the precedent in our meetings. As soon as we started talking about this other child, she started ranting about how we were violating all sorts of confidentiality clauses, even though the other parents had explicitly given us their permission to use their child's data.

You might think that the confidentiality of your child's IEP information is yours, as a parent, to preserve or waive, and that APS has no legal standing to fight to keep your case confidential should you, as the parent, wish to waive confidentiality for the sake of exploring precedent cases.

But this shrieking loon of a liaison wouldn't even let us speak aloud about the matter. She literally tried to drown us out in the meeting, like a five-year-old child trying not to hear something unpleasant.

Parents, it's time to share. Come on this blog, or other blogs, and talk about what you've gone through in IEP meetings; what you were able to secure (or why you were turned down); talk about the comportment of APS PEC employees in your meetings (were they prepared? Were they professional?).

Let's create a database of cases so the next parents who come through this pipeline (and you know many more are coming) won't have to negotiate in ignorance with shady double-dealers.