Upcoming Presentation at CHADD

Hope Kirsch is giving a presentation on Special Education Law to the Valley of the Sun Satellite of CHADD.
Date: Thursday, May 17, 2012
Start Time: 6:00pm
Location: 9811 East Bell Road, Suite 110, Scottsdale, AZ 85260 (On-Track Tutoring)
Contact: Erica Schwartz
Phone: 480-563-5588
CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) is the nation’s leading non-profit organization serving individuals with ADHD and their families. CHADD has over 16,000 members in 200 local chapters throughout the U.S. Chapters offer support for individuals, parents, teachers, professionals, and others.
 CHADD is a membership organization, produces the bi-monthly Attention magazine (for members), and sponsors an annual conference. The National Resource Center on ADHD National Resource Center on ADHD (NRC) is the CDC-funded national clearinghouse for evidence-based information about ADHD.
CHADD was founded in 1987 in response to the frustration and sense of isolation experienced by parents and their children with ADHD

Call to action: KEEPING ALL STUDENTS SAFE ACT

Rep. George Miller in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senators Tom Harkin and Mike Enzi in the U.S. Senate are working to bring an end to the dangerous and deadly practices of seclusion and unnecessary restraint.  Schools need to use evidence based positive practices instead.

Please contact your elected officials (again if you have already) and urge co-sponsorship and swift passage of THE KEEPING ALL STUDENTS SAFE ACT (S.2020 in the Senate and H.R. 1381 in the House).
 

Senator Harkin is the Chairman of the Commitee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension.  Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Enzi released the following announcement for a hearing in the Senate next week:

COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR

AND PENSIONS

HEARING NOTICE

To:              All Committee Members

Title:           Beyond Seclusion and Restraint:  Creating Positive Learning Environments for All Students

Date:           Thursday, May 17, 2012

Time:          10:00 a.m.

Place:          SD-050

Witnesses:

Dr. Daniel Crimmins, Director, Center for Leadership in Disability, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia

Ms. Cyndi Pitonyak, Coordinator of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, Montgomery County Public Schools, Christiansburg, Virginia

Dr. Michael George, Director, Centennial School, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Ms. Deborah (Debbie) Jackson, Parent, Easton, Pennsylvania    

House News

During remarks on the House floor today, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, called on Chairman John Kline (R-MN) to consider the Keeping All Students Safe Act – a bill to protect children from abusive seclusion and restraint practices while attending school.  Although the legislation passed the House more than two years ago with bipartisan support, it never became law.

“Schools are supposed to be a safe place. Parents should never have to worry about the safety of their children when they’re at school,” said Miller. “No child should be neglected, abused, or injured while they are trying to learn.”

In recent months, there have been disturbing cases of children being dangerously restrained by teachers and staff during the school day. In several of these cases, students have suffered serious injury or even died as a result of their injuries. The Keeping All Students Safe Act would, for the first time, put in place minimum safety standards to prevent abusive seclusion and restraint in schools across the country. The legislation would protect schoolchildren from inappropriate uses of seclusion and restraint while at school. The bill would also provide school personnel with the necessary tools, training, and support to ensure the safety of all students and school personnel who support them.

Miller’s remarks today follow a letter he sent last week to Chairman Kline requesting immediate committee action to markup the legislation.

The full text of the letter to Chairman Kline can be found here.

Miller’s remarks on the House floor can be found here.

More information on seclusion and restraint can be found here.

HOW TO SEND AN EMAIL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS.

SENATE.  You can email your Senators through the Senate website forms at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm Locate your Senators by choosing your state at the top. 
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.  You can find your Representative and send an email through the House website  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

14th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum -- Think Sheet Responses

At the beginning of last week’s 14^thAnnual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum (panel topic: “The Education and Schools Our Children Deserve”) at the Center for Education, Equity, and Diversity, we (i.e., the forum organizers) distributed a brief question sheet that asked each audience member to “list three characteristics that describe an education and school our children deserve.” Then, after the forum was over, we asked the audience to take a moment to write down any changes and revisions that had taken place in their thinking. We then compiled and analyzed their responses, which I will now summarize and discuss here.

By far the most commonly cited characteristic of desirable education was a sense of equality and inclusivity, with an ideal educational institution being one that provides guidance and quality education to students of all cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Over 75 percent of the audience members who turned in their question sheets cited this as being particularly important. This demonstrates both the abiding concerns of the forum-goers in general, and the fact that issues of educational equity remain woefully problematic: obviously if instances of severe inequality did not exist on a large scale, it probably would not have loomed sufficiently large in the respondents’ minds to become the common touchstone among their responses.

Also present in many people’s answers was the notion that schools should provide a sort of safe haven for students: a safe, comfortable, healthy learning environment where no one should feel threatened or uncomfortable. The primacy of a “whole child” approach to teaching, the appointment of knowledgeable, well-rounded, enthusiastic teachers, and a pedagogical focus on inculcating a love of learning in children also came up quite frequently.

Almost everything else that people mentioned—teacher consistency, caring relationships, diverse teaching styles to accommodate different ways of learning, instruction in critical thinking—more or less fell under subheadings of the common elements discussed above. One respondent facetiously suggested that the ideal school would have a “state-of-the-art detention hall where students are held in place with magnets” (obviously a quote from The Simpsons), but by and large the responses painted a portrait of the ideal school as an inclusive, holistic space of multicultural learning.

Meanwhile, the post-forum part of the question sheet, as I mentioned, asked audience members to discuss changes and refinements that had occurred in their thinking as a result of the panel. Many people cited an increased consciousness of the importance of relationships—between teachers and students, students and other students, teachers and the larger community, and so on—as their primary take-away from the forum. Several of them cited the video Vale Hartley showed of her class meeting at the Whatcom Day Academy as being particularly enlightening in that regard. The overall importance of the “humane aspect of teaching,” to use one respondent’s words, was definitely the throughline of the various post-forum responses.

Likewise, a large number of respondents asserted that their opinions were not changed so much as augmented as a result of the panel: no one’s broad convictions were really altered, but many people were moved to consider aspects of education that they had previously not given a great deal of thought. One audience member put it thusly: “my opinions have not changed but I now feel I now have many additions to what I believe children deserve.” It is this sort of response, perhaps, that might be used to answer the concern that forums of this sort amount to little more than preaching to the choir: while it is certainly true, if the answer sheets are any indication, that almost everyone at the forum agreed with each other in broad strokes, that certainly doesn’t mean they had nothing to teach one another. Much was clearly learned in terms of specific details, and the answer sheet responses as a whole attest to the vitality of the sort of public discourse the forum represents.