Supporting Your Child

Can Your School Handle it if Your Child’s Disability is Mental Illness? Your school may or may not be prepared to cope. Here are six issues to watch out for.

Every parent dreams of what his or her child will grow up to be. Will my child become an NFL player, a concert pianist, or perhaps win the Nobel Prize? No parent ever wishes that his or her child would be born with a disability, even though the parent knows that dreams may not become reality.

With summer ending, parents of children with special needs have a new and daunting task: transitioning back to school. What additional steps should you take to ensure your child with a disability is ready for school?

John Buckley, a lawyer who is helping write the law in Colorado pertaining to trusts, graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and later Harvard Law School. He founded Buckley Law, for estate and asset protection planning in the Front Range.

You leave the doctor’s office more confused than when you walked in! You have more questions to ask, but your head is swimming. There is no way the doctor could be right—or could she? Being told that your child has a disability or developmental delay is hard news for any parent to take and involves a grieving process as well as tough decisions to make. Each child and his or her condition is unique; different disabilities take a different path. So what do you do now? How can you best help your child, whom you now know has special needs? 

An Individualized Education Program (IEP) is required by federal statute for students with special needs in order to understand what accommodation, modifications, special education support and educational goals a specific child needs. The IEP process can be tedious, yet if you are equipped with the proper tools, is a maze that can be navigated. PEAK Parent Center is the Parent Training and Information Center (PTI) for the State of Colorado. It reports that the number one most-sought-after help is on the IEP for a child with disabilities.

Our understanding of a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) comes partly from statute and partly from case law. It brings parents both hope for what schools can provide for a child, and disappointment at the relatively low bar for education.

Parents (and even educators) are often confused about the difference between a 504 plan and an IEP, and when each is appropriate. To choose between them, first the school and parents must find out whether the student has a disability as defined by statute. Then, they must decide what the school’s educational obligations are under each statute. The school must meet its obligations to provide a student with a disability the appropriate educational support. Finally, parents should know that their rights are different under each statute.