Working the System: Tap Into Public Schools for Assessment & Support for 2e Learners

This recording is of our event March 2022 over tapping into public schools for assessment. (transcript below)

Understanding and getting support for 2e learners can be complicated. The public education system is sometimes unwieldy and confusing. When parents suspect their child’s challenges (academic and/or social-emotional) may stem from an as yet undiscovered diagnosis, they often don't know how to start the process of requesting accommodations, assessments, and services. As a result, parents frequently do not leverage the resources of their public schools, which can lead to delays in understanding their child's needs or great expenses for private assessments and therapies.

REEL welcomes recent USC doctoral graduate Dr. Hanna Merk as well as Laura Kimpton from Special Education Advocacy Group. Hanna will share the findings and implications of her dissertation research, “Understanding the Critical Role of Parents in Improving the Identification and Support of Twice Exceptional Learners in the K-12 System.” Laura will walk through how to work with school districts to make assessment and accommodations requests, what that process looks like, and potential strength-based goals to advocate for as you move into the 504/IEP process. During the talk, we will dispel some common myths about assessments and help you understand the facts.

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The Special Education Advocacy Group is the culmination of Laura Kimpton’s life-long passion for supporting children with exceptional needs and their families. Laura obtained a special education teaching credential so that she could support other children and families with a higher level of expertise. She began teaching as an educational specialist for an intensive-needs classroom, and within her first year won an Excellence in Teaching award. Laura earned her administrative credential and a Masters’ degree in Academic Leadership and Administration. She transitioned to the role of Special Education Program Supervisor, in which she used her educational and administrative skills to advocate for students with disabilities and the supports they need, in two large unified school districts. Ultimately, to even more effectively support children and families, Laura began working directly for families as a special education advocate. Laura then acquired Special Education Advocacy Group, where she now works tirelessly to ensure that her clients are receiving all the supports and services necessary to be successful in school. Having supported students with exceptional needs as a parent, teacher, administrator and advocate across the San Francisco Bay Area, Laura is able to effectively collaborate with teachers and administrators to achieve the best possible programs for her clients. She uses her extensive knowledge of services, supports, goal writing, accommodations, alternative placements, inclusion and assessment to foster success for children with a wide variety of needs.

Dr. Hanna Tikkanen Merk is a lifelong learner passionate about trying to make sense of complex human phenomena based on science, research, and experience. Dr. Merk’s recently completed dissertation focuses on understanding the critical role of parents in 2e learners’ diagnosis and access to supports. In addition to an EdD from USC, Dr. Merk holds an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a BA in Engineering and Economics from Brown University. With a background in corporate strategy and finance, most recently as the Managing Director of Merk Investments, Dr. Merk has also garnered experience in educational leadership and as a non-profit executive. Originally from Finland, Dr. Merk has called the Bay Area home for the past 20 years. Her four children have each attended different Bay Area high schools, thus giving her a unique vantage point of its complex educational ecosystem.

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Read the transcript here

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so welcome to our REEL event tonight about working the system how when and why to tap into public schools for assessment and support for twice exceptional learners i am Callie Turk and i am one of the co-founders of REEL and I'm gonna hand this over to my partner at REEL Abby who will introduce herself and say a few words about REEL for anyone who's new to our organization before we start the presentation hi everyone thanks for coming so i work with Callie and Yael at real and I'm also a graduate student at bridges with Callie and work at a dyslexic school as well so do a bunch of different things related to choice exceptionality and neurodiversity um okay let me there we go next then I can get it working all right so real for About REEL those of you new to our organization thank you for joining us this evening REEL is a non-profit organization that ensures that twice exceptional students in silicon valley really thrive in school by raising their parent the parent and the educator awareness and understanding through resources tools events and services we like to think of ourselves as kind of a bridge between these different constituents all in support of our two-way children we have a number of different Resources shareable resources and tools that you can find on our website and the url is there it's reel2e.org we have this great tui fact sheet a quick sheet about is your child twice exceptional and a bunch of other

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resources for teachers and parents on the site New YouTube Channel we also have a new youtube channel where all of our events that we record we publish them to our REEL channel so i encourage you to go there and check out all of the great talks that we've been doing over the past few years and subscribe to our channel so you can get updates when new events are recorded Upcoming Events and we've got wanted to just highlight three upcoming events that we have over the next few months next week i think that's already next week we will have a quarterly parent support group that we do in partnership with parents helping parents and then in the end of april i will be putting on a workshop that i also gave to this group a few months ago in partnership with parents place on strength based strategies and then in early may we're going to have one of our graduate graduate colleagues dr marcy dan and she's going to come and talk about slow processing speed and twice exceptional children and you can rsvp for any and all of these on our website and then in addition to our website we've got a bunch of other ways we can Connecting with Us you can connect with us we've got an active twice exceptional google group where parents ask each other questions about tui in the bay area uh we've got a facebook group we have twitter and like i mentioned our youtube as well Event Overview

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thank you so much abby for giving a great overview of REEL we're so excited for everyone who's in our community and i am like i said before just very excited for tonight's session that features dr hannah merk and we love to say the doctor part because she she received her doctorate in the last year and so we'd like to like to really emphasize that and laura kempton and i'm going to introduce each of them in a little more detail right before they present but i just wanted to say the reason i'm very excited about the presentation we have here about thinking about tapping into public schools is because i personally have had so many questions about this topic over the years and almost every time we have a session with parents questions come up about what our rights are what the schools need to be doing who pays for what how to get assessments we hear all kinds of myths or things that we think might be myths we're not sure if their myths are fact and i just felt like there was a lot of stuff i wanted to clear up so in some ways yes this presentation is for all of you but it's it's really for me because i had just so much i wanted to learn and i felt like dr merk and um laura kempton were just the right people to have to help teach us all about this really important topic so the way we're going to run things tonight is hannah's actually going to

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speak first she's going to talk about the dissertation results that she recently defended to get her dissertation and her i mean her edd from usc and then we will have laura kempton talk about from her perspective as a special education advocate and then we're going to run through some facts and myths really quickly i have a list of statements that i want to know are they fact are they myth and i think i think laura will have cleared some of that up in her presentation and some of it will go through together and just make sure we get get the facts and then we'll have an open q and a and i do have questions that were submitted as part of the rsvp process and you are more than welcome to submit questions in the chat please feel free to go ahead and introduce yourself in the chat say who you are how old your kids are you know whatever is really pertinent for you right now and just feel free to talk with each other throughout um as needed in the chat that's an open space for conversation so we are going to jump in right away i'm going to stop sharing or actually ask abby to stop sharing and Dr Hannah Meyer we're going to let hannah get her presentation cued up and while i while i introduce you to her so dr hannah merk is someone that i met through Hannah Meyer the the parenting grapevine i don't even remember how and we had several walks together and i just found her to be so

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inspirational and i was so excited about the dissertation work she was doing and About Hannah Meyer i felt it was really important for our community to know about her because she lives right here in our community and has also her own personal experience so just to say a few words about her she's a lifelong learner who's passionate about trying to make sense of complex human phenomena based on science research and experience as i mentioned she recently completed her dissertation that focused on understanding the critical role of parents into e-learners diagnosis and access to supports in addition to have receiving her edd from usc she holds an nba from insead in france and a ba in engineering and economics from brown university she has a background in corporate strategy and finance she most recently was the managing director of merck investments and she also has a lot of experience in educational leadership and is a non-profit executive she's originally from finland but has been in the bay area for 20 years and amazingly to me she has four children and they have attended many different bay area schools and she has a very unique vantage point in understanding the educational ecosystem that we have here in silicon valley so hannah i'm going to turn it over to you thank you and i'm really really excited to be here as well because i have been in your shoes callie and abby and everyone else as a parent of a twice exceptional truck

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myself and as one who knew that there's so much more that i need to know let's see if i can manage the slides tell me if it's working yes it's working great so cali already explained my life story so i can Hannahs life story pretty much skip this one um but i wanted to perhaps um point out the fact about my four children so three of them are just simply exceptional actually four other exceptional our youngest is twice exceptional and that's um that is really what threw me into this space because i i as a parent i realized that i didn't know what i needed to know and the story there really was that it took me from the time that i knew that something needed really addressing it took me five years to uh to find the diagnosis to actually really stumble across the world that she might be twice exceptional i had to come up with it and then i had to find the proof for it and that's then um that kind of opened the kind of worms and i realized that i'm not the only one here in this space and i really wanted to then learn more and that led into them my myself changing completely my career uh for a from for-profit to not for-profit um so currently and as a combination of that now i finish my dissertation and i'll share some of those findings but obviously that's still only the start because this is the

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uh this is the beginning of the path of sharing the findings and building on that experience and really my goal is really help others learn from this experience that i've gathered and can continue building on it i'm also involved with a um with an edtech startup right now so that's another direction in which i could be uh perhaps taking it so bear with me um Childs perspective here we go so the start always starting with the child from the center their perspective um this is what we're trying to do we're trying to help help these young people help the children as they grow into their own personas to realize that realize their potential to realize that they are wonderful and unique and they are good and all of their wonderful crazy ideas even if they seem messy at times it's really about finding the right environment and the right tools to help them unleash their superpowers that's what i want to do Gap of knowledge so then um i was describing that there's so much that i didn't know in the beginning i still don't know it but um as i started my research i really came up with this idea of that this is gap of knowledge there's this thing that i need to know uh and there's existing research that only gets you so far and then there's all of this experience experience that parents have on top of that that is not really um

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it's not easy to come by real is doing a fantastic job in getting all of these pieces all the information uh in one place but there's still um so much of it is in our heads and our collective lived experience and that's what i was trying to get to so what i call the 2e knowledge gap between what typical parents and typical teachers frankly what they know and then the increasing knowledge that we all need as parents of two learners so we can help them and which hopefully also the teachers will eventually also get and uh what prior research before my work with prior research showed is that parents parents of two children they need to be the key people initiating diagnosis they need to be the ones influencing the self-perception a fancy word for the way the child feels about themselves and they are the key people enabling and advocating for support that's what it started with and i said okay this is the area that i want to learn i need to learn more about and i went out and i have um i spoke to numerous people but the study itself focuses actually the stories of 10 families and of their children and those parents and how they discovered what they discovered and i'm going to skip through the mechanics of the study because that gets to be hairy and boring and i'm going to go directly into the findings so this is what my research

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of these 10 families showed um there are nine different themes i'm not going to go through all these themes Themes tonight because not all of them are as relevant to the topic but this is what uh what i found out first there is a time lag between i suppose in my case as well there's a time lapse between when you as a parent you know there's something there's something that needs attention but you can't quite put your finger on it so between that observation of a need and then the actual tui diagnosis it's not a question of weeks or months it's a question of years and it's years of struggle so that's the first point second point is that as parents start voicing these concerns they have they face the dismissiveness from the entire population i'll get into the details of that now uh that leads to the fact that there's nobody else it is the parent the parent is the crucial element that is needed for the tui diagnosis even if you're not as a parent doing the diagnosis if you don't get active the diagnosis will never take place uh fourth parents lack knowledge about their right to demand evaluation and this is exactly going today's topic is that within the school system there is a certain process you need to follow otherwise it does not get done then fifth uh even within using the system parents still rely on outside resources so outside the public school system to seek accurate to diagnosis i'll go into

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detail on that and then even after diagnosis parents do employ outside resources to support their learners the next point is obvious which is that since you're employing outside resources then your socioeconomic factors will influence what's accessible to you and this gets to the question of equity i will not go into detail on that that's going to be another evening but that's an unfortunately an obvious point that comes out of that um the eighth point was that parents throughout this learning process they develop very specialized two expertise and that's what we're trying to share there's this amazing amount of knowledge that's out there because of this the process the parents have gone through and lastly um i'm not the only one for whom it has been a career changing experience because of this year-long journey is going to influence what many parents end up doing and that's not necessarily bad at all but that does also turn into the socio-economic point which is that not everybody has the opportunity to in a way completely shift their career to to go for this and that's another point that i will not go into too much like at length this point happy to expand on it at a separate occasion so then the time lag so then um don't be worried about the graph this is just Time Lag actually showing the data behind it these are obviously fake names pseudonyms for everybody but um the scale is years so if you look at all these bars are the age of a child when the parent knew

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there was something that needed specifically needed help in addressing and the line shows how many years it took beyond that for the diagnosis to take place so obviously ranging from child to child but in every case it was years on an average it was between four and five years from when you knew your child needed help and when you knew what to call and where to look for that help specifically Contributing Factors then here are some of the contributing factors why did it take so long um i bucketed them into three different things which is that first of all people say well it's nothing you know this child is brilliant they can read at age three they are so uh dazzling that we tend to look at the glasses half full at that point and everybody else around it looks at the glass is half full without focusing on the fact that the child may not be happy they are not well adjusted they are they are showing signs and we want to ignore those signs and not necessarily us it is really the teachers and other people around them who say don't worry about it that's going to take care of itself let's focus and celebrate on these dazzling wonderful things here so they say it's nothing the second thing that you face is that oh it's you you are seeing things you are uh you are taking things out of perspective you are you know a pain in the career kind of parent and that's you'll face that too it's you

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and third which is really the most hurtful is that it's the child is that we we hear from other yeah from teachers from other from the other spouse perhaps uh from other parents that well if only if only the child would work harder if only they would um sit down and focus if only they would do this yeah and people will start labeling the child as defiant or difficult rather than realizing that it's obviously not the child's fault and that's what really is the hurtful thing and if you just imagine when you look at the previous life that it takes on average four to five years and if this keeps happening for 45 years you can imagine what it does to the to the uh how the child feels about themselves Parent Involvement so then parent involvement being crucial so i try to actually quantify it so that it's called real science and um this is a on a relative scale so don't worry about the actual numbers just worry about the the height of the of the um of the graph so the parent one is the parent that was the primary parent in initiating diagnosis um was clearly the most important person in this process for getting the diagnosis done and so for example we're much bigger and bigger and bigger impact than the teacher or the pediatrician now it is a relative scale but you also have to be careful in how you interpret it

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especially because this shows for example special education teacher having less than half the impact however it doesn't mean that that person wouldn't know what to do it just means that that person wasn't involved and that was an other very sad and i think laura is going to get more into it there's a very big there's a disconnect between a classroom teacher and a special education teacher and the special education teacher perhaps would have been able to be of health because they actually have some of the knowledge in the background but they were never invited into the room they were never consulted or pulled into this so it was really the parent trying to figure out where to go knocking on different doors and that was the door that was not open to them and and uh okay i have lots of quotes here so this is again a just direct quote from a parent that the two idiots could have taken place earlier if teachers school staff and other professionals or any of them had taken my observations seriously it's very sad but very true then um in addition to being the most important Lack of Knowledge person parents were also lacking the knowledge that some of these things would have been available if they would have known where to ask it doesn't mean that the result would have been better but it would have been quicker in some ways so there is a parents have the right but they also have the

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responsibility to request an evaluation and that evaluation is no cost to them school districts are required to give this when you ask for it but you have to follow a very specific process to do that and as a typical parent i can completely relate to this you you tell the teacher how what you observe and the teacher observes it too but that's not enough because it is you have to fill in the you have to use very specific wording to ask for this thing otherwise you don't get it it's kind of like i was trying to think of like how to um how to explain it's kind of like a house on fire you keep saying the house in a fire house on fire but you actually have to call in 9-1-1 and say please come to this address and put off the fire that's how i would perhaps describe it so there's a procedural understanding and a specific language that's needed for this and again this doesn't necessarily solve it all because it's going to be a partial diagnosis and it may not get anything but still many parents already at this point they were there were roadblocks that slowed them down because they did not know to ask and they were never told to have there's nobody telling you this is how you do it now and some of that and i don't want to uh this is going to get very political once

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you start calling the school district about this but there is a certain sentiment that some of this appeared to be avoidance to offer this um and to the level that perhaps some some teachers definitely felt that they were not comfortable even talking about this topic was because they felt uh between the lines they felt that perhaps their job was on the line if they started crossing crossing this this bridge where it's really is the parent's job and not the teacher's job um so anyway i could write a book about this topic yeah uh and again another quote i can't believe that malaysia's belonging definition were never offered by our school and i can't believe i did not know i i had to ask so then very clearly if parents think that there's something is wrong the school is not doing anything they are not asking the school or anything then it's very obvious that if you have the means you're going to go somewhere else you're going to go any you're going to do it any length of things to help your child so parents felt they had to go outside their public school district to get an accurate and complete uh two diagnosis and they did all of these parents did okay they were motivated for really by two things one you want to help the child you can see you can observe the child is suffering so you're gonna you're gonna go out somewhere to

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look for help and then secondly you need to have some tool in hand with which you can ask for other things so this is a you still it doesn't solve everything or maybe even anything but having an actual diagnosis hand is some kind of a lever that you can use to to ask for things and these quotes are actually a mixture of uh children's and parents quotes or parents quoting their children i did not interview the children i only needed parents but um the things that break your heart is when your child tells you that nothing they're good at nothing they feel good about matters at school the school does not reward them for the things they're good at it just punishes them for the things they're not good at and or having physical signs having having the child hide and not want to go to school um you know scream at the kitchen floor kicking and screaming and not wanting to leave the house have seen all of that um or you know bite their fingers until they bleed because they did not want to go to school because school was such a negative um experience for them so that is that those are the observable signs as a parent that make us go outside the school district very quickly when the school district is not helping us and then uh another quote from another parent is that after the diagnosis they still had to fight for their rights

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but they felt that this is something official it's kind of the doctor title it makes you more believable they can't say anymore that it's just you no you have it on paper but there's something here um and then so this is all from my study i'm going to do a little detour about Power of Diagnosis the diagnosis and the power of that so this is from existing previous research which is why the diagnosis is so important whether you get it from the school district or whether you get it from outside the school district it's really important for the student themselves so the student empowerment part instead of being the problem as they feel they have internalized this over the five-year lag they have internalized they've heard so many times from the from the teachers possibly also from their parents over the other parent that they are you know lazy or dumb or just trouble and the diagnosis makes them realize once you share it with them and i i would i'm a great proponent in saying share this with your child if they are at the majority level age level that they can understand this shared with them that they are great and they are wonderful and they have these amazing gifts and all these other things are just features of those things features of their gifts being put in a wrong kind of a box that then causes behavioral like you know it has to give somewhere right so for the child to feel that they are special and they are worthy and that

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they have some really cool interesting things that are their strengths and they realize that i need that they have really a different way that they learn and they need to learn their way and they can really become the architects of their own life and you are there to help them and that's really the student empowerment part of diagnosis and then the parent empowerment other than feeling oh my god i'm not crazy i didn't imagine this is to realize that these are all symptoms symptoms of the unmet needs and it's most likely environment that is not not serving yesterday so this is why diagnosis is important then once you have um past the point of diagnosis you still Public vs Private Resources have the choice of what are the public resources and what are the private resources you you have at your um yeti access and uh and all these parents they ended up using outside private resources in addition to the public resources um and there are several reasons for that so in terms of public resources what you really as a parent what you can do is you advocate and you get accommodations um however accommodations are not going to be enough for our twice extrapolated learners because they also need to build their strengths and this i have not met a public school yet that is actually providing really strength-based programming maybe there's some out there but i haven't found one yet so that's where the private research is

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coming in and how ever much you know we have all of us i'm sure we have met wonderful teachers and some less wonderful teachers but they're great wonderful teachers in public schools but they don't really have the resources and in many cases also not the knowledge to support the tui learner needs and that's where private resources come in either in terms of completely changing a different environment or adding enrichments and the one that research shows the the best kind of schooling for tourist student would be a strength-based programming in a supporting environment um and that's actually the greatest kind of program for any chance so not only 2e but that's what um two e-learners really uh makes them makes them thrive and then obviously you can also do other enrichments in talent development as a subsection but this is the uh kind of palette of uh of choices they are Filling the Gap now um this is where this is the filling of the gap this gap was this big but these parents that are uh two parents these are all the different areas of knowledge that they became experts in to fill that gap from my first slide and um again it's actually amazing um each of these parents could have written a book about all these topics it doesn't mean that all of us need to know all of this but it is just quite a broad spectrum of areas of specialty and all of it with a 2e lens so if you

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just talk to a regular psychologist or regular medical doctor they would not necessarily have exactly this specific knowledge that is relative to the uh to the 2e space so it's quite quite impressive but they're there i think again real uh is doing a great job in having you know having all of these information as much as possible available through their site and through all of the speeches and to all of the uh events so but it's a cross-section of an amazing amount of knowledge Steps to Fill the Gap so then um lastly to as we are trying to fill the gap for all of us these are just some of the steps uh that we need to take and it really um to parent a to a learner it really starts with making sure that hopefully all parents and all teachers are able to recognize the two characteristics because if you don't recognize them then you're going to be running in the wrong direction so recognize those characteristics then knowing how to request uh the free evaluation you'll still most likely need the outside evaluation too but you should request the free evaluation to start um how to advocate for supports how to communicate with teachers again that's something that it's not going to be done once it's going to be done every year with every single teacher so you better get really good at it what's your feel how are you asking for this um how you support you to a learner at home how do you connect to other families

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we're doing this right now right and how do we find more resources and research so this is all again fits right into what real is uh really is doing for for all of us how do we increase our knowledge across all of those spectrums and then lastly oh of little challenges Challenges i thought this is cute so it's really looking at looking through the lens of it's not we shouldn't be looking at the problem with the child maybe the problem we have is maybe the disability is how we're teaching how we're parenting these children really turning the tables um this picture i stole from the internet so it's not um it's not mine but i just started it hits the nail on the head um we're trying to make everybody around the child understand that we are the ones we need to re uh re-examine the way we value things so that we can provide these children with the best support and um and opportunities to grow and be really as i said in the beginning be the architects of their own future with our help now the challenges for us of course are how do we make sure the parents still take advantage of all of this so the outreach and the information can be there how to make sure parents come and then how do we make sure not only teachers apply their training but we do need classroom teachers to get more training we need them to

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as a first step really understand and recognize those two-way characteristics so they do not classify our children anything in the other categories too soon and lastly so this is really Why bother public schools me preparing to pass it on to laura because now we get to laura's expertise of why why bother republic schools and and there are several reasons why we need to by the way public schools um most of us i think started in any case the process in those and um it's the reason why it's worth the effort is that we really need to go go and go through this process sticking it through helps you help your child better you need to unders you will understand better what they need and how and if we don't ask for it we will never get it so it's not it's never fair it's you get what you negotiate so knowing what to ask for and how to ask for more and obviously there are many of us in the public schools so and if we get out if we work together there's going to be we'll have a stronger voice and you know more power to negotiate um and then it comes simply also to being a question of resource allocation there is a there's so much you need to still do outside the system that might as well get maximum you can from inside the system um also if we don't push those teachers then they will never learn the more we

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talk to them in the public system the more mainstream this becomes same thing with the parents the more we engage parents the better better chance there is that they are going to be that we're able to um we're able to compress the timeline of of diagnosis for the next generation of two estrogens so i will finish with that i hope i stayed within my 20 minutes but i'll uh we'll get back hey it's okay we're not being that exacting um there's such good information in here and congratulations to you for all your hard work on on your dissertation and for sharing those results with us i think it i think it really helps people feel not so alone too just to hear that other people have gone down this path and and then to put it all together like that is super helpful so thank you very much and i'm looking forward to having some q a time with you later um so before we get to our myth versus fact i wanted to give laura some time to give us a bigger picture view and an overview that would answer some of the questions that that i know i always have and i'm very excited to have laura here with us again we've actually partnered with her several times in presentations and she's sort of become our go-to resource when we have questions about how the system works because she's very familiar with it and in her background work as both a special educator on the district side

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and also a very lengthy career as a special education advocate which has now culminated in her actually having her own firm the special education advocacy group and we're very excited congratulations laura on on having your own firm and i will say she does have a special education teaching credential as she has worked specifically with students in intensive needs classrooms she won awards for her excellence in teaching she also has her administrative credential and a master's degree in academic leadership and administration she was a special ed program supervisor uh she's really done just about everything you could ask for in education and now is putting all of that to work for families as a special education advocate so i am extremely excited to hand it over to laura thank you join me to share My personal history my screen so that i can share my slides if you don't mind that'd be great that'd be fine give me one second let me just change the screens okay um so um i know kelly just gave you a little bit about my edu my work history um but just in terms of my own personal history um born in england to english parents english-speaking parents um i did for some reason we cannot see your slides at least i cannot let me see it's not working as well as it did in our little test no it didn't i can't see it either it says my screening is working hang on we have a big white stripe down our i wonder if you're like zoomed in or

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something can you see any better if i do it here on this screen okay i'll just have to look to my right a little bit if you don't mind because i'm on this screen and my camera's on the screen um so i was born in england um i did not speak until about a month before i turned five um my sister and i had our own special language and nobody knew what i wanted except for her um but then when i started to talk i started talking in full sentences and then by the age of six i was bilingual french was actually my first language english was my second um i have always been interested in special education honestly as long as i can remember i had a godsend who was born with down syndrome when i was seven and they made me the godsend because they were concerned that you know as as they got older they wouldn't be able to care for him and that's really where i began to love working with students with special needs um in high school i wanted a lot and this is back in the day which i realized ages me quite significantly but when children were institutionalized if they had severe needs and still i spent a lot of really cold and impersonal hours in institutions trying to help children to have some engagement with other others um i became a mother so i have three of my own biological children or names that met with a greedy bunch of stepmother to

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three um i actually homeschooled my children and that's when i realized that all three of mine in varying degrees from moderate to severe have dyslexia dysgraphian dyscalculia my youngest is definitely a 2e child and he is a prime example of how the system can fail a child um and that is given the fact that i'm also in education and advocate um [Music] so i taught them the foundational skills that they needed um and then enrolled them in school and i wanted them to also work on their social skills we did a lot but it's not the same as learning from somebody other than your mother and in all honesty my middle child and i but heads continuously so i decided it would be best if they went to school and i went back and i got my credential um i became a moderate to severe special education teacher um went back and got my masters and my admin credential um and just became very frustrated with the system if you will and so i've become um an advocate some of you might know renee lambo and i started off working with her um and then earlier in the school year i started my own farm um as renee has since retired um How 2e present at school so in terms of how children who are 2e present at school i'm sure some of you have had that conversation with teachers that he's the class clown or he doesn't

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complete his homework or he has attention issues um and that is really how a child presents who's bored and that is generally at the younger grades i would say probably more in the elementary level as the children that i work with get older there is a definite shift at the middle school level where those children now become completely disengaged they no longer feel successful they have six teachers now they're six times the amount of people who don't understand them um and so that anxiety in that school refusal starts the other thing that i see a lot of is students become perfectionistic where they get so obsessed with being able to do the work to their highest level that is never good enough and so it really seems to be somewhere around the middle school age they kind of go in one direction or the other um and those behavioral difficulties that immaturity that you see when children are younger now becomes emotional difficulties whether that's anxiety whether it's school reviews or whether it's depression and i have to say that covet exponentially increased that um the amount of clients that i got over covert with 2e students who demonstrate average and i'll use the word average i would rather it be called acceptable but average academics or above average but we're off the sharp charts in terms of rating scales and i'll get to that in a little bit but that's just how two e children begin to present at school um Questions to ask yourself

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following what hannah was saying these are questions that i always want parents to ask how does your student learn best generally that's a modal mortality approach it's not sitting down with lectures writing notes how is your child best at demonstrating their knowledge sometimes that's doing projects you can get students who do these amazing science projects they can't write what they've done but they can demonstrate what that what they've done um how to allow your child to go ahead knowing their areas of strength while you also know their relative weaknesses and i always use the term relative weakness because two e students are not across the board off the charts they will always have an area that is within the average or the acceptable range but for them it's a relative weakness and so it's always important to know what those are um the other thing to ask yourself is sorry oops um what skills does your child need what's what skills is your child lacking is it coping skills is it social skills is it executive functioning skills really understanding your child's um intellectual abilities as well as their strengths and i'll get to why that's so important afterwards and then you can start to decide how does your child need to be supported best in school um and so i do think that asking yourself and i think covert allowed parents to see their children present this to them more than ever before because parents were now seeing their

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students and their children at school rather than just getting the daily school was fine i did nothing reports from the students um and so i do think that was an important time for parents to get to know their children better as learners um so this is School responsibility it's a very broad area and i tried to put this on onto one slide and i'm not sure if i did a good job of it but i really want parents to understand what the school's responsibility is because once you understand what their responsibility is you can start learning how to negotiate with them so the legal requirement of a school district is to provide their students access to the curriculum they don't need to provide the best educational program possible they don't need to provide private schools but the trick is tweaking that to really be able to say what does your child need to access that curriculum and it looks very different for every student and so it's difficult to give a cookie cutter answer but that's where you can really increase the supports the services the goals everything that your child is receiving from the school um i'm going to touch on this assessments a little in a further slide but it is important to know that academics are not the only area of assessments and so if you are requesting assessments from the district please request assessments in all area of concerns that can be social emotional that can be anxiety that could be pragmatic language it doesn't academics

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are one part of the puzzle they're not the whole part especially with students who are 2e so know what to ask for and know what your child would benefit from don't just don't leave that open-ended well how can you help my child because no one knows your child better than you do so you really have to start understanding what you want to ask for um okay so this is where i wanted to back up a bit because Educational vs Medical i first wanted to explain there is a five-foot brick wall between educational and medical and so a school is absolutely not allowed to diagnose any student they can meet eligibility through a school but they can only be diagnosed medically so i have lots of parents who get into that conversation that the school won't diagnose my student and let's just use autism for example as having autism no but they can say he's on the autism spectrum or dyslexia he has specific learning disability they can't give you those diagnoses they can explain to you how your child is eligible for special education so that's the first tear down if you will in terms of medical and you know lots of things can be done through medical insurance and then educational and then educational gets split again between general education and special education one of the things i really want parents to understand is that general education teacher who's standing at the front of the class teaching your child has no

45:20

training in special education they are not required to have any special education training in order to receive their their certificate for teaching they can go to a few classes they attend a few training sessions but they don't have a very in-depth understanding of what special education is which is why like hannah said sometimes teachers would rather err on the side of not saying anything because there is a big um cloak if you will over special education and the fear of saying the wrong thing and so knowing who to talk to us about special education is extremely important the school psychologist does know about special education so they are a contact person um again i always feel specifically sorry for school psychologists because they are so overwhelmed um know who the program supervisor is at the district level who is responsible for your school email them call them put them on put your child on their radar they are the ones who can go into schools and help the school teams so that is always for me an important person lots of times i'll get penalty so when i talk to the teacher and i talk to the principal and they're not doing anything and no because they don't know special education and so it really is two separate worlds and if i could relay that if there's anything i'd like for you to understand it's that it's knowing who to speak with um i know lots of parents will say i want to volunteer and i want to get involved in the school and i'm the class parent

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or i do this for the school if it's not on the special education side of things the special education department still has no idea who you are they still have no idea how you're trying to support your child so always look in your district for special education they normally have parent support groups they normally have um parent-led pta groups get involved that way and that affects greater change than going through the general education side of things um so the oppressed the assessment The Assessment Process process at school write an email to the principal and to the psychologist stating that you are requesting assessment for special education for your child you can say i feel that my child has deficits in this area though academically he may be she may be strong these are my areas of of concern at that point the district has two two options they need to provide you an assessment plan within 15 days or they can write you a private notice explaining why they are denying your assessment even if you get private and notice it's not the end of the line you just keep fighting um you just say no i disagree this is why this is and you keep giving them that information um again i've said you know for two students they already show academic needs the teacher will say well he's reading at level he's doing this fine she's you know she's able to do her math

48:19

again it's those splinter skills it's where is the area of need where is the area of deficit um and then from there you can work with the school team to either have a 504 which is that student receives accommodations or an iep when they're also given specific services the difficulty with an iep for students who are 2e is that legally to have an iep you also have to have specialized academic instruction and so they have to be in a special education program whether that's push and support whether that's resource support whatever that looks like and my job is always to minimize how that impacts your child whether that's through a push and support or through co-teaching at the higher levels so that's that's also something to consider the other thing i want to say about assessments and it's the most frustrating thing that i do is that assessments are based on aged normed assessments in kindergarten and first grade and second grade the requirement for students is so low and so parents always like but he has this issue and i really have to say you have to wait because those deficits aren't going to show at the kindergarten level because you don't have the difficulties with social or the other the higher level academics so again keep that in mind in terms of you know what child what level and what grade your child is Types of Supports um so again this is just a level of supports i we haven't touched on it yet but these are all the different levels

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of supports that you can get for your 2e your student with 2e including non-public schools they are not private schools they are private schools that offer special education services and there are a number of schools for twice exceptional students um there are pros and cons not every student enjoys them they're only there with other students who have two e's so there are no neurotypical peers it's considered extremely restrictive which could be a whole other conversation but i just wanted to let parents know that you know there are students that i have placed in schools that help um to each students and the district has paid for those programs um it's a little bit more difficult in and engage engaged to get there but that is also a possibility if the school isn't able to meet your child's needs so i know i took up more time but that was the most abridged version i could possibly give no that was great and uh we will go back through Fact or Myth uh some of the questions that have come in while you've been chatting but i really i really do want to make sure we get we get through our fact or myth okay i'm going to stop now so that you you can as well so um i'm gonna go through just a list a list of things that i've heard or parents have emailed us about just things we've kind of been hearing over the last couple years and

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we are very excited to hear if these are fact or myth so um here's one it seems like teachers can't tell parents if they suspect a learning phrase factor method like we have we have definitely heard like uh i have talked to teachers who have said i suspect this child has a learning difference and might be 2e but i don't think i'm really allowed to say anything we've heard parents who get like little notes kind of passed to them we've heard parents who've had teachers say i think this about your child but don't tell anyone i told you that i'm not allowed to tell you that so fact versus myth laura it seems like teachers can technically it's a myth technically teachers are allowed to say they have concerns however when i was on the other side of the table i would anonymously email parents and tell them what they needed to say because when i was in those meetings i was told what i could say and what i couldn't say um and it's not i think this is the difficulty is that it's that normally enrages parents a lot of the difficulty is financial and at some point that gets to be part of the conversation with the district is the this is how much money we have to spend what can we do um having said that at the time i felt like having the students succeed and receive this the supports and services that they needed was more important than that so

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that's a kind of tough one i will say that it's absolutely a fact a myth that teachers can say these are my concerns and they should again that's a split between general education and special education where a lot of general education teachers are intimidated to say that um so i'm not sure if that answered the question it answered the question if i can add to it it is a myth that has de facto become a fact because that is the lived Its a Myth experience so for for the child and the family it has become a fact that for the teachers become a fact and it's really hard to change i would just like to say on that though i so encourage parents to develop those relationships with teachers don't look at them as being on the other side they are really there to help you and so the less you can alienate them and the more you can get them to share information and i don't just say use that information against them you use that information with the district to show what your child needs and so it's really creating that cooperation with the district and and that to me is the most important relationship and again i you know in defense of general education teachers they have such very limited training on this they're not doing it because they don't want to a lot of them are doing it because they just don't know yes i think that's right and i think um Praise Ask Thank

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julie skolnick who who runs the group with understanding comes calm and does the let's talk to e conference every year she does a whole presentation on working with the school and she's you know she kind of follows this praise ask thank model yeah you know always find the thing that's going well with your child and talk about that make your ask and then thank the teacher for for all that they they do so um and i think a lot of people try that model until it just doesn't work and so sometimes you end up having to get more adversarial but most people like to start with that model so all right next one this one has come up a lot we've seen it in the chat we see it a lot in questions if my child's academic performance is at grade level they won't be eligible for any type of school-based evaluation assessment or services fact or myth it's a myth because it depends on the definition you really need to um laura was talking about this i'm sure she wants to jump under this one but really depends on what specifically how well you can define the deficit it doesn't have to be academic it can't be other things but again it depends on your tenacity and ingenuity in framing in such a way yeah and it also becomes what i was Strengths Weaknesses talking about before in terms of understanding your child for their strengths and their weaknesses and so it really is a matter of you know not just

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asking for academics they they have to do academics anytime they do assessments but also looking at other things pragmatic language is like the soft-spoken language it's the sarcasm it's the body language typically some 2e students have a very difficult time with that because it's more gray than black and white um anxiety depression all of those things that it's not a yes or no and that's why they do reaching scales and as a parent you provide one of those rating scales they'll also have a teacher do a rating scale given that given the age of the student if they're old enough the student will also do a rating scale i can guarantee you most of the time to choose student will say i'm fine but it's all always important to get their their input as well but again know where your child is struggling and be very clear in how you communicate that to the district because there will be assessments in all those areas so i think this just comes up so much i just want to really clarify i think a lot of families in our Clarifying Questions community have gone and asked and been told you're no your child is doing fine your child is meeting standards or your child's grades are okay or they're good enough so no and they they don't they get they get the pushback and so laura um like one clarifying question that came in was you said sometimes parents have to wait until things get harder which is

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kind of that way to fail model like do you have to and i think we know legally that's not true like legally way to fail is not actually the model but it's it's it's you know what do you think in actuality a parent should do if it's a myth so it it it really depends again those younger grades the k through two those Legally How to Fail are very difficult because socially there aren't great a lot of expectations they will say and parents will hear this again and again that it's age appropriate so if students are still engaging in parallel play at the kindergarten level because they don't have the pragmatic skills to engage with others they will say well that's age appropriate so it's it's you have to wait until your child is showing a deficit and so i wouldn't say it's a weight to fail but it's pretty close to a weight to fail is you have to wait until you can argue at least that that shows a discrepancy and so again it's difficult for me given what i do because generally if i ask for an assessment the districts will know there is a good reason why and so i i'm not engaged in those conversations when the district has said no it's happened on a few occasions and i've been able to argue why that's so important but again those assessments are aged norms assessments it doesn't matter if the school gives them it doesn't matter if a private psychologist gives them they are word for word verbatim and so i know

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lots of parents worry about districts giving assessments as opposed to private individuals again it's asking for specific assessments in specific areas so the next one was Child Find it seems like my school district actively tries not to find learning disabilities i thought the federal idea law which is individuals with disabilities education act called on school districts to do what's called child find that they are supposed to be actively looking for learning differences fact or myth that is a fact um but i can't tell you one district that i think does child find well um there might be one in the east bay but um it is a fact the schools do have responsibilities to um find students who are struggling and offer them the supports that they need um it is i i can't think in the last decade of a child that i know that came into special education that way now i was going to ask you about this in the context of the other discussion we had about medical diagnosis versus i think i can't remember what you called it what educational like disability i guess i was curious how does child that child find obligation fit with that so they're they're obligated to find someone who struggles but they really aren't allowed to make a diagnosis like they can identify dyslexia because that's like an they can can they they can identify a specific learning disability yes but like but can they identify autism

1:00:34

can they say we've done the tests your child is autistic they really can't right that's a diagnosis a school is absolutely not able to diagnose a child and they can't even for most chili children they cannot even identify dyslexia because of the masking because the 2e children are as we all know so complex and using the other scale so i haven't uh whether it's a factor or myth i have not seen any children um getting getting the accommodations they need being found by the school because their way their the lens they look through is are they failing academically no they are muddling through they are muddling through and they are not failing that enough so therefore they are not passed on and i would even say with some 2e students they may fail um but then the school says it's behavioral issues it's they don't do what completion they have school avoidance um they don't work hard enough right i think i think someone posted a their question was more of a comment to us in their rsvp that they actually have had better supports like when we they focus on emotional health over behavioral supports which was very very wise yeah this this next one i mean i if this is true i don't even know what i'm going to say i mean this one just really when i i don't know the answer to this but like i've heard i mean i think i did look this up so i think i do know the answer

1:01:57

this but the fact that people don't know the answer to this is really bothersome but you tell me i've heard that school districts legally cannot use iq tests with children of color to identify strengths or weaknesses fact or myth that's fact i mean i thought i looked that up and that got outlawed i thought that they changed that they can't do iq tests because they have shown that those iq tests are skewed towards the caucasian race and so some of those questions end those tests that demonstrate iq are not based on intellect and more based on experience and so they do other tests but they can't say your iq is this they can do other assessments for the students but they can't denote an iq can they can they denote can they use the subtest like can they do it but then not say this is the iq would be like this is because i i mean we've heard this from parents of color who are frustrated because they cannot get the schools to understand their kids strengths because they can't use the iq test or something some kind of cognitive ability test to show what the child's strengths are so there are lots of cognitive assessments that they can do they just can't determine the iq if that makes sense so it's a full scale iq there's a general ability index the iq is what they cannot use um but that doesn't that doesn't say that they there's lots of other assessments

1:03:34

there's plenty to demonstrate strengths and weaknesses they just don't need to give you the full scale iq number so they help you like the wechsler and just not give you that number but they could give you all the subtests yes okay that's good i mean i think we all find the the the the one final iq score to be a little specious i guess with two e kids anyway it's really having the the verbal the you know did you know i i think this i mean correct me if i'm wrong but there is a massive issue with special education about over-representation of my knowledges in some ways and then under representation of minorities and others and 2e i would argue would be in one of those areas in which there is an underrepresentation of some minorities because they don't have access to all of this and then when they are given those assessments they are slanted towards the caucasian rather than minorities and so it's a very loaded issue right now it's it's one that i think special education is going to have to start looking at um the state does always run um keep numbers in terms of the the differences among races in special education and it is always overly representative of um blacks in special day classes and so that has just been something that i have always been very interested in um because again i wonder if that is seen through a certain cultural lens that doesn't quite accurately represent those students

1:05:15

all right we have many to go through so i'm going to keep moving i remember reading somewhere that ieps are supposed to address a child's potential and strengths not just weaknesses fact or myth it's a fact but it really depends again who wrote it and who asked for what because it only gets there if that's really highlighted and asked her what do you think laura um can you read this statement again i remember reading somewhere that ieps are supposed to address a child's potential and strengths not just weaknesses factor myth so an iep is supposed to address a child's access to the curriculum and so i have argued this in both ways i have argued in terms of the deficits of what does a child need to meet those great standards expectations and be able to access the curriculum i have also argued that the curriculum isn't high enough and therefore that is what is negatively impacting the child and so i i think as with lots of things in special education it's a little bit of a gray area again it depends on how you argue that it can be used for your it can be used for the positive and you can use it for the negative in terms of some schools will say well we're giving him access to the curriculum him or her he doesn't need to go above that and i would argue that is why you're seeing the behaviors and so that's where i tie

1:06:59

in the social emotional well-being of the child in terms of how we can get the academics to meet the needs of that child so that we don't have those areas of need so it it's it's manipulative manipulable i guess i'll say right ah all right okay um i've heard that schools in california won't use a discrepancy method where they look at discrepancies within the iq score or between iq scores and academic performance to identify students learning disabilities so for instance a child they may have like high verbal let's say on their iq but not be able to read well and you said that's a discrepancy is that a fact or a myth that we can't use a discrepancy method that's a myth and that is used enough that that's how you qualify a student earned a specific learning disability is that there is a disqus discrepancy between their cognitive ability and their academic ability but at the same time again i have seen schools do exactly that which is the average out and they say on average there's no problem therefore this child does not um qualify for anything so it's again i think it's one of those where maybe it is a myth but the school district certainly are falling for it right and that also gets back to knowing and this is so difficult is knowing what specific assessments to request or what areas to request whether it's auditory processing visual processing um you know

1:08:33

it's all those areas and you know it's learning how to ask for those so that you can be so it demonstrates those discrepancies um okay i want an assessment so that i understand my child's suspected learning disabilities if any and i can't afford a private evaluation but i've heard that the school district actually isn't obligated to provide testing for my child they can just put my child on a 504 without doing any evaluation fact or myth okay so there's lots of parts in that but i think all of those are missed so basically i can request i can request the evaluation they are obligated to at least respond to my request for the evaluation yes i can keep arguing for it if they push back and they cannot just put my kid on a 504 without doing an evaluation you can have a 504 without an evaluation right but they can't use that as an excuse excuse for not assessing for not assessing if you're requesting the assessment you will get a response and if you are clever enough in requesting you actually will get an assessment yeah and again it's knowing what areas of disabilities to ask for assessments in um and do you have any like good resources for parents to know that like how do they how do they formulate their request that is my biggest frustration and one day when i have enough time i would love to create something for parents to go where they can learn about that unfortunately you learn by doing i have

1:10:19

to say i didn't even learn it during my special education credentialing program i learned to in the classroom working with school districts working with different students working with different strengths and weaknesses there is not an easy you know google search that populates all of those all of those needs and so that is a little bit of my frustration is how to help parents know what to say and know how to ask for those assessments well that's good to know that that's i mean identifying a gap gives us some idea of what we need to fill right okay i i'm okay i thought that the district would let me know if my child should be evaluated for a learning disability but someone told me that's not true that i have to make the request in writing and that is what triggers the district to start the process fact or myth so both um it's it's fact that the school the parents shouldn't have to ask for assessments um and it's a fact that the school should offer it but if they don't then yes a parent needs to write a letter requesting assessments specifically asking for requests assessments in the specific areas because if you just ask for assessments they will do a psycho ed and an academic and that is all and so knowing what the other concerns are like that was my first my first slide because that's so important in understanding and learning about your child is you know if it's behavior uh some to do a behavior

1:12:02

assessment if it's speech language whether it's receptive expressive pragmatic knowing what to ask for i mean obviously if your child is able to communicate that's an age-appropriate way you don't need to ask for an ex an expressive speech language assessment um but knowing what assessments to ask for is is how you will really start that process working that was one that yeah that's a very personal one for me because we did not know we needed to ask and we never did and i will honestly tell you that there are some parents i've worked with who have said i asked a teacher i asked the principal i asked the psychologist about assessments and they said no and i said you know then you ask what did you put it in writing did you put it in an email did you date and timestamp it um and that's what triggers it and if not it it just it doesn't rise to the level um that it needs to in order to get some attention all right i have three more i know our chat has been blowing up during this location unlike unlike any other chat we've ever had so i'm trying to keep up i love it don't worry i think yeah and abby are trying to help stay on top of it and yael is doing it from a bathroom hotel in a hotel in boston she's on her child's school trip so okay i hear i will need to be confrontational

1:13:27

and firm to get the district to work with me that i won't be able to approach them collaboratively fact or myth myth it's it's a myth that there's a there's a fine line between being persistent and being polite you have to be knowledgeable and firm and you have to understand the process and you need to follow the process and um add all those things but being confrontational usually is not going to help alone but knowing that actually knowing the law knowing the language you need to use uh and the process those are the things and not not giving up and and i think all of us if we would have had something like laura working with us uh we would have been able to do it quicker and better so that would be giving getting other resources to help you but just being confrontational is not going to help you alone all right anything to add there laura no i just when you get a chance i wanted to uh just answer the question about what the difference is between a 504 and an iep go ahead um so i'm not sure um if we have this still but i did a um a presentation about a year ago maybe a little bit longer about the difference between a 504 and an iep in a nutshell a 504 provides accommodations within the general education environment an iep provides services with measurable goals and those and um accommodations but that's the difference between a 504

1:14:59

and an iep is a fight and both are enforceable lots of parents will say but a 504 doesn't really count and it does a 504 goes through the office of civil rights and iep goes through the department of education so they're both enforceable they're both useful they both help students you just have to determine does your child need special education to access the curriculum or do they need accommodations to access the curriculum um i've worked with lots of parents who we've gone through the assessment process and then they've said oh but i don't want my student instead i just want him to get help and it's like but you know that's that's the difference um special education is services as well as accommodations of 504s accommodations great i've heard some districts are easier to work with for assessment and support than others factor myth fact absolute fact okay and i think laura agrees i um because there's some legal questions there are two sides rightslaw.com and i wrote that down there it's very good one and then um understood.org is another good one that i use all the time for all these things yeah and i think laura you probably would even agree too that like sometimes it's it's even who you're working with within the district i mean we find some schools are easier to work with than others some schools are easier to work with some years than others depending on who is in charge and i can't tell you how many parents ask me what school or

1:16:25

what teacher should i put my kid in and the difficulty is as you have all experienced every summer everything gets reshuffled and so that's why it's so difficult to give you that specific information because it really does so much depend on the teachers on the special education support staff moving up on the attitudes of the districts there are definitely some districts i look forward to working with and there's definitely some districts i don't um but again i think the experience of of me knowing the districts and knowing what they're going to say and being able to argue those points makes it a little bit of an easier common ground if you will at least they know i have that experience to be able to say i know you're going to say this but this is what we want to ask for but yeah it really it really depends and i'm sure you can all attest to who you have who's directly working with your child yeah um all right last one for me um we have some questions in the chat is i've heard i might be able to hire an advocate and get reimbursed for the expense if i qualify um the only time that i know that my services have been being reimbursed is by a few parents who work for certain companies in the south bay it is not reimbursable by insurance it's not reimbursable by the district um that is the only experience i've had with a parent who's been able to get reimbursed

1:17:58

do you know for people who um have not as the financial resource resources for it are there options for them so i always try and do some um some pro bono work yeah families um just because that's why i got into this to help families and getting back to what i was saying before in terms of the disproportionate amount of of children um so i always try and do some pro bono work um it just gets to be very difficult in terms of balancing that schedule with with clients um you know one of the things i would love to do would be to create a kind of a a search engine if you will for parents um i just have not had the time to do that yet um but you know hopefully sometime down the line i'll be able to have more of um a place where parents can go to get help well thank you so much abby i don't know if you've been keeping track of questions or i can just scroll back to the top because i know there were questions all the way through a lot of things have been people have been contributing and answering um yeah i don't think i have anything that stands out questions i put in there and then i um some people answered but i think would be interesting to stress out the details is you know i've heard that you have to get reassessed every three years in order to keep your um

1:19:26

well this is the question is it both for the iep and the 504 is it only for the iep um yeah is that true so for the for that iep you and they've they've changed it now from calling it from a triennial to a reassessment so every three years a child needs to be reassessed in all areas of suspected disability um that doesn't mean that you can't ask for early assessments if you're concerned about a certain portion of um the educational program or if you're just worried in general about the program you can ask for early assessments you cannot ask for it within the same year assessments cannot be done within the same year or they invalidate those results so just getting back to what dr mark was saying in terms of requesting private assessments please please make sure that you coordinate that between the person who's doing the private assessments and the school if they have done any are they going to do any um i have worked with some parents that didn't communicate that and they completely invalidated all of the results for a 504 you don't necessarily need to have an assessment you can generally you will have a reassessment to see if that child still qualifies for 504 you don't necessarily need to have assessments for it it depends on why that child has a 504 so um we're going to go through a bunch of these questions and i if we run over a little bit is that okay yeah

1:20:54

and i want to just i want to just tell people though if you need to drop off don't feel obligated to to stay i think one of the things that i'm really myself personally taking away from everything you've said like if i had to boil it down and just tell everyone before they drop off is really the number one thing i'm taking away is you are entitled to ask for these evaluations and assessments but you have got to do it in writing and i think that's something parents just don't know and it's one of those things you don't know until you need to know and even then no one tells you and so we all need we are all in this group because we are probably also connected to other parents who are having kid who have kids with challenges and the more we can support each other like to get the word out like like if you know other families who are struggling please tell them that this that they they need to make the request and they need to make it in writing and they are entitled to do so because i feel like that is the number one thing i personally did not know and no one was ever going to tell me that because it's not something they put in the school newsletter that's not advertised that's you know so we just need to do a better job of letting people know that that's their right and and i think in

1:22:10

in combination with that i would tell every parent you are your child's best advocate um and it doesn't have to be personal it doesn't have to be confrontational this is a professional environment it's no different than if you went to work and you had a disagreement with a co-worker it doesn't have to be that confrontational it's it's it's a serious request you have serious concerns um i will say i have a child with an iep she's now in college but every year at her iep i would cry because it's such an emotional thing and so as much as you can take that emotion out as much as you can look at your child in terms of data points in terms of black and white is a benefit to you and i know as a parent that's sometimes very difficult to do but that's what the school will respond to more than just the anecdotal my child is sad my child is depressed look at the attendance records look at the zeros your child has for schools all of those are important factors that need the score needs to be addressed hannah i don't know if you have a kind of final remark before we go through questions we can keep going through the questions but some people may need to drop out yeah i understand and absolutely this is the it's a very very important to get an assessment done have the diagnosis done and it's really important we have the word out that help

1:23:39

is available but you have to ask for it the specific way but then i'd also like to balance that with laura excellent advisor but trying to keep it professional keeping the emotion out of it but for most of us we only have that one experience to practice it with so it's really hard it becomes easier as you go through the process but the first time around um it's quite overwhelming and because the they're all this mix of emotions your child is suffering you thought the school was better helped how come they are not helping me so it's really hard so we also there i think parents need to come together and share this you know the more we share about this the more we when we can manage it and and empower ourselves but then just i don't want to depress anyone but still having that plan in place and having the assessments having diagnosis having a plan it's still again only the beginning because you have to understand that every single time there's a new teacher the teacher may have the paper of this other accommodation for your child it doesn't mean that they happen it doesn't mean that the teacher gets it and that's again getting back to cali's point of earlier point where it's uh laura you made the point as well it's so important to build their relationship with every single teacher everybody who works with your child you are going to be the advocate for life you can every single

1:25:00

time a new person teacher comes in you're going to be there with your little spiel educating them on what's special about your child making uh educating them about 2e telling them how to take this plan to life how they can be be your your partner in helping your child and that's something that school again it's the parent will have to do that you a bad heavy lifting every time so i also just want to say when we first i want to thank hannah and laura thank you so much for letting us put you in the hot seat and go through the facts and the myths and for sharing your vast experience and knowledge with us and i think also just creating a platform for everyone in our chat tonight to be able to talk with each other about their experiences and the way they're experiencing these facts and myths in their everyday lives which i think just shows there's so much more we have to do to help everyone teachers and parents understand kind of what's fact and what's meth and and the gray areas in between so thank you very very much and i'm going to start going through some of these questions yeah elle has tried to collate through everything and send me the ones that haven't been answered but we are not really going to be able to address individual like super individualized specific questions um if you would like to reach out to laura or hannah you can do that

1:26:34

and you can also join our google group if you're not part of it already um i'll ask abby if she doesn't mind putting the link to that in the chat that's another great place because i mean laura is fantastic but she's also like you know she's got her firm and i don't want to overwhelm laura i do want to overwhelm laura but i don't so sometimes people in our google group have advice that they can provide and it's a great place to post your more specific questions so um question for you all is um and i had only vaguely answered this in the chat but is there any research that shows whether there is a difference between the accuracy of public school evaluations versus other sources of evaluations i would say in our experience what we've heard is that some schools really do do excellent evaluations um and other schools don't and it just and it can vary by who's doing it but a lot of people we know who have had private evaluations and school evaluations have actually been pretty impressed with their school evaluations on the whole but that's not always the case and i think for getting a neuropsychological evaluation i'm pretty sure you have to go private for that in most cases but i could be wrong so you guys tell me fact versus myth what do you think let me cover that quickly um any assessments that a school does have to be school based so they can't do a

1:27:57

normal site because a novel psych is a medical assessment you don't want a non-medical person doing a medical assessment as you would not want a medical person doing a school-based assessment um i can't say it enough that these assessments normed reference assessments they are scripted ideally how one person does it exactly is exactly how another person does it to me it's not a question of who does the better assessment is who does the most thorough assessments in terms of what other assessments are they looking at what other assessments are they doing um that's to me the difference between how assessors do it it's you know everybody can give the wyatt everybody can give the word cop johnson but what other assessments are you looking at is you know are you just providing that as your basis for for your assessment or are you looking at other areas you know and that gets back to parents knowing specifically areas of need if you just say i want assessments for special ed you'll get a cognitive and an academic and that will be it if you say i want assessments for special education i have concerns about my child's auditory processing or visual processing or you know visual motor integration whatever the areas are you'll also get all those additional assessments so again it's it's not the specific assessment itself it's the breadth and the level of assessments that they're going to provide and only one of them is going to suggest other assessments so if you get

1:29:27

assessment a done publicly versus privately yes the quality of it is going to be very similar comparable but only the private side is gonna say well in addition to this we also want this and that and the public side is never gonna suggest anything they'll do what you ask for and the private side will say okay well this isn't the whole picture then let's paint the whole picture yeah i think i think we've often found too like i don't know if this is true or not this has been our experience that it helps if the assessor has some knowledge of twice exceptionality because it's not so much that they're going to get different results but they might think of the child differently understanding that that it is possible possible for a child to have a very jagged profile and then the recommendations they may give if they have a twice exceptional background might be slightly different because they're gonna it may emphasize strengths more in that like set of recommendations as opposed to just how do we address deficits i think that's probably what we found more it's not that the results are different but maybe the the conversation is different sometimes how you look at the information and what you do with it ties in well kelly to one of the questions that's in here it says what is the status of formal tui diagnoses being available and recognized by school districts and i know we were

1:30:50

just talking about how school districts can't diagnose but i think there's there's still the question like do how much do public schools do you feel in the bay area we could be specific um know the signs of 2e so when they look at all these different evaluations that they ask for are they able to see that in the patterns or or are they not aware of that that's that's a tough question because 2e is not an eligibility for special education so um you know there are 13 criteria and not one of them is 2e um so i i don't know how to say this i don't know if having that label is is the significant difference between receiving services or not um i i don't know if that makes sense but again it's it's trying to fit that child into one of those 13 eligibility criteria so that they can qualify for special education services what i find actually in working with the parents that i do is the proportion of parents who don't know that their child is 2e who i have to review these assessments and have that conversation with them which is you do realize your child is twice exceptional and they will say well i just thought she was really bright i just thought he was good at math and so it's not it's not just educating the educators it's educating the parents as well and you know i i try very hard to not make

1:32:32

it us versus them um whether that's parents versus school or private versus public or educational versus medical because i don't think that helps the child and so if i could say anything it would be i i want everybody to become better educated about it i want educators i want parents i want doctors i want psychologists i want everybody to become more educated about these kids who have amazing strengths but somehow can't get past their areas of difficulty to really demonstrate their true gifts and somebody else asked a pretty specific question i i was curious about this too you talked about the non-public schools and we don't have a list of those ourselves like i know there's esther b clark and i know you know i know certain schools are private schools and qualify as nps too like i can't remember the name of the lineup in burlingame do you know of a list anywhere of of non-public schools so there is a list you can google non-public schools and you get a whole list of all the schools in the area the difficulty is knowing what schools do what and what schools are accepting and how to get into some schools some schools you need to have an iep and can only be funded by districts other schools are only funded privately by parents um you know sap cloud for example is really for students who have serious emotional disturbances so you wouldn't want necessarily you know a two-week child going into that environment unless

1:34:04

their social emotional difficulties were what would the main impact in their educational program um so that's the difficult part as well is is being able to say to parents you know we and again special education is is a continuum of services and it goes back to my my slide that i made it goes from least restrictive to most restrictive and so you have to justify every step along that continuum so even though there are no non-public schools that do a great job of educating 2e students you can't go from being in general education to a non-public school and that's not you know there's a process in terms of how to work that and and how to help your child succeed in along that course of different programs and then we do i mean you do hear the stories that are coming out of new york and maybe this isn't going to be as big a thing about so many parents of two week kids sue the district and get reimbursed just to send their kids to private schools and and i know that has happened some in our area but i think not as much so private schools do not offer any special education services so if you have a child who has two who's 2e and has deficits whether it's language based whether it's you know a specific subject academically they won't be able to provide that special education curriculum and when i have conversations with parents

1:35:32

it's always what is the end goal and generally the end goal is i want my student to go off to college and live it you know a very successful happy independent life and the difficulty with non-public schools is i know a few really good ones who go up through middle school and then after middle school there's none and so if your child isn't fully equipped to matriculate back into a general education high school we're little stuck and so that's you know the goal always needs to be and non-public schools are not permanent you wouldn't put the child in a non-public school in kindergarten can keep them all the way through senior year it's to recoup the skills or to access the skills that they need to be yeah and i'm not talking about the non-public schools i i'm talking about like can i just say to jade that i said no good non-public high schools there were not any very good non-public high schools for 2e students specifically but so like in new york it's not sending them to non-public high schools it's basically saying i get them to flex or quad or one of these schools that are specific for two e kids right or even some of their private schools that can support tweet kids and i would say like here in our area for some students and not for all a mid-peninsula high school where my daughter goes can do some support for two-week learners compass high school

1:36:57

certainly could do something like that um you know stanbridge might be able to support some to e-learning yeah has two e kids who are very bright but have some learning differences so um but and that's different that's that's like and i don't even know like that i know that happens some in this area but i don't hear about it a lot not like you do hear about it in other places and i wonder i was just kind of curious why that is if you even know you ain't necessarily asking about the why why parents don't sue the district yeah why that doesn't seem to happen as much here and i wonder if it's because it's just it's not going to happen as much like part of it is they had gifted programs and so those kids were not being given access to the gifted programs but we don't have that so you can't argue your child is missing something that doesn't exist maybe i don't know it could be just a cultural you know geocultural issue here you know some people select to go to private schools for many different reasons and i think i think that there's an income there's a socio-economic you know structure that enables people to make those choices sometimes here for various reasons so um that could contribute to it um but i do find it just on the point of like are there private options they are private options that work for some people and you mentioned some of those

1:38:17

schools and there's some specific schools for dyslexic students that have a significant 2e population for example but it depends on the combination um my our daughter actually goes to fusion that's another modeled a couple of schools that offer one-on-one instruction which by itself enables a 2e learner to advance in areas where they can advance faster and other areas get more support because they need or have an accommodation in it so there are options but those are very expensive options and it's not it that doesn't solve the problem as it should for for everyone the last question i have which i think is ending on a reasonably positive note and but i may be missing some more questions at the bottom it's just do you know anyone who's had success obtaining enrichment or acceleration through the public schools like anyone who's been able to argue that that's part of the appropriate part of fape which is fair and appropriate public education but short of hiring an attorney i have a student who is currently in third grade but during 11th grade math and so i have been able to argue that he needs access to that great level work um parents don't want to keep him in the public school socially um you know he's not age appropriate to be in 11th grade in a high school class um and he does have some gaps like you he's amazingly bright but then when you do you know some of the basics it's it's more difficult um

1:39:49

but i think that is where it's necessary to work with the individual districts about that individual child so i you know i have been able to work in terms of getting different curriculums um it's just it i can't say overreaching i do it with all 2e students just because again like i was saying some districts are easier to work with than others some it's a longer conversation shall i say than others and this is not exactly an answer to that one but i still want to put it in which is that there are other school options that are interesting so for example um palo alto and couple of other school districts they have a program with uh the community colleges which is hugely interesting so at foothill college it's called middle college it takes uh you know 11th and 12th grade students where you can take college level courses obviously foothill college level courses which enables you to use your build on the areas of strength at the same time they have their own small community doing the english history uh every day with their small group so you have like a mini school within foothill of high school students and that's for example something where one of our daughters did which i felt was a a really uh nice combination of support and um accelerate in other areas so and that's completely public and free and one of our two teen bloggers actually did that program so and she talked a lot about just how supportive the teachers there were and she really loved it

1:41:20

uh laura somebody asked if you're familiar with springstone in lafayette i am that school yeah it's um um it would be difficult for me to say um if it would be appropriate for a student with 2e or not um it has from my experience more children on the spectrum than to ease so the academics might not be as rigorous as a 2e student might need i think we find these things are all very personal and i think that we always talk about in terms of school selection whether it's private or public or whatever it is is it really depends on the kid every kid has their own needs and and you have to think about what the goals are and almost no school is perfect i don't think there is a perfect school for any really for any child but definitely not for a two week child so you just have to think about the trade-offs you know i mean even my pretty neurotypical academically motivated kids i mean there are things they do and don't like about school i mean that's that's kind of life you know and so you know i think with our two e-kids it's it's even more about thinking about the trade-offs and what that child needs and at that time what that child needs it's quite frankly it changes it doesn't change changes and these kids seem to change quite quite a lot um yes maria a twice exceptional an autistic child can be twice exceptional i think i think what laura was saying is

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it's a school that maybe is not does they're not all not all autistic children are twice exceptional exceptional just like not all twice and exceptional children are autistic so um you know schools may skew for different kinds of needs um for different kids so um yes jane more better days than bad days so i think that was it did i miss anything we've gone 15 minutes over and i really hate to be disrespectful of of uh of our speaker's time they've so graciously um donated their time to be with us today i'm gonna stop recording