The Wrightslaw Way

My 9th grade daughter has an IEP for NOS/PDD. She has extremely high standardized test scores. But her teachers say she has inconsistent work habits and is disruptive in class.  They treat her as a disciplinary “issue”. I don’t think her teachers are taking the time or making the effort to deal with the problems […]

US DOE Office for Civil Rights has released the new civil rights-education data collected nationwide. A few of the shocking findings: Teachers in elementary schools serving the most Hispanic and African-American students are paid, on average, $2250 less per year than their colleagues in the same district working at schools serving the fewest Hispanic and […]

Update: Policy Statement (12/31/12):  The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that recess is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and, as such, it should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons. The Crucial Role of Recess in School My sixth grade son, 12, is diagnosed ADHD with anxiety. His current IEP does […]

I have a 10 year old son who has Down syndrome. He is significantly developmentally delayed and does not speak. His teacher decided to make a storage closet in his classroom his timeout room.  She put a chair in the closet facing the wall, several times a day she sat him in there and made […]

Bringing police into public schools is a trend that exploded in the 1990s, after high-profile school shooting incidents at Columbine and Jonesboro. When a reader asked a question about school resource officers,  we realized how little we knew about these officers. Are school resource officers law enforcement officers? Disciplinarians? Counselors or educators? Let’s take a […]

What does the law state regarding a student who is in mainstream classes yet refuses to do any assignments? He just doesn’t care. The staff has made extra effort to “bend over backwards” to provide assistance, extra help, make additional copies of materials lost or discarded by the student. IEP accommodations have been addressed, FBA […]

We just found out our non-verbal 13 year old son with autism spectrum disorder was being locked in a containment room when he failed to comply with his aide’s instructions. Sometimes this happens several times a day. The school administrator said he had no knowledge the room was being used. Yet, the administrator was the […]

In 2007, a judge ordered sanctions against MPS and remedies for kids. MPS says what the judge ordered in June 2009 will be too costly. However, “they have a never-ending pot for attorney’s fees.” A lawsuit brought by Disability Rights Wisconsin in 2001 alleged that MPS systematically failed to identify and serve students who may […]

The following video (taken from a school surveillance tape) is a shocking report of videotaped abuse of a 14 year old boy who has autism. This young boy cannot speak and is not able to explain what happens to him at school. He repeatedly arrives home with torn clothes and in January was taken to […]

The implementing federal special education regulations for IDEA 2004 became effective in October 2006. Additional regulations were published in December 2008. In June 2009, OSEP published a revised series of question and answer (Q&A) documents prepared by OSERS to address some of the most important issues raised by requests for clarification on a variety of […]