Patricia S. Phelan runs The Law Office of Patricia S. Phelan - a practice dedicated exclusively to the field of special education law and advocacy.  Ms. Phelan has been practicing law for eighteen years and is an experienced litigator as well as a parent of a child with a disability.  For guidance about your child's rights under the law, please contact Ms. Phelan by email at PSPESQ@aol.com or telephone at 845-398-3273.  For more information about The Law Office of Patricia S. Phelan, go to http://www.phelanspecialedlaw.com/.

 Organize Educational Records

It is important to organize the large amount of paper that piles up when you have a child with special needs. Your files should include one copy of every educational record you have. File the IEP, reports, evaluations, and progress notes. Keep all notes, letters, and emails about your child.

Do not forget to include records of contact with anybody who works with your child – gym, art and music teachers; speech, occupational and physical therapists; and school psychologists.

If you have a telephone conversation with a professional about your child, you should write down the date, the time, the subject, and the names of all participants. Also summarize what was said.

Ongoing and open communication with your child’s teachers is very important. I recommend that you talk about this at the IEP meeting. You may want to include in the plan how you and the teachers will communicate and how often.

When possible, communicate with the teachers by email.  It is more flexible, efficient and private than either communication notebooks or telephone conversations. Email also makes it easy to keep records. Don’t wait. Print out emails right away!

Make a Binder

As you organize your child’s paperwork, I recommend you use the “parent-tested” system explained by Pam Wright and Pete Wright in From Emotions to Advocacy, The Special Education Survival Guide (Second Edition, pages 67-72).

As the Wrights point out, your organized file will help you feel more in control, particularly during IEP meetings. It will also help you see the big picture about your child.

The recommended approach:

1. Organize by year all of the papers about your child that you have so far.
2. Use a soft lead pencil to lightly write the date of each document in the lower right corner of the first page of each document. (Otherwise, do not write or highlight on the originals).
3. Add a few samples of your child’s schoolwork.
4. Put all of the documents in a three-hole-punch binder in chronological order.
5. Add to this notebook as the year goes on. It is important to keep your binder up to date.
6. If you need more than one binder, label the outside of each: Put a number (e.g., Notebook 1) and the range of dates and grades of the papers it contains.

Make a Master List

You should make a master list of your child’s papers. This list tells you what documents you have and where to find them.

Create a table with four columns. (You can download a sample from www.fetaweb.com or www.phelanspecialedlaw.com.)

Label the columns “Date,” “Author,” “Type,” and “Significance.”

Fill out the columns with the Date, Author and Type of document right away. You can fill in the “Significance” column later, when you determine what information is important.

Deal with Other Paperwork

Organizing your child’s educational records is only half of the battle. As we know, homework, artwork, and other papers tend to gather on the kitchen table. You need to organize this paperwork in some way, as well.

Some of us think we need to save everything our child makes. If you are one of those parents, I recommend that you get a large empty box or bin. Label it with your child’s name, grade and year. Throw everything in there!

This way, your counter is saved and you have a record of everything.

When your child completes a large art project, take a digital photo. Keep the photo in the box.

If you can be more selective, try to save only things that show your child’s strengths and weaknesses. Remember that both are important! For example, you might not keep every spelling test, but you might keep one or two to show how your child does on these types of tests.

Of course, you also want to save those “special occasion” projects – the ones created for religious holidays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.

Whether you save everything or a select amount of your child’s paperwork, keeping up-to-date with this is crucial.

Keep a Diary

Keeping a written record about your child can be very helpful. It is nice to have a record of what your child was doing in a given grade. (Don’t we all hope we can look back with our kids before they get married and embarrass them with the poem they wrote to us on Mother’s Day?)

When your child has special needs, it can be even more important to keep a record of his or her accomplishments.

It is important to realize that children’s needs continue to change. You must constantly look at where your child’s educational program needs to be individualized. Having concrete examples of your child’s work really helps.

Often, a teacher, doctor, friend or family member might ask, “How is your child doing?” You must keep records about your child in order to accurately answer this question.

Further, it is helpful to you as a parent have a record of your child’s performance. It is natural to question the pace of progress. Sometimes, we need to reflect upon the steps forward to accept that they are real.

Here are some tips for your diary:

• Include entries of both accomplishments and challenges.
• Make a separate page for each of the sections from the “Present Levels of Performance” part of your child’s IEP (academic achievements, social development, physical development, and management needs).
• When you learn about a significant accomplishment or problem your child has experienced, find the appropriate page in the diary and make a note of the details and the date.
• Support your notes with homework and artwork that your child may bring home. (Don’t forget to save samples in the three-ring binder, as well.)
• In front of the very first page of your diary, insert the IEP Summary you have made of your child’s programs, services, goals and parent responsibilities.

 A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words: Keep a Video Journal

You should regularly videotape your child. I recommend you do this at least once a month.

This visual record will be incredibly helpful to medical professionals, educators, therapists and other working with your child.

It also might be a valuable advocacy tool. You may use the video at your child’s IEP meetings and at other key moments. And should it ever become necessary, you could use the video at a due process hearing – a step you might need to take if you do not agree with the services your district wants to give your child.

All else aside, I have found that the greatest benefit of the video journal is to remind us, as parents, of how far our children have come. The daily progress our kids make is not always obvious. When you look back at the video, you see a clearer picture. Compare your child from one month to another. You will see that his or her hard work – and yours – is worth celebrating.

Look for the final Part in this blog Series, which provides some additional strategies on how to help your child have a good school year.  Specifically, that section deals with how you might educate your child’s new teachers about some of your child’s strengths and weaknesses.  I also find it helpful to provide educators new to your child with strategies that you have found to be helpful to your child.

For additional resources, including helpful books and links to other web sites, I encourage you to access my web site at www.phelanspecialedlaw.com.             

  *I would like to thank Pete and Pam Wright for their assistance in editing certain portions of this blog.