IEP Family Assistance

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Family Involvement Brochure 2143139

How can you ensure the involvement of family members into your plan for servicing your special education population?

The need for a collective effort is obvious when dealing with young children in special education enrollment in their respective schools or place of learning. Teachers need to ensure that parents stay involved in their' child's education, or that child becomes at serious risk at becoming "lost in the system" and permanently damaged due to this abuse and neglect. It is important that we treat those in our society who appear to have less with dignity and respect and contribute to their quality of life.

The family is where the child learns to act and behave in society and many of the initial traits and behaviors within the child's life is learned from the family source. This may be helpful or not helpful depending on the relationship and the quality of care that parents can give to a child. Unfortunately those children with emotional and intellectual disparities' are most at risk for being ignored and displaced in the system. The importance of family involvement can certainly help mitigate these problems that are seen across the country and schools everywhere.

Henrich (2013) argued that parental involvement is key to success in achieving goals in special education. He wrote "systematic efforts to engage parents in early childhood education can benefit from comprehensive models for parent-school partnerships that have been developed for families of school-aged children. These models can serve as useful guides for future research and practice in early childhood education." This research is corroborated by Duchnowski et al. (2012) in their research. They suggested and argued that "An extensive body of research investigating the extent to which parents are involved in the schooling of their children indicates greater parent involvement is associated with better academic achievement and mental health of children."

To ensure involvement it must take great effort for the special education staff to engage parents and make them see their importance in their child's education. This is a difficult challenge since many times, parents are not concerned with their own child's learning much less their own. To avoid these circumstances, it is important to think of the child first, and the family second. While family involvement tends to be a useful practice, it must be tempered with reason and thoughtful planning when considering the individual problems of the child. Treating each child as an individual with their own needs is helpful in this process and can allow education professionals to attain their strategic school and classroom objectives.

2. How might you work with the parents of your special education students to make them a part of their students' education?

Engaging the parents to become involved in their student's education begins with awareness. The responsibility of the child must fall on the parents themselves and taking this responsibility away does not serve anyone with any valued purpose. The intent of education is for the child to become competent on his own accord and breaking away from parental structure to lead a healthy and productive life. When too much dependence is placed on outside sources, the child becomes truly handicapped and cannot function without an authority figure telling him or her what to do, how to do it and when to do it. This is not education, this is human programming and defeats the purpose of education in pursuit of intellectual freedom.

Having a firm and knowledgeable base about other cultures and people's goes a long way in helping a special education teacher establish parental involvement at a healthy and optimum level that both allows the child to reach new levels of learning and can establish the appropriate amounts of boundaries for all involved. The impact of culture on education should not be undervalued.

The quality of involvement is very important. Meaningless parent -- teacher meetings occur often where the parent is not truly interested in the IEP but is just there to make appearances. Engaging the parent becomes an important first step in any strategy to involving the parent. This idea is explained by Smith et al. (2013) who wrote "many schools, charter as well as district-run, appear interested in involvement -- letting parents know the school's expectations, having parent attend school events and meetings -- but not engagement in which parents are an ongoing presence at the school and set school policy through serving on the school governing board or advisory council.

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There may be a continuum of parent participation from involvement to engagement, with a critical link to the school's mission."

Once again the notion of subjective and individual mission appears as important in this process of involving parents in special education programs. The need for hyper specialization within the special education programs places heavy demands on the faculty and parents because the need for individual attention and learning. Rote lessons do very little to activate the minds of children with learning disabilities and the whole system needs to concentrate on fixing this issue. The need for such programs suggests that teachers and educators have not found a useful manner in addressing this situation but there have been improvements demonstrating that there are useful means to work with parents of special needs students.

Sheridan et al. (2012) presented two approaches to this problem. The first approach calls for interventions: these " are designed to align structures and practices at home and school; attention is on parents' actions or behaviors in supporting their child more so than contributing to establishing effective strategies or building relationships with teachers." Another approach is family-school partnership. This approach can " emphasize the relationship between families and schools, and purport to enhance student outcomes through development of crosssystem supports and continuities across settings." Each approach can work, but the individual details must be worked out by the individuals themselves. To treat each family with a special child the same would not be a prudent approach in fixing this problem. In most likelihood the problems will never be totally solved, and incremental success and development should be favored in place of massive overhaul.

3. Besides attending IEP meetings, what other activities or events could you put in place that would encourage more family involvement?

The issue of communication is important when dealing with IEP development and the role of the parent. Communication barriers exist all throughout society and it is important for teachers and educators to realize that their messages might not be transmitting successfully to the intended audience. Making parents feel comfortable and becoming approachable is useful first step in becoming more encouraging for parents to become involved with their child's education and development.

The more parents are around the school the more they can become involved. By encouraging parents to become part of the school in other ways besides IEP development, a more cooperative and collective environment is presented which makes this process simpler and easier to communicate. Engaging parents and caregivers in school-based volunteer opportunities is usually one of the first ways that parents and school personnel envision "parent involvement." In reality, parent volunteering is one kind of parent involvement that demonstrates little impact on student learning, but volunteering can be an important way to build linkages between parents and schools that lead to more family engagement overall.

Parents need support as well and many are not very educated themselves and have no idea on how to educate their child, otherwise they would most likely not send them to a public school. This suggests that the parents need to make more decisions for themselves and eventually become more involved with the decisions that are being made at school in relation to the child. Many times the parent does not even realize that they have such decision making power. Discovering this influence in their child's life can be very helpful and very rewarding for those involved.

Educators must know their role in their local community to understand their true role in a child's education. Throughout the public school system of America there are many different approaches to parent involvement that reflect the more specific values, ethics and traditions of that local community. Knowing the place of school and educators within that micro environment requires knowing the limitations of the school and the role of the teachers. Peters (2012) wrote that "Although it is widely recognized that parental involvement is highly beneficial to a child-s academic success, therein lies a dilemma. Regardless of the obvious importance of family involvement coupled with extensive proof that it helps children succeed, many schools do not have comprehensive parental involvement programs (Swap 1993). As desirable as it is for schools to create programs which encourage parental involvement, it is not always feasible.".....

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