You Have the Right to Observe Your Child's Classroom

If you didn't read yesterday's offering from The Friendship Circle, it shared some really wonderful information for those of us dealing with special education.  Their article, Observing Your Child's Classroom: What are Your Rights? is an article that really struck home for me.  I was denied access to the special education classroom during Patty's first year of Kindergarten, and FERPA was the backbone of the argument used to justify the situation.

As you may remember, last summer we decided to have Patty repeat her year of Kindergarten and we also made a move to a different elementary school in our county.  During this past school year I have witnessed so many wonderful things at our new school, that I have tried very hard to forget all of the negatives from the year before. 

It's been hard.  Really hard.

The first sentence of the article says it all:  As parents of children with disabilities we are in a constant state of worry.  Really, that whole article says it all.  It feels like Mr. Dorfman pulled out things from my very own heart and mind.  And, like I've said before in comments on other blogs, it is really nice to know I'm not the only one going through these emotions. 

Sometimes, being a parent, dealing with special education and therapies and insurance approvals and IEPs, makes me feel like the giraffe in a herd of zebras.  I mean, I have no one in my physical life who is dealing with anything really similar to what I deal with everyday.  Sometimes, it can all be really tough to deal with.  Ug, the insurance approvals alone are enough to drive a person crazy.  Articles like this one help me be more diligent, more knowledgeable. 

And I now know that the school was wrong in their actions to block me from Patty's "resource" classroom that first year. Of course, the school system may have additional rules in place to, as they put it, protect the privacy of students in special education. But, I can certainly say it felt much closer to hiding something from me, than protecting my student's privacy.