School Beat: Special Education Community Advisory Committee Censored By DistrictKaty Franklinbyline‚ Feb. 14‚ 2008I am a member of the San Francisco Unified School District Community Advisory Committee for Special Education. The CAC-SPED is a group of parents of children with disabilities and our mission is to advocate for effective special education programs for children in our district (SFUSD). One of our strategies is to create and distribute a newsletter to get information and support out to a wider grouping of parents than can attend our meetings. In September 2006, administrators agreed to translate this newsletter into Chinese and Spanish, and print and mail it out three times a year to all families who have a child in special education. We wanted to reach out to low-income parents of children with disabilities who have no computers, to parents who do not speak English and do not get access to as much information about their rights as English speaking families do, and to parents who work two jobs and do not have time to scour the internet to double-check what special education administrators tell them about services their children are entitled to. Because many of these parents are not aware of their basic rights under the system their children are not always getting the services they need in order to receive an appropriate education. |