Families as Allies says a great big THANK YOU to our friends and partners at the Mississippi Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities and the Mississippi Parent Training and Information Center for a terrific job with the Ninth Annual Special Education Law Conference. We learned so much and came away with renewed excitement about what we, as parents, can get done together.
Attorney Diana Autin was the conference speaker. She is also near and dear to our hearts at Families as Allies (as we are sure she is to many others). According to the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network: “Diana MTK Autin, JD, is Executive Director of the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network (SPAN), a family-serving, parent-led organization located in Newark, NJ (www.spanadvocacy.org), which has housed NJ’s federally-designated Family-to-Family Health Information Center for 16 years and the state’s Parent Training and Information Center for over 33 years. SPAN is the NJ affiliate for Family Voices, Parent to Parent USA, and the National Federation of Families (formerly the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health (FFCMH). SPAN operates the National Center for Parent Information and Resources (www.parentcenterhub.org) and the National RAISE Transition Parent TA Center (www.RAISEcenter.org).”
These are some of our practical takeaways from the conference that we think might be helpful to others:
- Parents and caregivers can formally address special education disputes with school districts through formal state complaints, mediation and due process.
- Anyone, even someone from another state, can file a formal state complaint.
- Formal state complaints can be about what happened to one child or a group of children.
- Mississippi has a low rate of filing formal state complaints when compared to other states.
- Formal state complaints include a section on proposed resolutions. Using this section to help bring about needed changes for children is essential.
- Due process complaints are about one child and are filed by the child’s parent/guardian.
- Mississippi has an extremely low rate of filing due process complaints compared to other states.
- In Mississippi, only an attorney can represent families at due process hearings, but there are ways that other people can offer support.
We encourage families who believe that their children are not receiving a free and appropriate education and have not been able to resolve these issues with their children’s districts to consider if using formal state complaints, mediation, or due process could be helpful. The Mississippi Department of Education website had a dispute resolution page.
