>Starting tomorrow, we will be home-schooling our youngest until which time we can get the public school in our district to accept him and his disabilities.
Anyone know anybody associated with the ACLU? How about the NAACP?
The reason I ask, is because my son’s civil rights have been violated. He is diagnosed with a number of very specific mental and emotional disorders, and he just happens to be African-American. Why is that an issue or should it be an issue? He is the only African-American in his school that I know of. While I can’t say for certain that they are discriminating against him because of his race, I know that they are discriminating against him because of his disabilities.
Even after they accept him back in the district, either by legal mandate or their own volition, how can we guarantee that he will be given the opportunity to succeed or fail on his own merits. How do we guarantee that they won’t sabotage him just to get him out of the building?
If you know of someone who could help our case, please leave a comment and let me know. I will be in touch.
May parents with special needs children homeschool and their children thrive. I don’t know where you family resides and what your child’s circumstances are so it is very difficult to comment. You can lodge a complaint with both the ACLU and the NAACP but they will do nothing unless your case is in the media. Is your goal to give him an appropriate school placement? If so, Wrightslaw is the place to start. That and the County School Systems special education page online. They may have a list of Independent Educational Evaluators approved by the school system. Your son can be assessed by an IEE first, then you can try going through the process to an appropriate placement again. Look for a Disability Law Center for resources on affordable advocacy. If you choose to continue homeschooling, there are great support groups and cooperatives both on and offline. They help with setting up fieldtrips and playdates, as well as with the ins and outs of homeschool portfolio reviews. I also just wanted to say that I think more people might post comments if you didn’t have to resgister with wordpress to do so. Can the blog have a guest commentator added subject to your approval?
Thank you for your comments. We live in North Dakota. I will look into the things that you mentioned. We are looking to return him to public school, as he needs to learn social skills that he can’t learn if home-schooled. We live in a small town.
I will look into the guest commentator. I like that idea. I didn’t like the idea of requiring registration either, but short of not allowing comments couldn’t figure out a way to do it. C.