^{Special Education Audits}

Special Education Services and LOFT: Let LOFT evaluate your Special Education Program and work together with you as a team to have the most ethical and legal program your community desires.

No single issue can define a school community’s overall wellbeing as accurately as the health and wellbeing of the Special Education program.

Every school will benefit by using a common language when dealing with students and families. LOFT is guided by a simple and loving sequence: patience; acceptance; empathy; compassion; cooperation; kindness and love. When your school community is able to use such common language many answers concerning fairness and equity will be worked out in a caring, accepting and kind atmosphere.

How many of these issues are you facing?

1) Staff members, School Board Members, Community members and students who don’t understand the ethical, legal and legal underpinnings of Special Education Legislation.

2) Higher than average Special Education percentages?

3) Pre-referral and referral processes that seem to be only a conduit for Special Education determination, not a clearing house of ideas and a collaborative staff of Special Educators who have an important and supported mission to help regular educators learn a wider array of teaching strategies.

4) Skyrocketing Special Education costs?

5) Hiring too many paraprofessionals without asking the question, “How can we assign the least trained person to the neediest students?” If you have never asked this question perhaps you should.

6) Higher than average poverty rates with no active curriculum changes to accommodate for students living in generational poverty.

7) Decision makers who still believe there is a positive financial reason for coding kids as requiring Special Education when on average it costs eight times the amount to educate a Special Education student over the course of their lifetime.

8) How sure are you that every child on an IEP actually needs to be on one? How sure are you that every child that would benefit from an IEP has been so coded? Don’t know – LOFT can help!

Special Education can be a superb harbinger of the overall health of a school community. A vast well of research shows that strong, professional and student centered Special Education services working hand in hand with the regular education staff and administration should be a universal goal for all public schools.

Tom McGuire, A LOFT Director, has been an advocate for children since 1978. Over the last 10 years Tom has conducted numerous graduate classes, workshops and whole-school reform projects aimed at making the often difficult changes schools face. When Tom works with a school it is through the Sequence of Seven, no recriminations, judgments or mandates. The goals and outcomes will always be decided by the community but all participants will have much clearer legal and ethical parameters to work within. Our extensive network of likeminded colleagues can be called upon at every stage as appropriate.