Finding your inner advocate.
My hope with this website is to take you from hesitancy to courage and strength. I want you to feel like you can rock even the most difficult of IEP meetings. By learning the basics of special education law and increasing your understanding of negotiation and advocacy—you will be able to climb mountains. How you apply this information will be different depending on your purpose, the ages of your children, their unique needs, your family situation, and whether you are a parent, parent and child educational advocate, or an attorney.
Advocacy is hard. It is. Please don’t let anyone tell you anything differently or lead you to believe that it is simple. Being an advocate means taking on the cause of another as our own. Being a parent naturally pushes us into the advocacy role in one way or another. Being a parent of a child who has challenges forces a parent to fully take on this role to ensure their child is getting the medical, educational, and psychological services they need to become as independent as possible. However, the fact of the matter is that most of us don’t wake up one day after having a child automatically having the skills to not only know everything our child needs but with the expertise to successfully advocate and negotiate. These are learned skills and there are hundreds of books and seminars simply on the art of negotiation. It is hard enough to negotiate a car price with the internet at hand to give us the scoop, negotiating with a public school is another animal entirely.
We may be forced into various roles in our lives but it still all comes down to choice. When it comes to your child’s education or the education of any child for that matter, sitting at the IEP meeting or 504 meeting does not make you an advocate, nor does going to the doctor’s appointments or scheduling specialists.
What makes you an advocate is making a conscious choice to push harder, to ask more questions, to seek out additional services, and to learn what is needed and ask for it.
It does mean occasionally not being liked and that can be hard. This is why it is a choice because you are choosing a harder path and one that does not always feel comfortable. At times, it may feel downright miserable – especially when you are sitting in a meeting with fifteen people looking back at you and disagreeing with your request. At that moment most parents and advocates are battling the multiple emotions of wanting to be liked, respected, fully frustrated, confused, and angry. We often second-guess ourselves in these moments. We second guess our understanding of the law, what a school must offer, what the child needs, and whether it is worth the fight.
The fact of the matter is that if what you are requesting will make that child’s life easier, more productive, and will advance him or her forward academically or functionally, it is worth the time and the stress.