Ms. C's Special Education Information
A Beginners Guide to Special Education Information.
A Brief History of Laws Affecting Special Education
This website is a timeline covering laws that affect special education from 1973 to 2004. It is very brief, in that it does not offer a lot of information on each law, although it does not touch on how each law benefits a child with a disability, it does mention what happened each time the law changed. For instance, it describes the EHA (Education of the Handicapped Act) being enacted to expand Title VI, but it does not define EHA and Title VI. This website would be helpful to a person with some prior knowledge of special education law.
A History of Special Education Laws
This website, Prepared by John Peterson, is a timeline of when each special education law was put into practice. Not only does it list the year the law went into Affect, but it also states the law's name (i.e P.L. 94-142) and how that law benefits student's who benefit from that special education law. This timeline stretches from 1965's creation of Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, to 2004's IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) being reauthorized. This website would be helpful to a person with little to no prior knowledge of special education law.
School Based Intervention Team Information
This is an excellent resource for teachers because it includes all the forms for helping to assess a student who may need an special education plan, an IEP or a 504 plan. Some of the forms located on this document are: a Student At-Risk referral form, an S-BIT Case Liaison Checklist, and an S-BIT meeting script. This PDF file is ideal for and provides extensive information to educators in obtaining special education assistance to students who need it.
This is a website that would be especially helpful to the parents or guardians of a child who is in need of special education and/or disability services. This is a website that makes clear, in five different languages, the support and services people with disabilities are entitled to by law. Some things that can be found on this website are: Who is eligible for services under the IDEA Act, and What is the maximum age eligibility for special education? This website also tells parents how to start the IEP process if they believe their child is in need of one. This is a great website for finding information about getting a child in need of a special education program, by looking not only what they are entitled to by law, but also how parents/ guardians and teachers can obtain that assistance for the child.
By going to this website and clicking on "Resources," you can access podcasts, modules, case studies, activities and information briefs on a variety of education related topics, such as assessment, math, disability, school improvement, grades k-3 and grades 4-8. "Funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), the IRIS Center develops training enhancement materials to be used by faculty and professional development providers for the preparation of current and future school personnel (http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/index.htm)." This website is ideal for educators, but also provides articles such as Functional Behavioral Assessment and Positive Interventions: What Parents Need to Know, that are directed at parents.
This is a document that is a great resource to educators because not only does it describe what ADD and ADHD are, but it also explains how they are diagnosed. This document also clearly explains what teachers can do to accommodate a student with ADD or ADHD that are both subtle and appropriate by doing this such as creating a nonverbal cue system between the student and the teacher to indicate things such as when the student is not making good decisions during class time and keeps yelling out answers without raising their hand. This is a document that every educator with a student in their class that has ADD or ADHD should have in their classroom.
