I Have All These Skills, Now Why Don't They Just Listen?

This will be an interactive workshop on early conflict management practices and innovative training models pioneered at Student Advocacy, Inc., a small agency in suburban New York City that has been in existence for almost 30 years. It serves approximately 1,000 children and teens almost all of whom need special education advocacy. The objective is to showcase a program that combines legal and educational expertise in an effective advocacy approach that has a long track record of resolving disputes at the IEP team level, discuss how a program can be developed on a district by district level, and as such be powerfully sensitive to multi-cultural and linguistic issues. Components of the workshop include Student Advocacy’s holistic approach to advocacy, its commitment to working with schools to overcome the obstacles to school success for every child, and its partnerships with non-educational agencies. Addionally, the core values required by early conflict resolution will be discussed including the paradigm shift that is necessary to move from adversarial meetings to collaborative and durable agreements. Also, the legal and ethical challenges faced by lawyers and advocates who work in early stage conflict resolution and how sensitivity to these issues on both the side of the advocate and school personnel is critical. Finally, a presenter will speak from both the school district perspective and as a child education advocate, acknowledging the difficulty of these two different perspectives and how successful communication and early conflict resolution can occur. Often it is necessary to work with both groups outside the formal IEP team setting; sometimes individually, and sometimes jointly before going to the IEP team. The clarification of what the parent desires for a child with a disability and what and why the school district is offering, leads to a successful IEP team meeting with the student receiving appropriate services. More than 99% of these cases are resolved at the IEP or Section 504 team level; any case that is not favorably resolved and needs to be taken to due process is referred out to local private attorneys.