Negotiating the Special Education Maze

This 2007 book covers key legal topics — Who is a person with a disability under the ADA and Rehabilitation Act? What accommodations are required? What documentation is necessary? How do the ADA and RA apply in higher education and in the workplace? What are the courts deciding? What about state law? How to advocate for your position?

This book contains everything necessary for establishing effective IEP meetings. The former President of the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, Chuck Noe, M.A., acknowledges this and says, “Martin’s ideas work…” and he recommends this book to “anyone wanting to strengthen the quality of meetings and outcomes.” The book targets the needs of administrators, teachers, resource professionals, and parents. It is a skills-based book that will help these groups to design, review, and modify IEPs for children with special education needs.

Wrightslaw: From Emotions to Advocacy, second edition will teach you how to plan, prepare, organize and get quality special education services. In this comprehensive, easy-to-read book, you will learn your child’s disability and educational needs, how to create a simple method for organizing your child’s file and devising a master plan for your child’s special education. You will understand parent-school conflict, how to create paper trails and effective letter writing. This book includes dozens of worksheets, forms and sample letters that you can tailor to your needs

Here is a model of reading ideal for striving readers, focused on their personal interests, topic-specific reading, deep background knowledge, contextual reading strategies, and mentoring support. More important, the model moves away from a deficit approach to conceptualize striving readers in a new way. Chapters share success stories of readers who overcome their struggles and highlight instructional strategies and materials you can use to develop activities and lessons for children and adults. Use this research-based model in the classroom or at home to help your striving readers achieve high levels of literacy.

Author Rondalyn Varney Whitney, a pediatric occupational therapist, is the mother of Zac, a child who suffers from nonverbal learning disorder, or NLD. By definition, NLD is a neurological defect in children who are unable to recognize the nonverbal clues that make up 50 percent of communication. In Bridging the Gap, Whitney seamlessly weaves practical professional advice throughout the account of her passionate involvement with her son. She writes, “I believe that NLD, now thought to be as prevalent as dyslexia, is a difference and not a flaw.” She also warns parents and teachers that kids with NLD are likely to be misdiagnosed as lazy or defiant, so she urges readers to consider both the strengths (high intelligence and advanced verbal skills and memory) and weaknesses (low visual, spatial, and motor skills and deficits in social communication) of these kids.

“Bad” Helen is in trouble. If she can’t improve her reading skills, she will be stuck in the sixth grade forever! An ace baseball pitcher and class clown, Helen must now face the fact that reading is not one of her skills. With the help of a sympathetic teacher, Helen decides to brave her classmates’ teasing and enter a special education class.