You know I always wondered if those costs are covered under their insurance policies. I think the legal fees may be but never got a clear answer on the others. And if they lose the cases, they can be ordered to pay the parents' legal costs and attorney fees as well.

Isn't the biases and myths that pop up repeatedly about SPED amazing. It is almost as bad as the parents who will tell other parents (trying to offer advice) that their child is entitled to certain things based solely on the diagnosis etc.. *rolls eyes* yeah remember that the I stands for Individual.

Mind you my kids have always been mainstreamed and we wouldn't allow placement anywhere else. We have had awesome school districts and one of the most unique Special Education setups in the country for my kid's preschool through 5th grade <a href="http://(http://www.ssdmo.org/" target="_blank">(http://www.ssdmo.org/ county wide and covers all 24 school districts in the county). Because of that we had to coordinate dates for IEPs for both of us, reg teacher, resource teacher, school VP, School district regional rep, Speech, School Counselor, SSD regional rep, plus any other extra people we needed (yes that was a minimum of 9 people) and it also meant that SSD controlled placement of SPED teachers in the school, not the school (so the school got limited say in personnel changes)

We were very happy to start limiting pullouts starting in about 4th grade and both the old school and the new school had no pullouts planned for 6th grade (they both do speech in the main classrooms at the level).

Now I do disagree slightly that SPED doesn't pull resources from the general budget. While the do get federal funds for SPED, in general, those funds are not sufficient to cover all SPED costs. They help, but when you have a school that must offer the child ALL services, regardless of costs, and the federal funds are only so much per child. So it hurts even more when you funnel those funds away from SPED to RTI programs because your dealing with a limited budget but unlimited costs.

My recent post How to Survive Until My Social Security Disability Benefits are Approved Pt 2 – Housing

only 1 more thing to add to that list...

And I VOTE

Wow your new book sounds very interesting, adding it to my tbr list. I also retweeted your contest https://twitter.com/#!/deerhart23

total: 2

its sold out online. Sigh and I just bought this yesterday as one of the b2g1 free games