Parents Helping Parents
How To Make The Great Leap
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
For the past year, I’ve blocked out Wednesday mornings to write this newsletter. I missed this week, because my brain was overloaded and needed a short break. However, lots of things were still happening, because that’s how things work around here. Always a little loopy.
Last night, I had a group of parents come to my house to discuss the very topic of this newsletter - post-high school plans for people with disabilities. I borrowed folding chairs and extended the dining room table with a folding table. I organized speakers and set up a hybrid option, so some people could participate from home. The meeting lasted for four hours.
A friend of mine basically told me that I was crazy. I worked for free! On Friday night! But all the time and effort required to set up this parent event was worth it. Even though I’ve working on transition efforts for over a year now, I still learned something new last night. And I do think that the only way to improve the world for my son is by improving the whole community. I worked on a Friday night, because I think it will help my son.
Ever since Ian was little, I’ve found that other parents are my best source of information about services, programs, schools, therapists, and so on. Schools don’t want you to know stuff. Outside consultants charge thousands of dollars for mediocre information. Outside organizations give droning presentations aimed at people with a third grade education. But it’s that random conversation with a parent at the YMCA for special swim lessons that makes all the difference.
In every town, there are parents who have done their homework. Get a few of them in a room together and they can bounce facts off of each other and teach the community.
When more parents are knowledgable, they will not only help their child, but they can build something in the community. Knowledgable parents call State Senators to complain, and then change can happen. My son needs more changes in the greater world in order to thrive.
I’m going to do a series of newsletters over the next few weeks with hard, boring facts about the transition process — things that we talked about last night. But first, let me just say that every special education parent needs to create their own community for spreading information. Typical parents learn about the prom, varsity football tryouts, and college applications from conversations with neighbors at the supermarket. Special ed parents have to a little more resourceful.
Tips for parent organizing:
Start a Facebook page for special education parents in your town. I did it ten years ago. Our town had a Facebook page called [Name of Town] Moms and Dads for sharing information about school and town events. My Facebook page is [Name of Town] Special Moms and Dads. The page is aimed at special ed parents in town, as well as local therapists and service providers, who want to inform parents of upcoming events and opportunities. Our group now has 800 members.
Use the Facebook page to find other parents with older kids, high school and over. Then set up a time and date for the event. Do it in your house, so people can talk freely away from school administrators and away from money grubbing education consultants. Have the people rsvp to your email and create a mailing list. Super important. Email addresses are gold.
Pizza and wine. You want people to show up to an event? Offer them adult beverages and carbs. Hell, if you hand me a glass of wine, I’ll listen to your lecture on paint drying. You can put a note on your invitation asking for donations. Last night, every parent brought a bottle of wine and my liquor cabinet is now stocked until Christmas.
Hybrid. As much as I prefer in-person meetings, parents now expect a hybrid option. And special ed parents have complicated lives, so that’s fair enough. Last night, I brought my desktop computer upstairs and set it up at one end of the long table, so we could have that bigger screen. We used Google Meet. Because it was a rainy night and there’s some illness going around, we had a lot of people switch from in-person to Zoom at the last minute, including two of the super-informed parents. The meeting would have been less awesome without their input, so I’m glad we did that.
Be organized. I had a plan. Myself, along three other parents who have visited programs and have seen stuff, gave presentations. I asked that presenters to talk for ten minutes. The plan was to have forty minutes of discussion and then open up the discussion to questions. As it turned out, our presenters talked for longer and others piped in questions at odd times, but it was fine. By having a plan, even one that didn’t entirely work out, it still gave us some focus.
Hot Tip From the Archives: Don’t Let Your Kid Graduate From High School