ATTENTION PARENTS OF STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES
Albany is considering legislation RIGHT NOW that will make it harder for you to go to a hearing to enforce your rights or obtain additional academic support for your child.
Why should you be concerned?  Two bills before the Senate (S5816 and S5758A) would:

• Reduce the amount of time you have to enforce your rights against your school district by cutting the statute of limitations to 180 days for parents who unilaterally place their children in nonpublic school and to one year for everyone else.
• Eliminate the right of parents who home school their children or who pay private school tuition to get related services for their child unless they tell the school district that they plan to do this by April 1 of the year beforethey want the services.  
• Force parents who home school their children or pay for private school tuition to go through mandatory mediation before they could file a due process hearing.
• Allow school districts to cut Academic Intervention Services for students with IEPs. 

At the December meeting of New York's Board of Regents, the State Education Department began a long-awaited discussion of how to revise New York's graduation requirements. Among the ideas set forth in its memo (which may be found at: http://www.regents.nysed.gov/meetings/2010Meetings/December2010/1210ccrd1.pdf) were the elimination of the local diploma and the Individualized Education Program (IEP) diploma. These proposed changes could have a major impact on at-risk students, including students with disabilities and English Language Learners.
In 2007, AFC called for changes to the IEP diploma, which, despite its name, does not indicate that a student had successfully completed graduation requirements and confers few benefits of a high school diploma. In a letter to the State Education Department, AFC described widespread misuse of the credential to push out students who could have graduated with a local or Regents diploma. Many of these students did not realize that an IEP diploma was not a regular diploma until it was too late or they had already left school. Twenty-six individuals and organizations signed on to AFC's letter urging the State Education Department and the Regents to rename the IEP diploma and to issue guidance to combat misuse of the credential. The State was receptive to this position and has since then made reform and the potential elimination of the IEP diploma a major part of the State's planned overhaul of high school exit criteria.
At the same time that AFC was fighting the misuse of the IEP diploma, it voiced serious concern about the proposed elimination of the local diploma. 14.5% of students in New York State graduated with a local diploma in 2009, and most of the students with disabilities and English Language Learners who graduated that year did so with a local diploma. Despite the long-planned phase-out of the local diploma and the anticipated spike in drop-out rates, the State has not proposed any alternate path for students who may not be able to pass the Regents exams to get a Regents diploma. In October, AFC released a paper, "More than a Statistic: Faces of the Local Diploma" (available at: http://www.advocatesforchildren.org/Faces%20of%20the%20Local%20Diploma.final.pdf) which profiled students who could not have gotten a Regents diploma, but who used their local diplomas to find employment and attend college. If the local diploma is eliminated, these students and others like them would never have graduated from high school and would have had more severely limited opportunities for education and employment.
Going forward, AFC and its allies will focus on urging the State to create viable pathways to graduation for at-risk students, including students with disabilities and English Language Learners, and will urge the State to maintain the local diploma as an option for students until an alternative is developed and implemented.
For more information about AFC's initiatives around New York State's diploma options, please contact Gisela Alvarez at galvarez@advocatesforchildren.org.

News

Letter to Regents VESID Committee (Tilles - Oct 2008) Click here

News: Emergency special education regulations adopted by the Commissioner. Click here for a copy of the new regulations.

2009: VESID issues revised Procedural Safeguard Notice for Parents