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This is another resource that I would share with parents in relation to the COVID pandemic and other rights families have in North Carolina. Parents can apply for legal help and learn more about what they are receiving through the state of North Carolina in relation to special education. Teachers can also use this to make sure they are not discriminating against their students due to their disability and will not have legal actions against them for not providing the correct services.

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DRNC enforces the education rights of students with disabilities ages 3 through 22 who attend public schools in our state.

The law requires schools to teach students with disabilities i n the school building except in very rare cases. Additionally, schools must use effective instruction that meets the student's individual needs. Schools must teach them even if they have severe disabilities or challenging behaviors.

Meet the Ed Team

How DRNC advocates for the education rights of students with disabilities

A number of students with disabilities in NC miss significant amounts of school due to:

Our main goal is to get these students back in school so they can make progress in school. We also work to keep them out of juvenile courts and detention centers. And we advocate to improve the quality of special education instruction. We want your student to have the services and supports they need to succeed in school.

How we work to return students to school and improve their chances of success

Educating students, parents, and advocates about special education rights.

Helping parents and advocates file formal and informal appeals to enforce those rights.

Representing individual students on systemic legal issues.*

Securing changes to laws and procedures that are harmful to students with disabilities.

Enforcing laws and procedures to protect students with disabilities.

* These are issues that we believe we can resolve both for that student and other students in the same school district or state-wide.

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DRNC enforces the education rights of students with disabilities ages 3 through 22 who attend public schools in our state. The law requires schools to teach students with disabilities i n the school building except in very rare cases. Additionally, schools must use effective instruction that meets the student's individual needs.

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Legal Resources for Education and Special Education Law

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Legal Resources for Education and Special Education Law

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I like this resource for families and for teachers because it goes into information about special education in relation to the COVID pandemic. This was a grey area in the beginning about how to provide the correct services virtually. This also provides parents with information about legal actions and how to obtain such things. There is also has a tab related to free and low-cost legal services for families.

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Legal Resources for Education and Special Education Law | Durham, NC | Gahagan Paradis

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Gahagan Paradis has collected many free legal resources for students and people with disabilities in North Carolina. Review the collected resources here.

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I found this to be a great resource, like Wrights Law, in relation to the court cases connected to special education. I was able to search most of the court cases and see important information related to it and the outcomes. I would share this with other educators to make sure they know the significance of diffferent court cases and how it related to laws that we have now.

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Parent Rights and Responsibilities in Special Education

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Parent Rights and Responsibilities in Special Education

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Parents have a lot of rights when it comes to their student being in special education. This means that they need to be familiar with this so they know when their student is not being provided with adequite education through IDEA, Section 504, and FAPE. When they are denied the correct services then parents can take legal action. This is important to share with families so they can fight for what is right as well as hold teachers to high standards in relation to special education services.

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You may be seeing this page because you used the Back button while browsing a secure web site or application. Alternatively, you may have mistakenly bookmarked the web login form instead of the actual web site you wanted to bookmark or used a link created by somebody else who made the same mistake.

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I will share this with my students family to help them access their rights and services. This provides families with a resource that they can see different services in their county in North Carolina. Parents also have access to special education forms that will be used in IEP meetings so they can become familiar with it and be as engaged as possible. I think families can never have enough information about what happenes with special education because I am going to school to get a degree to understand everything and they are being thrown in somethings expected to understand.

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Exceptional Children's Assistance Center (ECAC)

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Helping families access the right services and support Our hope is to help each family find and access the services and supports available to them and their child(ren). We are committed to providing timely, credible, reliable, family-friendly information to parents and professionals. The following resources offer general information, organization tools, financial supports and links to ...

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Parents and Educator Resource Guide to Section 504 in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools

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Parents and Educator Resource Guide to Section 504 in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools

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This is something that I can share with parents so they understand the extent of their rights associated with Section 504 and FAPE. These laws can be confusing at times so making sure that I share as much as I can with families so they are as educated as possible on what their student is recieving. I can also use this for myself to make sure that I am doing everything in my power to giving my students what they to succeed in and outside school.

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Pipeline to Prison: Special education too often leads to jail for thousands of American children

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Pipeline to Prison: Special education too often leads to jail for thousands of American children

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This article is an eye-opener for educators to try to prevent students with disabilities from getting jail time from inadequate education. I can use this article to ensure that I am not failing my students in school and setting them up for failure in the future. The percentages are high for students with disabilities getting arrested if they do not stick with school. It is educators' responsibility to make sure that these students are prepared for the world outside of school and have techniques set in place to not get into trouble.

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GRENADA, Miss.- Cody Beck was 12 years old when he was handcuffed in front of several classmates and put in the back of a police car outside of Grenada Middle School. Cody had lost his temper in an argument with another student, and hit several teachers when they tried to intervene. He was taken to the local youth court, and then sent to a mental health facility two hours away from his home. Twelve days later, the sixth-grader was released from the facility and charged with three counts of assault.

Officials at his school determined the incident was a result of Cody's disability. As a child, Cody was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had been given an Individual Education Program, or IEP, a legal document that details the resources, accommodations, and classes that a special education student should receive to help manage his or her disability. But despite there being a medical reason for his behavior, Cody was not allowed to return to school. He was called to youth court three times in the four months after the incident happened, and was out of school for nearly half that time as he waited to start at a special private school.

Cody is one of thousands of children caught up in the juvenile justice system each year. At least one in three of those arrested has a disability, ranging from emotional disability like bipolar disorder to learning disabilities like dyslexia, and some researchers estimate the figure may be as high as 70 percent. Across the country, students with emotional disabilities are three times more likely to be arrested before leaving high school than the general population.

When the special education system fails youth and they end up in jail, many stay there for years or decades. The vast majority of adults in American prisons have a disability, according to a 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey. Data hasn't been updated since, but experts attribute the high percentage of individuals with disabilities in the nation's bloated prison population - which has grown 700 percent since 1970 - in part to deep problems in the education of children with special needs.

In Mississippi and across the country, the path to prison often starts very early for kids who struggle to manage behavioral or emotional disabilities in low-performing schools that lack mental health care, highly qualified special education teachers, and appropriately trained staff. Federal law requires schools to provide an education for kids with disabilities in an environment as close to a regular classroom as possible. But often, special needs students receive an inferior education, fall behind, and end up with few options for college or career. For youth with disabilities who end up in jail, education can be minimal, and at times, non-existent, even though federal law requires that they receive an education until age 21.

"A lot of times, it's a major setback," said Elissa Johnson, a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center. She added that some transgressions are serious, and it's behavior that needs to be addressed, "But when you're dealing with students with disabilities, youth court referrals are harmful."

Nationwide, at least 73 percent of youth with emotional disabilities who drop out of school are arrested within five years, according to a federal study.

Experts say that students with emotional disabilities can be impulsive, inattentive, or aggressive, behavior that gets them in trouble. "When we're talking about emotional or behavioral disabilities, we're really talking about kids with serious mental health needs," said Reece Peterson, a professor of special education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Learning disabilities can also land special needs children in trouble more often than their peers. "Kids with learning disabilities that are not properly remediated in a school setting start to dislike school, or act up at school, or do things to distract from the fact that they're not doing well," said Diane Smith Howard, senior staff attorney for the National Disability Rights Network.

More than 14,600 youth were involved with Mississippi's juvenile justice system in 2012, but it's unknown how many were in special education since the state does not track that information. (According to a Mississippi Department of Education (DOE) official, both the DOE and the Public Safety Office believed the other department was responsible. The official said that the DOE will begin to collect that data this year.)

Although numbers fluctuate as students move in and out of the system, some federal data show that kids with disabilities are overrepresented in the state's detention facilities. In 2011, 13 percent of students in the state's public school system qualified for special education. But at the Oakley Youth Development Center, about 27 percent of students had disabilities, according to a federal Office of Civil Rights survey. Officials at the Rankin County Detention Center say that 50 percent of the children they've had this year qualify for special education.
Related: Mississippi finally funds statewide pre-K - but only for six percent of its youngest learners
Many of these kids enter the justice system shortchanged by schools and far behind their non-disabled peers. In the 2012-13 school year, only 13 percent of eighth-grade students with disabilities scored proficient or above on the state's language arts exam, compared to 58 percent of non-disabled students. According to a previous Clarion-Ledger review of data, during the 2011-2012 school year, less than a quarter of special education students in Mississippi received a regular diploma, far lower than the national average of 64 percent in 2011.

"I'm trying to be proactive. Everything we talk to them about is about not becoming a victim to the system." Alfonso Franklin, program manager at the Mississippi Center for Justice.

"Young people who generally end up in trouble were not prepared from the beginning educationally," said Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, director of the Children's Defense Fund's Southern Regional Office. A 2013 report by the Minneapolis-based PACER Center, a parent training center, warned that one of the biggest reasons students end up in the corrections system is " school failure."

Many kids across Mississippi also lack access to pre-kindergarten, meaning they may start behind academically, socially, and emotionally, and can miss a critical time period to identify disabilities and begin treatment. Only about 17 percent of children under 5 in Mississippi receive a screening for developmental or behavioral problems, compared to the national average of about 31 percent.
First step - suspension
"Early education and nurturing is absolutely critical," said Fitzgerald. "Children whose needs are met at an early age are able to go to school ready to learn...They're much less likely to be discipline problems in the classroom."

To an outsider, Cody seems like any other 14-year-old boy. He's soft-spoken around strangers and spends his free time playing with his baby sister, hunting with his dad, and building things outside in the family's wood shop in their modest rural home near Grenada Lake. He aspires to be an underwater welder, like his father. But from a young age, Cody has struggled to manage his anger. He has outbursts when he argues with others, especially with other children. If he is touched while angry, he tries to get away, even if that means hitting someone else. His parents say he especially tends to clash with "bullies," which can spiral into heated fights.

In his 2013-14 IEP, it was recommended that Cody receive individual instruction, be placed in a small class with other students with emotional disabilities, and daily therapy sessions. His teachers set short-term goals for Cody, such as "develop the ability to identify impulsive thoughts and consequences" and "develop the ability to identify and express feelings of anger and distress in socially acceptable ways." In his IEP, his teachers also detailed his academic abilities: he was reading nearly at grade level, but his math and writing skills were several grades behind. They wrote that Cody "tries to do his best work and desires to learn."

Robert Beck, Cody's father, said he also explained to Cody's teachers what he found to work best in calming Cody down, like speaking in a calm voice and refraining from making physical contact.

Still, from a young age, Cody was suspended for behavioral incidents and missed more than a dozen days of school in the months leading up to his arrest. When asked about the fighting, Cody said he loses his temper when other kids tease him, or when he hears "people talking about my parents, telling me I'm stupid."

For many students with disabilities, suspensions are often the entry point in the pipeline to the criminal justice system. Statewide, more than 8,000 students with disabilities received an out of school suspension, and nearly half of those received more than one in the 2011-12 school year, according to estimates by the federal Office of Civil Rights.
Related: For special education students, diplomas, jobs increasingly elusive
"Many of those kids get in further trouble out of school," said Reece Peterson, "and they end up in the juvenile justice system."

Several special education students who have been arrested said in interviews that their trouble with the law was preceded by frequent suspensions for fighting or "talking back." One 16-year-old special education student at Oakley Youth Development Center, a long-term center for incarcerated youth, said in the past, "loud noises and childish people" would set him off. A 15-year-old student at Oakley who qualifies for special education said that she was incarcerated after assaulting a police officer. She had already been suspended from school numerous times for things like "playing in the hall" during class or talking back to teachers.
- Sarah Butrymowicz
What would have happened to Cody Beck in a different state? Like Cody Beck, thousands of special education students in Mississippi lose valuable time in school through suspensions, expulsions and arrests each year. According to federal data, more than 8,000 special education students in Mississippi received an out-of-school suspension in the 2011-2012 school year- about 14 percent of all special education students in the state. Experts say a suspension can lead to bigger trouble for students later on, including time in jail. By comparison, just 5 percent of Utah's students with special needs were given an out-of-school suspension, one of the lowest rates in the country.Keeping all students in school is a priority, said Utah Department of Education director of special education Glenna Gallo. Although she couldn't speak directly to a student in Cody's situation, she said that Utah educators are taught to prevent disruptive behavior from leading to arrest. "We have quite of a few of our staff trained in crisis de-escalation," she said, adding that teachers and administrators are given strategies for calming down students with behavioral disabilities without touching them.

The Utah Department of Education has provided administrators with workshops in crisis intervention strategies, which includes referring special education students to mental health services instead of suspending them. Sending a student to a private treatment program, as in Cody's case in Mississippi, would only be a last resort. "Utah generally keeps their students within the school community," Gallo said.
Not enough teachers, not enough counseling
School discipline policies often do not take into account students with disabilities. They may, for example, include zero tolerance policies not only for serious behavior, but also for disrespect or noncompliance. Experts say this can lead schools to disproportionately suspend special education students, whose actions may be manifestations of their disability.

A 2013 report by several nonprofits found that some Mississippi school discipline policies include vague or subjective language, like expulsion for "any action which is deemed disorderly conduct or misconduct." In Caledonia, Mississippi, several parents interviewed said that deputies who work in the nearby Lowndes County School District respond in extreme ways, such as pulling out a Taser gun when kids, including those with behavioral or emotional disabilities, act out in school. (Officials from the district said that no Taser guns have been used on children at school, but police officers on the campuses do carry them. The district's security guards do not.)

One of the main reasons special needs children are jailed more often than their peers is because teachers aren't trained in how to manage kids who are insubordinate or disruptive, according to the 2013 report by the PACER Center. For years, Mississippi has experienced a shortage of highly qualified special education teachers, especially in the lowest-performing schools. (Nearly one-third of Mississippi's districts are considered "critical needs " districts by the state.)
Related: Back to school, but without books and basics in Mississippi
Reece Peterson says discipline needs to move to a more "teaching-based" approach so that students explicitly learn correct behavior. "If [a student] has a disability that has characteristics of being aggressive and acting out, we can't simply punish him for that," Peterson said. "We would want to provide some sort of service or intervention for it."

But these resources are lacking in Mississippi. During the 2011-12 school year, only about half the children ages 2 to 17 who have problems that require counseling received mental health care, compared to more than 60 percent nationwide. Paul Bowen, administrator of the Rankin County Youth Court, said he sees many youth who have untreated mental health problems. The detention facility provides counseling while the youth are incarcerated, but few continue once they get home. "Many of these children would respond positively," Bowen said. "But they're dependent on adults to get them there and many families can't afford those services."

There have been some efforts to find solutions. In 2013, administrators at the Rankin County Detention Center rolled out a new behavior management program called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, which aims to teach and reward positive behaviors, rather than focusing on punishment and negative behaviors. Paul Bowen said that since the program launched, the detention center has seen a 65 percent decrease in incidents related to behavior. Some states, like Minnesota, have rolled out this program in all schools.

In the absence of school-based efforts and resources, a handful of nonprofits have launched programs to keep the most at-risk students out of the justice system. In the Delta town of Ruleville, Alfonso Franklin, a project manager at the Mississippi Center for Justice, runs a program aimed at helping boys transition out of the system, or keeping them out from the start. He frequently tracks down students who are absent from school, checks in with their teachers, and organizes speakers to talk about the impact of getting arrested. "I'm trying to be proactive," Franklin said, adding that there are few recreational activities or resources in rural Mississippi. "Everything we talk to them about is about not becoming a victim to the system."
No way back
Related: Can the hundreds of education experts who flocked to Mississippi improve life for the state's black boys?

Efforts like these are critical, experts say, since preventing an arrest in the first place is much easier than helping kids stay out of jail once they've spent time there. Dennis Daniels, superintendent of the Oakley Youth Development Center, said that Oakley sees so many students with disabilities because communities and schools tend to "deal with the behavior before they deal with the disorder."

"There's nobody dealing with their disabilities," Daniels said. "If you don't get them help in the community, they get locked up."

After an arrest, families say they often encounter districts that are reluctant to let those children return to school, or schools that are ill-equipped to handle them. "The school district might say 'I'm uncomfortable with you returning to school, we're going to put you in an alternative program," said Smith Howard.

After an arrest, many students lose valuable learning time and fall even further behind, while others become a frequent fixture in youth courts and a patchwork system of detention centers, youth jails, and alternative schools for education. A 2006 study found that for all students, a first-time arrest during high school nearly doubles the odds of that student dropping out, while a court appearance nearly quadruples the odds of dropout.

After his arrest, Cody's team of special education teachers and school officials decided to send him to the Millcreek Day Treatment center, a privately run facility in the northwest Mississippi town of Batesville, which is accredited by the state of Mississippi as a "special non-public school." There, Cody's parents say he was mixed with "a lot of problem kids and the school work wasn't challenging." Cody said he was frequently given worksheets and word searches. One of his assignments as a seventh-grade student was to read and complete a 68-page packet called "How I Learned to Control My Temper," which is written at a low-elementary level and tells the story of a boy who learns different ways to handle his temper. It includes several pages of activities, like drawing pictures, and playing tic-tac-toe.

Megan Williams, a therapist at Millcreek that the school provided for comment, said that although she can't speak about any former or current students, she guesses the packet was "not from the teacher, but from the therapist." (At Millcreek, Cody had daily access to a special education teacher and a therapist.) Regarding the classwork, Williams said that "each classroom is different," and she was not able to speak about the academic program at the facility.

In dozens of daily reports sent home by Millcreek, Cody's behavior seemed to improve, although there were still a few behavioral incidents that resulted in time out of school. For several stretches of time, he received perfect or near perfect scores for "respecting others," "following directions," and his individual goal to "stay positive." On several reports, teachers commented that Cody "did all class work" and "ignored negativity."

After an incident last October, however, Millcreek referred Cody to a behavioral treatment center in Tennessee. When he was released, his father and stepmother asked the school district to move Cody to back to the public school, where they wanted him to receive more challenging work. Instead, school officials offered to put him on a "homebound program" where he would complete work sent home every day, and spend two hours twice a week working with a teacher at a regular school. In the future, they said, he could possibly transition back to the regular school.

"When we're talking about emotional or behavioral disabilities, we're really talking about kids with serious mental health needs," Reece Peterson, a professor of special education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Officials at Grenada Middle School said they couldn't discuss individual students. Bea Colbert, director of special education for the Grenada School District, said that the decision to put a child on a homebound program "depends on the individual circumstances." The amount of time a child spends homebound also varies by child, Colbert said, but could be based on how well the child has been working with the academic teacher, "how much time [in school] they're able to tolerate," or how well the child is doing in counseling sessions. "Our ultimate goal for every child is to be in their least restrictive environment and to earn a traditional diploma," Colbert said. "But for some children, that may not be a realistic goal."

Cody's parents said they were torn, since they knew he may not be ready to handle a large class, but they didn't want him to be isolated. In April this year, they agreed to keep him at home, but they said his education now consists of him spending most of his days alone, teaching himself the material that is sent home from school. When teachers at Grenada Middle School wanted to move him on to eighth grade this year, his parents argued that he has missed too much school, and has not learned enough, to move on. This year, Cody is repeating seventh grade.

"What they're doing now is not providing him with an education," said Bobbi Jo Beck, Cody's stepmother. She said she fears that if he doesn't learn how to interact with others and control his temper, future incidents could lead to more arrests and jail time, which is something she sees frequently at her job as a nurse at a county jail. "It scares me," Bobbi Jo said. "I don't want that to happen to him."

This story was produced in partnership with the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, the only national news outlet reporting the juvenile justice issue daily. Read more about efforts to improve education in Mississippi.

Related articles

Jackie Mader is multimedia editor. She has covered preK-12 education and teacher preparation nationwide, with a focus on the rural south. Her work has appeared in the The Denver Post, the Sun Herald and... More by Jackie Mader

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Pipeline to Prison: Special education too often leads to jail for thousands of American children

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GRENADA, Miss.- Cody Beck was 12 years old when he was handcuffed in front of several classmates and put in the back of a police car outside of Grenada Middle School. Cody had lost his temper in an argument with another student, and hit several teachers when they tried to intervene.

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A Parents Guide to Special Education in North Carolina

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A Parents Guide to Special Education in North Carolina

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Within special education, it is important that parents are involved and know the rights they have as well as their student. This resource is something that I can share with parents so they are familiar with their rights and can be active participants in their students educational career. I believe that conversations and transparency is crutial and this will help with the relationship among parents and the IEP team.

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The Duke Children's Law Clinic has produced a comprehensive Guide for parents of children with special education needs. The Guide explains the special education law in clear terms so that parents can learn the vocabulary, navigate the special education system, and become an effective advocate for their children. The Guide is especially geared to assist North Carolina parents.

The Guide contains 11 chapters, beginning with the broad concepts of the special education law and the important terms, then moving to specific topics. Readers can access the Guide by clicking the desired chapter on the list below, or by downloading the entire Guide to their own computer. The Frequently Asked Questions are answered orally as well as in the text. See the videos below to hear answers to common questions.
Download the guide Descarga la Guía en Español
Frequently Asked Questions

Chapter 9 of the Guide provides answers to frequently asked questions about special education in North Carolina. The questions, which are divided into six groups, are also answered in the videos below. Click the play buttons to watch each grouping in its entirety, or use the links to jump to individual answers.

Eligibility for Special Education

Special Education Services and IEPs

Least Restrictive Environment and Placement Issues

Accommodations, Modifications, Supplementary Aids and Services, and Related Services

IEP Meetings

School Discipline

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A Parents' Guide to Special Education in North Carolina | Duke University School of Law

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The Duke Children's Law Clinic has produced a comprehensive Guide for parents of children with special education needs. The Guide explains the special education law in clear terms so that parents can learn the vocabulary, navigate the special education system, and become an effective advocate for their children.

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This resource will help me become familiar with laws associated with special education. This resource was already extremely helpful when completing the important court case activity which I will also connect to this resource. Court case activity link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F7DG0o3aKQwXYFRfGWX6qcssVdR_uweU/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103475867172450411899&rtpof=true&sd=true
Special education court cases are important to become familiar with so that I can ensure that I am providing the correct services to my students.

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Peter W.D. Wright, Esq. and Pamela Darr Wright, MA, MSW

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Wrightslaw provides free access to articles, cases, resources and training about special education law and advocacy.

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Policies Governing Services for Children with Disabilities

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Policies Governing Services for Children with Disabilities

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I will use this document to become more familiar with the policies in relation to children with disabilities. This document goes into detail on the definitions of different disabilities, state eligibility, and local agency eligibility. This will help me in the future to ensure that I am providing the correct services for my students.