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Candace Cortiella: Are schools required to tell parents about the centers when their child is found eligible for special education services?
Jan Serak: Some schools do provide that information to parents. Some give parent center brochures to parents. Teachers often tell parents about parent centers. Schools are required to give out what’s called procedural safeguards informational booklets, or they put in a booklet to parents at least once a year. Many of the schools include parent center contact information in that booklet, but they’re not required to do that.
Some schools include the parent center information on a page of their IEP forms so that it says if you have questions or concerns about your child’s IEP, call these numbers. They’ll often list the Protection and Advocacy Agency and the PTI or CTRC. Those are the acronyms for the parent centers and community parent research centers. But this isn’t required.
Connie Hawkins: I want to follow up on something Jan said earlier: Parent centers are working really hard to be accessible to families who are not native English speakers. We do outreach in communities who do not have the tendency or the ability to look in the phonebook for a parent center. This is becoming very much a part of our work now to make sure that we’re known but also totally accessible to families regardless of language or education level or anything like that.
Candace Cortiella: So, how many students are currently served by special education in this country?
Connie Hawkins: I think it’s about six million.
Candace Cortiella: How many parents of those six million children do you estimate the parent centers are able to reach and help each year?
Jan Serak: Out of the 106 parent centers, we have to actually report annually on the number and demographics of the families we serve. And last year, there were over 1.4 million, 31% of those were racially, culturally diverse families which is a particular demographic group we’re trying to reach.
Connie Hawkins: One thing that upsets us is when a family says, “Why didn’t I know about you five years ago?” And that’s the universal statement from our parent centers. It does frustrate us when families don’t know about us. But we’re trying and we’re definitely visible. We definitely want families to call with the caveat that we are all independent, family-driven, usually fairly small nonprofits. So like everybody else is doing today, we’re balancing our resources.
Candace Cortiella: Exactly. I think it’s important to point out that the amount of funding that you receive [should probably be] substantially increased in order to increase your capacity to serve families, especially if you use social networking and other technologies to increase your reach. It would be important for you to have the financial resources to do that.
Candace Cortiella: If somebody wants to find a parent center in their state, how do they go about doing that?
Jan Serak: We just launched a fantastic portal website which is a great doorway to the Parent Center Network. The address for that is parentcenternetwork.org. Parents can go to that website and look up any parent center in their own state or anywhere in the country.
The other neat thing about our website is that, if somebody is looking for materials on IEPs for example, the website will search every single one of the websites of all 106 parent centers for that information. So with this portal website, we not only have information from one center but from all of them, accessible at the same time.
Candace Cortiella: This is a wonderful new resource for everyone. I think it’s particularly helpful since one thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that as the centers establish themselves in individual states, they basically come up with their own names. So the names of the centers vary tremendously from state to state and might not be readily recognizable as the federally funded parent centers for parents for students with disabilities. So the new portal is a wonderful way for people to conveniently and quickly find the parent center in their state or community. Do you have any closing thoughts for us today?
Jan Serak: We’re really excited about the opportunity to reach out to others in this way so that they can really learn about what we’re doing and find the parent centers in their areas. Thanks so much for the opportunity to provide this information.
Connie Hawkins: We also want families to know that there’s no such thing as a wrong question or a dumb question. I mean that’s what we’re there for. Most of us at the parent centers are parents ourselves. We can simplify the process by not only answering questions but also by helping families understand and learn how to find the answers for themselves. So we like having calls from families.
Candace Cortiella: Thank you both for joining us today. We appreciate all of the information you’ve shared with us and, most importantly, we appreciate all of your hard work over these many years on behalf of parents of students with disabilities.
Connie Hawkins is Executive Director of the Exceptional Children's Assistance Center in North Carolina, and a National Center for Learning Disabilities Professional Advisory Board member. Jan Serak is Executive Co-Director of the Wisconsin Family Assistance Center for Education Training and Support.
This transcription was made possible by a grant from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation.
