Making Special Education Actually Work

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/worried-parents.png As the dust starts to settle, to the degree it can following the 2024 election cycle, parents of children with disabilities who need special education or 504 accommodations and supports are now searching for answers as to how the promised changes to public education in the United States will affect their children. Many of these parents had no idea prior to the election what the fallout for public education and students with disabilities would be, and are only now starting to realize the magnitude of the changes on the horizon. This is not the first time the disabled community has had to deal with seismic shifts in the legal landscape as it relates to disability rights laws, and I'd like to quiet the worried minds of those parents who are on the verge of freaking out, right now, to tell you that "This to shall pass." This isn't my first rodeo and I've gotten really good at dealing with the ineptitude, stupidity, apathy, and egocentricity of the types of tiny minds responsible for discriminatory practices against the most vulnerable members of our communities. I don't say this to minimize what's coming. We are about to enter into some very trying times in the special education community following the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States and the installation of his cabinet in January 2025. Number 47 has already promised to shut down the U.S. Department of Education [https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/department-of-education-shut-down-trump/index.html] without any regard for how this will affect the millions of children with disabilities who rely on federal civil rights protections being implemented and enforced by the U.S. Department of Education, including those who receive federally funded special education programming. This is causing widespread panic among families of children with special needs and public-school employees who are employed to service this population of learners. The concern is entirely justified, but the panic is not, at least not for now, and I need everyone to calm down and let me explain why that is. Regardless of Number 47’s inclinations and intentions, the United States still is not a dictatorship, at least not yet. It certainly won’t instantly become a dictatorship the second Number 47 is sworn in. There are laws in place that control how our federal agencies are organized, the duties they are required by law to perform, and their respective enforcement authorities. No presidential administration has the authority to simply put an end to our laws. It will take more than Number 47’s four years in office to fight Congress, the courts, and the will of the American people to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and all the laws it is responsible for implementing and enforcing. We have to remember that he tried to do this once before with Betsy DeVos when he was Number 45. DeVos actually shut down the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) upon assuming office. It took 18 months of litigation to get it reopened [http://chrome-extension//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.copaa.org/resource/resmgr/docs/2018_documents/nfb_et_al_v_dept_of_educatio.pdf], but it was still reopened because it exists to carry out specific legally mandated duties that could not be performed if it no longer existed. It was the existing laws on the books that mandated OCR’s existence, and those laws remain on the books now. Further, the legal precedent for preserving OCR is now also on the books, so Number 47’s new Secretary of Education is already prevented from repeating that approach by existing caselaw, and OCR is operated by a bunch of lawyers who are likely going to rely on that existing caselaw to resist any future efforts to shut down OCR. We also have to consider who Number 47 wants to name as the secretary of education, which is an absolute weirdo from the world of professional wrestling [https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5192689/education-department-trump-linda-mcmahon] with no background in education science or law and a questionable relationship with lawful conduct. I’m willing to believe that her absolute ineptitude and lack of understanding of how anything in public education actually works will eat up enough time that by the time she figures much out, we’ll be at the 2026 midterms where we can beef up Congress in such a way as to legislate our ways out of this mess in spite of the pressure coming from the executive branch. The way I’m looking at the next four years is that the incoming administration is headed by Dr. Evil, Number 2, and Frau Farbissina, but they’re going to be too preoccupied with fem-bots and sharks with lasers to really get that far with things that matter to the rest of us. They will still do a lot of damage and people will still likely die unnecessarily again from their policies, just like when COVID first broke out. I still remember the refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies from when COVID first hit because our morgues were filled to capacity. But I also remember that, as Number 45, he who is now Number 47 was going to build a huge wall between the United States and Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it, which never happened, and that his last attempt to shut down the U.S. Department of Education failed in such spectacular fashion that caselaw was created against future attempts to do the same thing. Further, because Number 47 is now attempting to surround himself with loyalists willing to act on every sharks-with-lasers idea he may have, because they are also bone-heads, whatever acts of corruption they intend to carry out will be flawed, inept, and ultimately doomed to failure. These morons leave evidence trails behind them a hundred miles wide for which we will have all new charges that we can press against them and finally hold them accountable, in spite of what they’ve managed to get away with from their last shot at power. All they need now is for their version of Scott to sit at the table and make fun of them every time they fail and the Austin Powers comparison will be complete. There’s a really good chance that getting away with as much as they did last time around is going to make them feel untouchable enough to not even try to conceal what they are doing, which is going to make the future prosecutions and lawsuits against them much easier to win. Further, even if their past crimes from the 45th administration become moot in the face of statutes of limitations, those past crimes are still historically relevant to any violations they commit over the next four years and can be used to establish a pattern of behavior. If they are continuing violations that started during the 45th administration that are still happening during the 47th administration, the statute of limitations would not necessarily limit the look-back period for enforcement; it’s possible that violations during the 45th administration would still be live for adjudication if they are continued into the 47th administration. Furthermore, in California, where we are headquartered, the governor has already ponied up the legal resources to sue the living bejeezus out of the federal government in every instance in which the 47th administration tries to pull an unlawful stunt that would hurt the people of California. This includes public education and our students with special needs. California has the resources to stand alone as its own country if it ever needs to. It’s the 5th largest economy in the world [https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/16/california-remains-the-worlds-5th-largest-economy/] and it financially supports the red states, which can’t support themselves without our money. It will be at the forefront of the fight to preserve everyone’s legal protections, including those afforded to students with disabilities, so our families here in the State have less to worry about than our families in other states, particularly the red states that were tricked into voting against their own interests. It's important to remember why public education in general is so important, and the degree to which public education failures have led us to where we are now. Without belaboring points I’ve repeatedly made in previous posts/podcasts, let me sum it up by saying that the measure of how civilized a society is goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members. I’ve spent the last 34+ years defending the educational and civil rights of some of our society’s most vulnerable members, children and young adults with disabilities. These individuals’ cases have been the canaries in the coal mine for American democracy this entire time, but when I first started out my career, I was considered a hyperbolic “Don Quixote” tilting at windmills whenever I squawked about public education failures. Now, here we are 34+ years into my career, and most people are now worried about what’s going to become of their own civil rights and those of the people they love, even if none of them have disabilities. For those of you who have lived your lives dealing with racism, homophobia, and/or other forms of discrimination, you know what I’m talking about, too. I’m extremely concerned for the children with special needs who were born here in the United States to undocumented parents, who are citizens under the 14th Amendment [https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/] but who could still end up in deportation concentration camps if Number 47’s sharks-with-lasers fantasies with respect to immigration [https://apnews.com/article/trump-immigration-deportation-republican-states-da5c2465b9d4476176c09d87d6c00aed] are nonetheless realized. I realize that, at this point, irony is dead, but I have to take a moment to acknowledge the profound mental illness that will pervade the 47th presidency and lead to so much damage to people with disabilities. What makes sociopathy combined with personality disorders so dangerous is that these are the people who refuse to acknowledge that they are themselves disabled carrying out their mentally ill motivations at the expense of the rest of us, simply because it is their hands on the wheel right now, not ours. What makes it even more tragic are the number of equally impaired individuals who were convinced to vote for this shitshow and who are now going to pay for those mistakes along with all the rest of us who will simply be unwilling collateral damage. Evidently, humankind needs to experience these kinds of hardships in order to connect the consequences with specific behaviors, but most of us saw this coming from a far way off, tried to warn everybody, and not enough people listened to us to change their behaviors. These are the people who only learn the hard way if they ever learn at all, and they constitute almost half the population, which is frightening until you realize that, up until the modern age, they were the majority. We are only now as a species at the tipping point where more people are educated and literate than not, and only barely. Only an intelligent, educated population can maintain a free society. Ignorance through book bans and other forms censorship are the tools of oppression, not protection. People don’t need to be protected from making informed decisions. Learning about opposing views is not the same thing as adopting opposing views, and the only way to know if your own views are accurate is to compare them against the views of others, which you can’t do in a society that practices censorship and book bans. Pre-Civil War slave owners deliberately prevented their slaves from learning to read for fear of them gaining the knowledge and power to rise up against the slave owners. For the least educated and mentally stable among us to be manipulated into voting against their own self-interests, much less the interests of society on the whole, goes to the degree to which the mental health crisis in this country is being exploited by severely mentally ill people with power looking to prevent everyone else from holding them accountable for their own deranged behaviors in a way that prevents us from meeting the needs of our mentally ill with any degree of ethical responsibility. The inmates are literally running the asylum, and it’s going to get worse after January 2025 before it gets better. This is one hell of an Extinction Burst that humanity is trying to survive. It’s going to take a lot of work by people who truly understand the dangerous situation we now find ourselves in and the mechanisms by which we can save ourselves, going forward. I fully expect that some people who are smart enough to understand but weren’t particularly paying attention during the last election cycle will be filled with remorse and seek solutions once reality hits them. I’m not going to turn those people away when they come to us seeking help to protect their children with special needs. I know I’ve already got at least one family on my caseload upon whom the consequences of their choices are only now starting to dawn on them. I went to an IEP meeting for one of their children a few weeks ago and, afterwards promised the mom that, no matter what happens after Number 47 gets sworn in, we’ll have her back. She seemed confused until I told her what Number 47 intends to do to public education, of which she clearly had not been aware, and I could tell by the look of horror spreading across her face that she and her uneducated, blue-collar husband had been duped into voting against their own interests. As soon as I told her what was up, she began protesting with, “But it will cost so much more to support them with services as adults if they don’t get special ed.” I had to explain that the whole point of Number 47's agenda is to not spend any money on anybody who isn’t already rich, period. If these people get their way, not only will there be no public education to speak of, much less special education, but there will be no services or supports for disabled adults, either. These tax-fattened jackals will reduce the rest of us to a level of impoverishment on par with Oliver Twist if they have their ways with our government. Remember that individuals with developmental disabilities were tossed into the gas chambers with the Jews during Hitler’s reign of terror, and many of the incoming administration, including Number 47, regard those efforts at ethnic cleansing as appropriate and desirable. Understand that what is happening right now are a bunch of spoiled rich people with no adult-level problem solving skills attempting to take over a free democratic government that, if properly administered, would have the whole sorry lot of them jailed and impoverished as consequences to their own behaviors, and they’re not about to start assuming any accountability for their behaviors, now. They have no interest in governing; they’re only interested in not being governed. This is a hostile takeover with only short-term objectives of consequence avoidance and get-rich-quick schemes in mind that cannot be indefinitely maintained. The people behind it are too inept to keep it going long-term, though they will do a whole lot of harm while they try to the best of their limited abilities to maintain control of what they’ve started. The other thing to keep in mind is that all of the people involved in undermining the rights of the rest of us are so self-centered and greedy that they regard each other as enemies, as well. As soon as they collectively enjoy some kind of win, they immediately turn on each other to fight over the spoils, which waters down the benefits that any one of them may actually receive in the end. We can expect juvenile antics and backstabbing at the federal level for the next four years from the incoming administration, and the rest of us are going to be left picking up the pieces for decades to come, but we have to stand firm against the forces that want to put an end to publicly funded special education and the laws that control how it is delivered. There’s nothing wrong with amending the laws to protect our kids with special needs in the face of inevitable change, but our kids with special needs and their families should never experience a reduction in their protected rights. If it’s okay to violate their rights, it’s okay to violate yours, as well. So, strategically, what should parents of kids with special needs do right now to prepare for what could come? It's impossible to plan for every possible scenario, but thankfully you don't have to. There are some basic guidelines that apply to every advocacy situation, regardless of what is happening politically, and all of it relies on facts you can prove through evidence. Here are the basics: * Document everything * Request everything in writing * Respond to everything in writing * Limit your written communications to things you can support with other things in writing * Assessment reports * Medical records * Old IEPs * Outside agency records * Mental health * Developmental services * Vocational rehabilitation * Do your research * The science applicable to your child's known condition(s) * The laws that currently apply to your child's 504 plan or IEP * Implementing regulations of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act: 34 CFR Sec. 104 [https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-I/part-104] * Implementing regulations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): 34 CFR Sec. 300 [https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2009-title34-vol2/xml/CFR-2009-title34-vol2-part300.xml] * Your State's laws regarding how its schools are supposed to implement 504 and the IDEA (varies by state and could change on the fly, so you'll need to do some internet searching as time goes on) * Maintain your own running records like you are your child's case manager * Old-school: 3-ring binders full of paper copies * Modern age: Cloud-based archival with built-in search features (you'll need a scanner or a scanner app on your phone for converting paper records into digital formats) * Keep everything in chronological order - it's tempting to group things into categories like all the assessment reports, all the IEPs, all the correspondence, etc., but this just makes it harder to piece together related events over time * Use the following format to name your digital records so they automatically display in chronological order when you sort the folder by file name: "[Year] [Month] [Day] [Document Description]" - For example: * "2024 12 14 Assessment Plan" * "2022 03 06 IEP" As you will note, almost everything I've said above involves documents, but it can also apply to other types of records, such as audio recordings of IEP meetings. The laws vary from state to state as to when parents are allowed to audio record IEP meetings. In California, parents simply have to give at least 24-hour written notice that they intend to audio record an IEP meeting and their local education agency can't say, "No." The local education agency, however, becomes obligated to make its own recording when parents audio record their IEP meetings. Cloud-based storage solutions usually work best when having to save records with such large file sizes, but parents should keep copies of everything on their own hardware, as well, just in case they lose access to the cloud for any reason. With respect to how to conduct yourself in 504 or IEP meetings going forward, the same guidance applies now that we've always given: Don't be the person in the meeting acting like an asshole. If the school people are going to do it, you have no control over their personal choices, but you do have control over how you respond. Meet the dumbfuckery with professionalism and fact-based communications. Don't stoop to their level. Always take the higher road and let them make the record acting foolish, not you. If you can't get them to act right in the moment, collect evidence to use to hold them accountable after the fact. Stand firm with the facts and the applicable rules of law. Don't get sucked into emotional exchanges or rely on emotional appeals. How you feel about what they are doing is irrelevant to what the law requires them to do for your child. Stick to the rules and facts. Save your feelings for your civil rights lawsuit against them for pain and suffering if they've actually put you through it. The more you try to appeal to them to stop hurting you, the more they know they are being successful at hurting you. These are abusive people and confirming that they are being successful at abusing you just rewards their behaviors. You telling them that they are hurting your child and family will only be perceived by them as "owning the libs," even if you aren't actually a liberal. These kinds of abusive, self-centered people consider your suffering to be their success, so don't give them the satisfaction. Just kick their asses with facts and law and let them stew in the juices of the consequences they will eventually incur when it finally happens. How they suffer as a result of being held accountable to your child and family isn't your problem, it's theirs, and Karma can be a real bitch.

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/AI-generated-music.png I have to say from the start that this is not a paid endorsement, and endorsing specific products is not something I normally do, but I've discovered a tool that has been a game-changer for how I work with one of my direct services clients as his counselor. That solution is using AI to create songs that are individualized to a specific person with lyrics based on therapeutically appropriate social scripts tailored to the person. I discovered this solution in the course of looking for ways to embed peer-reviewed music therapy elements into my counseling sessions with this client because he is highly responsive to music, and seems to remember lyrics set to music better than spoken words. Given that he's lost his eyesight, we've got to rely on his other senses. I was looking for an easy way to generate songs he would take seriously as legitimate musical productions that contained the social scripts, such as "safe hands," "inside voice," and "be patient," with which he was already familiar in order to expand his understanding and application of these concepts in his day-to-day life. I'm still shocked at how easy it was with the AI. These individualized songs are also serving as a stepping-off point to teach my client new, more sophisticated social/emotional skills and scripts, going forward, once he's incorporated them into his music listening routines and we work with them in our sessions. As time goes on, I'll be adding new songs that tackle more sophisticated concerns than those that I've initially created to get him started. My counseling client is in his late 20s and lives in a group home with 2 other men who have developmental disabilities. My client is blind, autistic, and intellectually disabled. He struggles to produce spontaneous speech and relies largely on scripted speech to communicate verbally with others. Since 2010, I've been this young man's lay advocate, his attorney's paralegal, his compensatory education services provider. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have instant rapport with each other, even after not seeing each other in person for a couple of years. Given the friendship and rapport I share with my client, I guess I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was at how quickly he took to the songs I created for him using AI, but I was actually flabbergasted. It was during my last session with him, in which I was collecting the last of the baseline data I needed to inform my program goals for him over the next 10 months, when I introduced the songs to him. The moment I started playing the songs, the stimming decreased to nearly none and he sat listening, turning his head so his ears faced the music, and orienting to me as if looking me in the face to repeat familiar scripts he was hearing in the lyrics with a grin on his face. He was fully engaged and it took next to no effort from me. I was floored. I was sure that I was going to have to work to sell him on the idea, but he took to it like a fish to water. This has left me inspired, because I know he can't be the only one who would benefit from this. I was in an online IEP meeting for one of my other students a few days ago, and mentioned this experience to the other professionals who were already logged into the meeting, while we were waiting for the parent and a few other professionals to log in. When I told my colleagues about what I'd done using the AI with social scripts to create highly individualized music for therapeutic purposes, they got all excited about it. So, based on the feedback I've gotten so far, I'm stopping what I'm doing right now to bust out this short post/podcast to share this information with anyone else who might benefit from it so that I can let it go and move on with the rest of my day. This is going to keep bugging me until I share it, and it's preventing me from finishing anything else until it's off my plate. Call me perseverative if you want; it is what it is. Thankfully, this can be fairly brief. The music-generating AI website I stumbled upon after 30 whole seconds of Googling is MakeBestMusic [https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music] (https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music [https://makebestmusic.com/app/create-music]). Again, this is not a paid endorsement. I didn't compare this AI against any other. It was the first one I tried and it instantly gave me what I was looking for in just the free demo. I copied and pasted the list of social scripts that I wanted incorporated into a song, selected some genre-specific tags, and hit the "go" button, then a minute or so later, I had two new songs using the words I'd provided as lyrics and one of them was absolutely perfect. I repeated the process for three more sets of social scripts and ended up with a total of four songs. For the sake of illustrating my point, I'm playing one of them, titled "Ask for Help," here: [listen in podcast] Listen to the lyrics and you'll hear that they are clearly about social behaviors, but it's sounds like a real song and not lame like something I'd make up if I had to do it myself. The robots do it better than me, and for these limited purposes, that's okay. I'm not trying to earn an award for high quality music. I'm trying to teach my client how to act right around other people and still live a happy life for himself. For those of us who could never afford to outsource this kind of work to a professional songwriter, AI is a sufficient tool for this type of job. Given that a less than professional job can serve a valid therapeutic purpose using AI at a much lower cost, using AI-generated music to embed music therapy elements into a program of social/emotional counseling with individuals who have developmental disabilities can be an affordable and powerful tool in a counselor's arsenal of solutions. I encourage my colleagues who work with individuals with needs similar to those of my counseling client to play around with this type of technology and see what kinds of solutions you can create. If you're the parent, you probably have even more ideas about how you could use this around your home with your own family members. Seriously think about setting the step-by-step instructions on how to perform certain chores to music to play when you have your kids helping you around the house. Once the song gets stuck in their heads, so are the instructions on how to perform those chores. I think AI-generated music holds a lot of currently untapped potential for parenting, teaching, and therapeutic interventions, and I'm curious to see how other people use it in these kinds of ways as time goes on. What instructional, parental, and/or therapeutic outcomes can you pursue using AI-generated music?

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2024-0718.png Most people these days have now heard about Project 2025 [https://project2025.org]. It's now one of the most commonly searched terms on the internet these days. These fascist shysters aren't even trying to cover up what they are doing anymore, but what I want to emphasize as I start this post/podcast is that none of the Project 2025 agenda is anything new and these are the same exact people we've been up against in public education at the local level for the entire time that I've worked as a special education lay advocate, paralegal, and educational consultant, starting in 1991. These individuals now feel even more emboldened by their far-right leaders and they are now done pretending that they work within public education to teach children. They are now openly acknowledging that they want to hijack our government of, for, and by the People so they can, among other horrible things, replace our public education system with programs of extremist indoctrination that promotes white male wealth at the expense of everyone else. They have never been in support of special education because people with disabilities, particularly if they are not white male landowners, are less than human to them. None of this new. These are the same people who made the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) necessary in the first place. We wouldn't need laws that protect people with disabilities in our public schools, other government agencies, and the community at large if it weren't for these same exact people. For the same reasons that honor and ethics alone cannot be expected from Supreme Court justices without regulatory oversight, our public agencies from top to bottom cannot be expected to function in an honorable and ethical manner without controlling regulations and systems of accountability. It doesn't help that the people responsible for Project 2025 are almost guaranteed to, themselves, be mentally and/or emotionally impaired in some kind of way such that they are incapable of viewing other people as equal in worth to themselves and have a collective compulsion to identify classes of individuals to target for abuse for being different from themselves. There is no universe in which any of that kind of behavior reflects intact social/emotional development. It appears that nearly 1/3rd of our population is personality disordered [https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/personality-disorders/what-are-personality-disorders] or similarly impaired, and the difficult thing about these types of disorders is that those who suffer from them are often incapable of understanding that they are the ones with the problems. This is why they consistently blame everyone else for the consequences of their own behaviors. There is no logic or mental health in any of it. Personality disorders and conditions with similar features have nothing to do with intelligence or communication abilities. Take, for example, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who insists the Earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time [https://www.yahoo.com/news/house-speaker-thinks-creationist-museum-235936048.html], thereby making the Flintstones [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstones] historically accurate. One would think that he is cognitively intact enough to mentally process the facts and evidence to the contrary, and he technically is, but his social/emotional underdevelopment compels him to ignore facts that contradict his worldview, no matter how insane it is. The fact that he is communicatively adept also helps him superficially appear more competent than he really is, which is exactly what makes him and people like him so dangerous. People like this can "pass" as developmentally intact, at least temporarily, because they can successfully mimic the behaviors of intact people up to a point, but it's all scripted language and learned behaviors meant to help them navigate a world mostly full of sane people. They are masking to gain access to the things they need to meet their wants and needs, but they lack the social/emotional development to understand the perspectives of others and assume anyone who doesn't agree with them is automatically in the wrong. They are each the center of their own little personal universes, functioning at an egocentric level that is age-typical in young children, but handicapping at ages beyond early childhood. Other people are simply objects in orbit around them, like furniture and buildings, that are either useful to them in the moment or not, and every decision they make is entirely selfish. It doesn't even occur to people like this that other people have their own unique wants and needs that are often very different from their own, which is why they seek to create homogenous rather than diverse communities and target anyone who disagrees with them with abuse. From a social/emotional developmental standpoint, they are like toddlers who don't want to share. They consider the conflicting needs of others to be an affront to themselves, and use their adult-level knowledge, communication skills, and access to resources to pursue their selfish desires without regard for how their behavior impacts anyone else, other than what they can get other people to do for them. With that in mind, I want to point out something obvious: Legitimately oppressed people do not have the means to book private jets to go protest their alleged oppression. I say that because individuals of the Project 2025 ilk did exactly that on January 6, 2021 [https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-supporter-flew-private-jet-jan-6-riot-threw-media-equipment-capi-rcna43829]. Nobody just wakes up one day that dumb. This is the consequence of failing to grow all the way up, from a social/emotional developmental standpoint. What this tells us is that privileged childhoods pose great risks of impairing children's social/emotional development and producing adults who view the world through the eyes of toddlers their entire lives, which is tragic. It's tragic because they are victims of circumstances that turn them into well-financed perpetrators of harm against the rest of us, carrying out the well-financed social/emotional agendas of toddlers using adult-level cognition and communication skills that allow them to "pass" as intact long enough to cause serious harm to all of us, and entirely lacking in the will or ability to take responsibility for what they've done. In every case that has not been resolved through responsible adult collaborations from my caseload over the years, it has always been because of these types of people who have managed to infiltrate public agency administrations who were/are at the heart of the conflicts. These are the administrators making $200K per year or more to deny children with disabilities the supports and services promised to them by law and funded by the taxpaying public. They will deny services and supports to eligible children because they don't want to pay for them. They think it's a waste of money to invest those taxpayer dollars into children with disabilities, while lining their own pockets at taxpayer expense, as though they've done a service to the public by refusing to fund appropriate supports and services for children with disabilities. One of the earliest litigation cases around these issues, which set the stage for what would ultimately become the IDEA, was PARC v. Pennsylvania [https://pubintlaw.org/cases-and-projects/pennsylvania-association-for-retarded-citizens-parc-v-commonwealth-of-pennsylvania/]. In that 1971 case, the public schools in Pennsylvania wouldn't even enroll students with disabilities, instead sending them home to languish without any kinds of services or education. This case laid the groundwork for what would become the IEP process by mandating the hiring of a psychologist and an attorney to develop a best-practices model for creating Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) for each student based on their individual unique learning needs. Getting the public schools to abide by any of this since then has been a challenge because of the anti-democratic individuals already employed within the public education system at and since that time. In 1971, public education administration was dominated by white men who wanted to use their positions to build their own personal wealth and become landowners at taxpayer expense. Women were largely limited to the classroom and support administrative staff at school sites and local school district offices. The public education system was created during the Industrial Revolution following the passage of child labor laws intended to prevent children from being maimed and killed working in factories or otherwise running the streets unsupervised. Men ran the schools and harassed their female employees, resulting in teacher's unions being created around the same issues as those confronted by factory workers who were also unionizing at the time. Eventually, school district administrations became more visibly "Karen"-dominated than overtly male-dominated, but the "Karens" have always been acting according to the expectations of the men who control their lives, both at work and at home. They have always been willing to throw families under the school bus in exchange for the favor of the men who control how much disposable income and creature comforts they have in their lives. This is similar psychology as that found in women who help male rapists capture their victims, like Ghislaine Maxwell [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghislaine_Maxwell]. The political divide has been present since our public education system was first created, with the "haves" trying to use it as a mechanism to maintain their relative positions of power and oppress the "have nots." These are the people who insist that our government needs to be run like a business, because businesses generate profits, not constituent outcomes, and they believe in sacrificing constituent outcomes to generate profit for themselves at taxpayer expense. None of these people could possibly make the same money in the private sector because they lack the competence to be successful at private sector-level grift and would be lucky to be trusted with the responsibility of handing out flyers at the front door of a Wal-Mart because they are so inherently self-serving and dishonest. People who cannot conceptualize the humanity of others will always put their own personal interests and greed before the welfare of others, and see nothing wrong with turning a public service responsibility into a profiteering grift. Like I said before, none of this is new and it's what I've been fighting against since 1991. The rule of law is our shield and weapon for protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities in our publicly funded education programs and society at large. This is why parents have due process rights in the special education process and can file regulatory complaints with the state departments of education or the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). You can see an example of what we've been able to accomplish using OCR complaints by clicking here [https://kps4parents.org/ocr-complaint-results-in-district-wide-compensatory-education/]. Readers and listeners may recall that, upon being appointed by the 45th President as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos immediately shut down OCR, even though federal law mandates its existence. Two nationwide nonprofit advocacy organizations banded together to sue DeVos and the U.S. Department of Education for shutting down OCR, but it took approximately 18 months of litigation before the courts ordered DeVos to re-open OCR [https://www.copaa.org/news/441156/COPAA-victorious-in-lawsuit-against-Secretary-DeVos-ED.htm], at which point it had a mountain of back-due complaints to investigate. OCR has been backlogged ever since and the pandemic only made it a thousand times worse. Investigations that the law requires be done in 180 days generally take over 2 years to get finished. Betsy DeVos already tried to hobble the U.S. Department of Education during the 45th presidential administration, and was temporarily successful until stopped by the the courts. She openly admitted during her term that her goal was to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and put an end to it. You will note that Project 2025 has that same objective. They've already tried to do this and they make no bones about their intent to permanently shut it down if the 45th President becomes the 47th President in November 2024. Without the U.S. Department of Education, there is no IDEA, no OCR, and no due process. Section 504 would no longer apply to school-aged children because it only applies to federal agencies and entities that receive federal funding, like our public schools currently do. The ADA would theoretically still apply to students in private school programs and whatever kinds of indoctrination camps might be created in place of our public schools, but Project 2025 seeks to replace anyone employed within the public sector not sufficiently loyal to their chosen leader with individuals who put loyalty to their "dear leader" above the rule of law and the rights of others. It cannot be realistically expected that the Project 2025 people would lift a finger to help students with disabilities under such circumstances. In short, the implementation of Project 2025 spells an immediate end for special education and all of the legal protections currently afforded under law to students with disabilities. It's already hard enough now to get a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) according to the applicable science and rule of law because these people have been obstructing the legitimate functions of their government agencies this whole time. If they are allowed to have things their way after November 2024, all of the parents of children with special needs who are reading or listening to what I'm saying right now are going to find themselves stuck at home with their special needs kids with no school, no special needs childcare, and, therefore, no way to hold down a job and take care of their families. It would only be a matter of time before a great many of our parents of special needs kids out there would lose their homes and end up on the street with their special needs kids, in a world in which the Supreme Court has now said homelessness can be regarded as illegal [https://endhomelessness.org/blog/the-supreme-court-rules-on-homelessness-what-it-all-means/]. Right now, regardless of who the Democrats put on their presidential ticket next November, voting for a Blue bucket of mud would be better for children with disabilities, their families, and all the rest of us than voting for the Republican nominee. Voting for a president is not electing a king, it's electing an entire administration of people who are supervised by a president. Any president is the chief executive of a whole cabinet of people, and those people are, quite frankly, more important than who sits at the head of the table. The current administration has done more for the American people and the world at large, regardless of its president's age, because of all the other people working around him. Understand how our government is supposed to work and don't get it twisted. If the 45th President becomes the 47th President, Project 2025 tells you the exact kinds of people he'll have sitting on his cabinet and staffing our government agencies from top to bottom, many of whom are already on the inside just waiting for this moment, and they will all defer to him as their dictatorial leader as they implement their fascist fever dreams as fast as they can. When you're voting for a president, it's more about the team that person will bring into the office and less about the individual sitting at the head of the table than I think most people realize. What team do you want making decisions about what happens to your child with special needs and your family? If you are eligible to do so, please vote in November 2024.

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/trolling.png   For the benefit of the majority of Americans who are capable of understanding what I'm about to say, I appreciate the opportunity to share some insights with you that might help you better frame how you think about current events and other people's behaviors. For those of you who struggle to understand what I'm about to say, just know that the point is to find a way for you to still be included in the public discourse with as much understanding as can be achieved. We want everyone making thoughtful, informed decisions and not just reacting emotionally to things they don't understand, which requires patience and understanding on everyone's part.   Recent events have inspired this post/podcast, and they arose around other online content I'd already published and then promoted through Facebook Ads, which was probably just asking for it. Facebook has become a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories abound as they are passed around among our least informed and/or least emotionally stable members of society and boosted by Facebook's algorithms.   Even though our content was supposed to be targeted to pro-democracy users, enough people on Facebook are apparently hate-searching the same hashtags as those used by pro-democracy activists and then posting hateful messages full of misinformation, which likely feeds the algorithm information about their user habits that increases their ability to engage with pro-democracy content without regard for how they are actually interacting. The algorithm is looking at the frequency and duration of a user's involvement with content, not the qualitative nature of what that involvement looks like.   Hateful comments are just comments to the algorithm. Clicks are just clicks, regardless of the beliefs or intentions of the users doing the clicking. These algorithms are configured to increase the exposure of frequently clicked- and commented-on content based on its popularity with users, regardless of why it's becoming popular.   This is how social media has been weaponized by bad actors to feed lies and misinformation to unsophisticated users who have no idea that their behaviors are being reinforced for all the wrong reasons, which effectively manipulates them into behaving in hateful ways with increasing intensity over time. My working theory about what reinforces trolling behaviors is that it's automatically reinforcing because there is an internal adrenaline rush that users get when their posts and comments gain popularity and get shared, which gives them emotional validation. It's a protest behavior that gets reinforced and maintained by attention from others.   It is only people who are starved for emotionally validating attention from others who seek it out online and fall into the deep well of online trolling behaviors to get it. If that's the only source of validation and feeling "successful" in their lives, they're going to do it. The solution is to give them a more appropriate functionally equivalent replacement behavior that still allows them to express their wants and needs such that they are validated with attention, but more importantly, that are met with more powerful reinforcers than the ones they receive by trolling. We've got to give them something more rewarding than what they get from spewing hatred while still giving a voice to their wants and needs, as well as access to appropriate solutions.   These are not our brightest problem-solvers. These are the people with arrested emotional development and limited coping skills who resort to name-calling and hostile behavior because that's the best they've got. They feel trapped in a life they can't handle where their wants and needs go unmet and they don't know how to appropriately advocate for themselves. Emotionally speaking, they are simply very old children.   Thankfully, only a handful of trolls found our online content. All of them were adult males, mostly middle-aged or older and white, based on their Facebook profiles. All of them were triggered by a single word in the title of the program being promoted, which is our Social Justice group on Meetup [https://www.meetup.com/kps4parents-social-justice-learners/], in which I conduct live events and share content with group members who are interested in learning how to participate in the advocacy processes of publicly funded programs to enforce their rights as program beneficiaries or the rights of other eligible beneficiaries who need help advocating for themselves.   In our Meetup group, I take my experiences working in special education, regional center, rehabilitation, and other publicly-funded programs for people with disabilities and generalize them to the same processes and procedures that exist within other publicly-funded programs that exist to benefit citizens with other other types of need than disability. Many of these other programs address social welfare issues, like housing, food, and healthcare.   Americans pay into these programs so that they are there for them if and when they need them. If we're going to pay taxes to pool our resources as the Public to achieve economies of scale and efficiencies that we otherwise wouldn't have on our own as individuals, then those resources and economies of scale better provide for us when we need them.   There is nothing un-American about expecting the American government to work and being worried and angry when it doesn't. What is un-American is failing to abide by the rules already in place and making excuses instead of improvements as a public servant or a voter. If the existing rules create more problems than they solve, then responsible leaders in local publicly funded agencies raise these issues with their legislators and don't stop making noise until the problems get fixed. They don't go, "Oh, well. That's just the way it is in the 'real world,'" and fail to solve the problems.   I've made this point before and I'll make it again, here, that Project 2025, which articulates the literal plan for a white "Christian" nationalist take-over of all the bureaucratic mechanisms of government, is nothing new. It's what I've been up against since I first started working as a lay advocate in 1991. It's what I was up against when I participated in the most litigation of my career in the mid-2000s through 2012 as a paralegal, supporting attorneys in special education mediations and due process hearings, as well as court trials in venues ranging from state superior courts to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal. It's why I went back and got my master's degree in educational psychology in 2013; I knew I needed to come at these issues from a more informed, expert position to be more effective.   The anti-everything-not-like-themselves by some of the least competent members of society who, through privilege and cronyism, have managed to acquire power, is nothing new to me. There is nothing more reckless than giving someone with low intelligence and emotional instability access to a whole lot of money. I'd have to go through the whole origin story of the public education system and how other public programs were modeled after its administrative design to explain how we got here, and that's enough information to create an entire college course titled, "The History of American Public Education."   Let me just cut to the chase and say it's been a political shit-show from the beginning and that all of the laws that prohibit discrimination in the public sector are there because these knuckle heads have been in there undermining and sabotaging the system from within all along. They have been doing this so that they and their like-minded collaborators can point to the failures of the system they caused as "proof" that this system of government is a failure and should be replaced with something different, like giving them total control with no accountability.   These are the people who want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and make it so that only wealthy elites can afford to educate their children, while depriving the general public of access to information and learning that will allow them to participate with understanding in our representative democratic government. There is a reason that the pre-Civil War slave owners didn't want their slaves to learn how to read; a literate, intelligent, and informed group of slaves was capable of planning and executing an escape or even an overthrow of their masters.   By depriving the American public of a sound, responsible public education system these hostile elites would hoard all the knowledge and only use that of it which would give them an even greater unfair advantage over everyone else, while ignoring anything that potentially highlighted any errors in their thinking. This would prevent the public from knowing how to take back its own power, live freely, and thrive for its own benefit rather than only for the benefit of the elites, while elites choosing to only acknowledge the facts that suit their purposes run everything into the ground by failing to abide by reality.   It is the least educated and/or least emotionally stable among us who become the most useful idiot minions of the anti-American elements in this country, which are fueled by money from self-serving domestic billionaires and foreign enemies, and facilitated by domestic and foreign influencers using online propaganda to exploit social media algorithms, radicalize these people, and turn them loose on the rest of us like ticking timebombs. Our current-day lone shooters are our domestic version of the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era.   Statistically speaking, a certain percentage of the human population has disordered thought to such a marked degree that their participation with social media brings on the worst manifestations of their symptoms possible. In the special education arena, I've got one student on my caseload who is so screen-addicted that she engages in property destruction with full-on screaming rages at home if she's expected to put down her device and go do something with her mother in the real world. I've got another student who impulsively, without fail, will immediately gravitate to any social media app that has a chat feature and start trolling strangers because she thinks she's being funny and she's cracking herself up, but then they come back at her with equal venom and she has a mental health crisis that can escalate to actual self-harm or attempted suicide.   These are real issues that I'm dealing with right now in the real world, and these two students are hardly the only ones. These are just the only two cases on my caseload right now with these issues, but this has become an ever-increasing issue for a lot of students who I've represented over the last 15 years as internet use has become more ubiquitous throughout public education. For the student with the chat app issues, the school district hired a cyber security expert to figure out how to block any of the kinds of content that she might misuse on her district-issued devices, while still giving her access to the online content necessary for her classes and without a human being having to actively monitor her device usage throughout each school day.   All of that is great for understanding the nature of the behaviors and the challenges faced by those who engage in them, but what does one do about it? For me, that's still a work in progress, but I can tell you how I've handled it so far and whether I think it's working or not. It's early days with me and the fascist trolls, and there have only been a handful, but I'm already seeing trends in the data emerging, not the least of which is the older white male observation I mentioned previously.   I'm totally using Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) to inform my responses to the trolls, as well as legal strategies I've learned from lawyers and judges over the years that can be generalized to other situations and contexts that align with the principles of ABA. One of those strategies is what I like to call "Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu," in which I take control of the narrative by using their own language to defeat their own points, then redirect everyone's attention to what my originally posted content is actually about and encourage people to join our group and participate in our live events.   In Jujitsu, there is a move whereby the enemy throws a punch, but you lean to one side, grab their arm at the wrist just below their fist, and pull them forward and down to the ground, using the inertia of their own punch and their own momentum against them while side-stepping the punch altogether. In "Jedi Mind-Trick Jujitsu," with these trolls, I'm taking the energy of the insult or slur, mocking the ridiculousness of it as politely as possible by pointing out the truth in a friendly manner, providing immediate forgiveness to the offending party, following it with an analysis of why this person is engaging in this behavior and why everyone else should feel bad for the offending party rather than revengeful, and promising to pray for the offending party's poor tortured soul or otherwise blessing their heart.   None of the trolls have replied back and no new hate posts have come in since I replied to the last one, though that could change. I've posted my replies to each troll's posts almost immediately after they were made. None of my replies took their bait. They were looking to pick a fight with people who are just as emotionally dysfunctional as they are, and they're not going to find that here. Engage in maladaptive behavior like that in front of us, much less in writing with a hot link to your profile, and we're going to offer personalized forgiveness and explain why, then redirect readers back to the original point of our posted content.   We work with mental and emotional health issues and challenging behaviors every day. Trolls aren't scary to us; they're pitiful. They are victims of our country's mental health crisis. They warrant our pity because they are so terribly troubled and broken and they deserve our effort because we need to keep them from becoming unsafe to themselves or others.   Trolls are mean to strangers online because that's the best they've got. That's a tragic way to live, and it's not hard to see how people from this segment of society are easily radicalized into acts of violence over things that make no sense, particularly when the information they receive is manipulated to limit their understanding and provoke their anger through their strongest connection to the world: the internet.   kps4parents.org/shop [https://kps4parents.org/shop]   The other data point that emerged from how the trolls responded to our posted content about our Social Justice group on Meetup, was, as I stated above, a single word. That word was "Social." The tiniest minds think that this automatically means "socialism," which they then equate with "communism," the definitions of neither being known to them, which explains why one of them referred to me as "comrade" in his disparagement of our post.   Here's the thing: The point of the post was to promote our pro-democracy group and teach people how to participate in the mechanisms of democracy at the local level, all in the pursuit of a just society in conformity with the Constitution of the United States. None of them actually read about what we were doing. They saw the word "Social" in the title and were immediately triggered. The irony was totally lost on them that they were using "social" media to spew their moronic hatred towards our use of the word "social" in the title of our online events.   For people who think anything that uses the word "social" automatically means "socialism," and you oppose socialism, then you need to get off of "social" media! And, God forbid you attend the Sunday Ice Cream "Social" at church after service, or the commies will start kicking in the front door of your house before you even get home. It's a freakin' word with multiple uses, depending on context. The title of our group is also a play on words with a "social" justice education initiative being carried out using "social" media and online meetings to interact in a "social" way to talk about how to uphold democracy at the local level. Tinier, fragile minds didn't get the pun or the point.   Those of us who are not so badly compromised as that have a responsibility to take care of those of us who are, not ignore or exploit them. We are our brothers' keepers and it takes a village. Humans are social animals by nature, so we need to figure out better ways to socialize with each other than what we've got going on right now. We have plenty of existing psychological, sociological, anthropological, and historical information to make wise, informed decisions as a populous, but that information is not equally available to everyone and educational equity is necessary for the survival of our species.   We can't figure out how to work together if we're too busy being pitted against each other by those in leadership for their own selfish purposes. Looking out for each other and collaborating for the mutual benefit of everyone is consistent with the teachings of every great religious leader the world has ever remembered, and none of them preached hatred or violence. These same values are also consistent with the rules of our democracy.   One piece of advice that I can give to sane, rational people dealing with trolls is to not look at what they post as an overture to start an actual conversation and engage in any kind of legitimate debate. Don't take their bait; they're just looking for someone to disagree with them and call them names back. That's their idea of two-way conversation and social engagement, but it's all one-sided and they're too impaired to see it for what it really is. They approximate and mimic conversational behavior, but they can't actually hold a real conversation, at least not while they are triggered and escalated. The adrenaline rush of a heated exchange is often as close to getting emotionally engaged with other people as they can get.   Troll posting is a ritualized behavior that includes scripted speech, which is not the same thing as a two-way conversation. Two-way conversations require both parties to listen with comprehension and think about how what each person says relates to what the other person says, and negotiate in some kind of way to reach a mutually agreed-to conclusion about whatever is being discussed. Troll posts are nothing like that. Troll posts are one-sided cries for help from mentally and emotionally anguishing people.   What has made all the difference for me when I encounter these kinds of behaviors in any social context is to recognize that this isn't a conversation, it's a ritualized behavior that includes words, at which point I can't take whatever is being said seriously because it's only function is to get an emotional rise out of me and engage me in a dispute. I'm only interested in a real conversation. I have no reason to reinforce that behavior by giving the person what they were looking for and engaging in a heated dispute with them.   That would give them my sustained attention in the form of an attempt to convince them they are wrong, which they would never do, which would make them feel powerful and leave me drained and exhausted with time I'll never get back wasted on the whole endeavor. If I took the bait and wasted time I can't spare to argue with a troll, then I'd be kicking myself afterwards for letting myself go there, and the troll is still living rent-free in my head. Hell, no!   By understanding that the function of the behavior is automatic reinforcement by way of making the troll feel powerful when they bully someone into submission, you can redirect them to a more functionally appropriate way to feel powerful without acting like an asshole. If I took the bait, it would be an open invitation for them to visit their wrath upon me, so I'm not taking the bait. However, I will take the opportunity to reclaim the narrative and redirect other people's attention back to what actually matters. I can turn a troll post into a marketing opportunity for my event by using their drama to get other reader's eyes on the back and forth, and further pique their curiosity about our live online Meetup events.   One of the motivating ideas behind trolling behavior is to come on strong so as to presumably present as a strong person. But, truly strong people don't actually act like that. Truly strong people don't give a shit whether people are impressed by them or not; it takes too much energy to care and there are far too many other more important things to worry about in life than that. Truly strong people just take care of their business and don't have a need to come on strong when they disagree with other people.   These trolls are weak people acting how they think strong people act, as seen through their eyes as people who are regularly ignored or exploited by others who are stronger than them. They can't actually conceptualize what stronger people must be thinking or feeling; they can only observe the outward presentations made by stronger people and attempt to emulate what they think they are seeing.   People who are lacking in competencies have historically found themselves on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing more than once in their lives for making mistakes that a more competent person would never make. From their perspective, it may seem that yelling at people and accusing them of being deficient is what being in charge is all about. Therefore, according to their logic, if they go around yelling at people and accusing them of doing bad things, they should be put in charge.   This strategy sometimes actually works for them in the short-term, but their actual lack of skills dooms them to ultimate failure. They can't actually handle the responsibilities that come with the power they manage to acquire and their efforts to fake it until they make it blow up in their faces because they are literally faking it and have no idea what they are doing. Dressing for success is pointless if you don't have actual job skills.   A good public-facing example of this is Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is being investigated for financial improprieties with public funds and who, with each new investigation or investigative finding being reported in the media, passes new statewide executive orders that violate the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States by banning the use of certain "woke" terms like "Latinx" or "pregnant people" in State documents. She's apparently getting all the "mam-maws" and "pap-paws" riled up over nothing so they don't notice her robbing them blind.   It has been alleged [https://www.wsj.com/us-news/arkansas-gov-sarah-huckabee-sanders-has-a-19-000-lectern-problem-4fde85b0] that some of the taxpayers' money in Arkansas was used to send Governor Huckabee Sanders to Paris, France with her girlfriends to party and charged off to the State as a credit card purchase in an amount just shy of the $20K reporting limit on State employee credit card purchases as an allegedly fraudulent purchase of a customized speaker's lectern that has yet to make a public appearance or ever be used to anyone's knowledge. This alleged "Lectern-gate" matter is still being investigated [https://arkansasadvocate.com/2024/02/08/auditor-report-on-arkansas-governors-lectern-purchase-should-be-finished-in-march/], given that over $19K was spent by the Governor on a lectern with no actual lectern to show for it, the Governor allegedly bought it from a company owned by one of her girlfriends who went with her on the Paris trip, and said friend's business does not sell lecterns as part of its normal course of business.   The abuses of authority alongside Arkansas' long-standing low performance statistics [https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/arkansas] as a state, such as with poverty, healthcare, crime, and education, reveal an entirely dysfunctional state government that is dependent upon other, better managed states that produce more tax revenues than they need to supplement Arkansas' own tax revenues in order for Arkansas to function in any capacity at all. By contrast, for example, California has the 5th largest economy in the world [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California] and could function as a self-funded nation-state, if it had to. If Arkansas were cut off from the tax revenue it gets from states like California, there wouldn't be enough money in the till for the Governor to steal.   Broken people may briefly attain power, but they usually don't have the skills to hold onto it for very long. It takes a fleet of broken people working together from positions of power to do serious harm over extended periods. We generally regard these kinds of folks as being part of a conspiracy when they collaborate with each other to achieve dysfunctional ends on a large scale. But, as with "Lectern-gate," these folks really aren't all that good at covering their tracks and tend to leave a wake of destruction that serves as a mile-wide evidence trail. We're seeing it happen right now with all kinds of folks from what's left of the Republican Party, a great many of them being attorneys.   They're banking on the rest of us being too exhausted to deal with their bullshit and just letting them go do whatever so we can stop and rest for a minute. Those are the moments they seize to do real harm. They wear us down to create exactly those kinds of exploitable moments. It's like an emotionally abusive partner who always picks a fight right before bedtime that goes on for hours into the night, night after night, leaving the other person too exhausted from sleep deprivation to make rational decisions. A sleep-deprived person is inclined to cave in on everything just to keep the peace and impaired beyond thinking clearly about getting out of the relationship. This is also how unethical employers trap people in high-stress, physically demanding, low-paying jobs for decades on end.   Abusive people tend to do poorly in unstructured situations. The more the environment is configured to discourage abusive behavior by imposing structure, the easier it is to keep people busy doing things that are productive and healthy. One doesn't have the time or motivation to go rob a bank if one is happily employed and well paid, for example. Not everyone handles unstructured time well and, when given too much freedom and left to their own devices, some people use their employer's credit cards to go party in foreign cities with their friends.   patreon.com/KPS4Parents [https://patreon.com/KPS4Parents] The bottom-line take-away from this post/podcast is that everyone deserves to live in a just society that treats them fairly, no matter who they are, and not everybody is healthy enough to appreciate what that means. We can't take it personally when someone else doesn't have the ability to get it, and we serve ourselves by looking out for that person and helping them meet their needs instead of shunning them and cutting them off. We need to take a serious look at the wants and needs of the people who pose the biggest threats to our democracy and then figure out the most appropriate ways to see their needs met so that they aren't feeling "othered," ostracized, and vindictive towards the rest of us.   Trolls' behaviors seek attention for a reason and we've got to give them more appropriate ways of calling attention to their wants and needs without causing harm. I suggest we start by responding to the hateful comments left by trolls in the most loving ways possible, without being afraid to poke fun at how silly they are making themselves look with their hateful comments. React the same way you would to a 4-year-old who didn't get what they wanted for lunch, and now they're packing a bag in their bedroom while crying and threatening to run away.   Acknowledge their suffering because they're upset, but be willing to chuckle at how silly it is to be running away from home over cucumber slices. You're laughing at the behavior, not the underlying reason why it happened. It's okay to hate the behavior, but try not to hate the person. You need to mentally separate the person from the behavior because they are two different things. They're totally related to each other, but they aren't one in the same. If trolls were better equipped to deal with life, their behavior wouldn't be so bad. Nobody is awful on purpose just to inconvenience you. No matter how much Hell they visit upon you, it's infinitely worse for them living in their skin. You can get away from them, but they are stuck with themselves forever.   Trolls only come on strongly because they are lacking the amount of strength they are attempting to project; it's a lie and they are actually cowards. Standing up to them with logic and facts generally shuts them down. Your alternatives are either ignoring their comments and leaving them to poison your posts, or getting baited into a heated, emotional exchange intended to exhaust you and wear you down. Shutting them down quickly with logic and facts appears to achieve a respectable degree of damage control and refocuses other people on the actual messages that you're trying to convey.   That isn't to say that an entirely deranged hothead won't resort to stalking someone who dares to shut them down online, but these kind of people aren't the majority of the people spewing hatred online and even the stalkers usually leave an evidence trail a mile wide. Most of the online haters are cowards who will never show themselves offline to the same degree they expose themselves online. Name-calling and profanities are the best they've got.   I'll save my name-calling and profanities for my private conversations with clients and colleagues, as well as occasional comedic bits in my online content, about the characters in public office we encounter who are obstructing the legitimate functions of our democratic government every day. We all need to vent and there is a time and a place for everything, including venting.   What you will never see us do is go out on the internet and post hateful comments on other people's content. We may disagree and provide our reasons for disagreeing if we come across something that jumps out at us, and we may point out the potential adverse consequences of acting according to another party's online advice if we think that advice is bad, but that's not the same thing as name-calling and hate speech. There's polite, informed dissent and there's raving like a lunatic.   I hope this has helped you organize your own thoughts around how to work with people who don't quite get it with a little more compassion, which has greater chances of helping you achieve healthy outcomes for everyone involved than ignoring them or attempting to argue with them about the flaws in their logic. Proactively, going forward, I encourage you to frame things with "I-statements" when presenting an opposing point of view, such as, "I hear what you're saying, but I've always understood it to be the case that XYZ, and what you're telling me doesn't really explain that. Why do you think that is? What am I not understanding?"   When you put a single unaccounted-for variable in front of them and ask them to account for it, whatever faulty logic they were trying to assert falls apart and they realize they've left something out of the equation. When you see that they've realized they don't know how to resolve what you've pointed out, that's your chance to continue with your logical explanation for XYZ with language like, "Aw man! So, what I've been thinking this whole time is that, because ABC and 123, XYZ happens. Does that make sense? Am I missing something? I thought I had it figured out, but maybe I'm wrong. Am I wrong?"   At that point, you take ownership of the doubt they are unwilling to let themselves feel about their own perceptions of things, and the troubled troll starts to put things together logically in their own mind based on the simple explanation you've given in an effort to remain the voice of authority by giving you an answer. This allows them to arrive at the correct conclusion on their own by thinking it through without being told they are wrong and getting emotionally triggered.   If you impose structure on the thought process by identifying only the variables that matter and leaving out the extraneous fluff in an emotionally neutral way that shifts the element of doubt onto you, then ask for their opinion of what you've just said, you're just asking for feedback on what you understand to be the case and correction where you're wrong. There's no reason for them to feel threatened by that and a lot of times it actually buys trust because then they're able to say, "Well, when you put it that way, you've got a point," or "I hadn't thought about that, but now that you mention it ..." and a rational conversation is more likely to happen.   One of the trolls who posted on my content asserted that it isn't justice if it's prefaced by an adjective like "social," there's only justice. That made absolutely no sense, but I was willing to entertain the idea, so I replied with, "Fascinating perspective! What evidence supports that argument?" and never heard back. That's not a hostile response, but I'm also pretty sure there's no actual evidence to support that argument. I'm willing to be wrong on that, but I guess only time will tell if he's going to come back and educate me with some real evidence that proves me wrong.   In the meantime, I hope you are able to cope with trolls better after reading this, whether they show up in your life online or in person. All of this can be generalized to dealing with nasty people everywhere, but for our families who rely on us for advice about special education and disability resources, generalize it to every nasty person who stood in your way when you tried to get appropriate services and supports for your loved-one with special needs.   Ronald Reagan is given credit for saying, "Trust, but verify," when it came to dealing with other heads of state and government officials. I think using that approach whenever anyone attempts to convince you of something. particularly if they are emotionally passionate about it, is always a best-practices way of dealing with them.   Ask for evidence in support of arguments that seem unlikely. Ask for their advice as to how to weigh contradictory information against what they've just told you. Don't accuse them of anything or call them names. Treat your exchanges like dignified conversations, set the behavioral example, ask pointed questions about their assertions, and sincere express interest in understanding their point of view. They do have a communicative intent to express an unmet want or need, but it can be difficult getting to the actual underlying message through all the behavioral chaos and word salad.   One of the parents I used to represent called the scripted speech from her daughter's emotional outbursts "throw-up words" because they were just verbal barf that came with all the other out-of-control behaviors, not a real conversation. In the moment, she didn't know what the Hell she was saying, and she usually felt terrible about it afterwards. The moment you can discern "throw-up words" from real conversation and stop caring about what is being said and then focus on why it's being said, that is the moment you regain control of the conversation. The words are the symptoms and you need to treat the underlying disease, metaphorically speaking.   Express caring for their welfare and forgiveness for their crude behaviors. Forgiveness means they aren't living rent-free in your head once you're done responding to them; it's for your benefit, not theirs. Let them stew in their own juices if that's what they really want to do, but that shouldn't affect the quality of your life.   Sometimes, all you can do is say, "Bless your heart, you poor tragic creature," and move on to your own bliss without carrying the dead weight of their opinions or the living with the consequences of their behaviors. There's no reason to feel bad about that. Love is doing what's in the best interests of everyone involved, including yourself. And, so, on that note, thank you for hearing me out and, until next time, peace be with you.

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ai_image_649044_22404316.png   I watch the news and read up on a lot of court cases and pending legislation these days because all of it is related in some way with the work I do in special education as an advocate, paralegal, consultant, and direct services provider. Congressional spending, public policy changes, new litigation, and all kinds of other world events have direct bearing on special education and the individuals I assist and protect. Similarly, how the powers that be respond to the legally protected needs of the individuals I serve speaks volumes to the state of our democracy at the local level and the degree to which State and federal oversight is effective or not.   The concept of locus of control is not widely known or understood, but it should be. It's a fairly simple developmental concept to understand for adult-level problem-solvers. It's one of those things that, if the majority of intact adults understood it, it would contribute to what could effectively be psychological herd immunity against the fringe ass-hattery that is taking up way too much political and cultural space right now in our modern day societies, and help us restore and repair things to a more equitable equilibrium.   Locus of control describes a person's understanding of the degree to which they have agency over their own lives. A person with mostly an external locus of control believes that life is something that happens to them and some other external force beyond their control is responsible. Having an external locus of control is normal for babies, but dangerous for adults. Conversely, a person with mostly an internal locus of control will assume responsibility for everything that happens around them, engaging in controlling behaviors as well as delusional thought, often to a narcissistic degree.   Living at either extreme of the locus of control spectrum is unhealthy. At one extreme is the willing victim and the other is the predator. As with most of these kinds of things in psychology, what is considered "normal" when it comes to locus of control can be expressed through statistics using normal distributions. Here, "normal" means the majority of people who fall along the locus of control spectrum between the two far extremes, with some mix of both internal and external loci of control depending on the unique circumstances relative to the individual developmental maturity of each person.   I don't want to focus on the statistical outliers on that spectrum here. I want to focus on the majority of us who fall along the locus of control spectrum between those two extremes and how the relative ratio of internal versus external plays out in each of us such that it affects our behavior and how we raise our children to become intelligent, empathetic, responsible independent thinkers or not.   In order for us to apply the science successfully to the classroom and beyond, we have to first apply it to ourselves. We need to understand our own perceptions of locus of control before we can start thinking about other people's individual perceptions of it and how that affects their behaviors and relationships.   A healthy concept of locus of control is somewhere in the middle between fully external and fully internal. The reality is that some parts of life are beyond our immediate control and other parts of life are entirely within our control. Rather than applying the concept of the locus of control spectrum to the person as a uniform monolith, one's standing is better understood by applying this spectrum to a specific situation and asking, "How much of this immediate situation is actually within my control?", and "How many things are actually within my control that can change this situation for the better?"   There is a commonly used prayer among Christians called the Serenity Prayer, which goes: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." This is the essence of the locus of control self-assessment in day-to-day life. I can think of no better tradition that captures how reality works with such scientific simplicity than this. Science doesn't compete with religion, it measures the truth of Creation. When used responsibly, it reveals miracles that can teach us a great deal.   Sometimes the miracles are more magnificent than previously realized and only known once more data comes in, such as when Galileo asserted that the Earth revolved around the Sun rather than vice versa, which contradicted the teachings of the Church at the time. Unfortunately for him, he was found guilty of heresy and had to choose between 1) pleading innocent totally knowing that he would be found guilty and would have to spend the rest of his life in prison, or 2) taking a plea deal and spending the rest of his life on house arrest, even though he was totally right. The miracle is actually greater than what the Church was teaching, but it was afraid of losing the trust of its followers if it admitted that it had been wrong about the Earth being the center of Creation with everything in the Heavens revolving around it, so Galileo died a convicted criminal for asserting the truth of God's actual Creation.   We're seeing the same kind of thinking right now when it comes to climate change. The miracle is bigger and more magnificent than previously realized. Sadly, our abuse of the knowledge we've gathered as a species thus far has been to the detriment of the environment all around us. The harm we've done is now proving to us how things are supposed to work and what we've misunderstood in the past. The Creator speaks to us through our errors and lets us know when we're failing to abide by the terms of Creation. We have invited harm upon ourselves through our own behaviors and now we have to change our behaviors to save ourselves. This goes directly to every person's unique concept of their own respective individual locus of control.   There are now corporations whose very existence depend on us believing we need them. They don't want to lose our dollars, so they can't afford for us to lose faith in their businesses and they're attempting to conceal the fact that what they are doing contradicts the larger miracles that have been revealed by science. I'm thinking of processed foods, farming-related dust bowls, and fossil fuels, here, and the amount of money spent on marketing and lobbying by these industries to influence how they are perceived by the public versus what they are actually doing.   These industries abuse the science to manipulate the masses with specific messages targeted to specific audiences, using algorithms to spread their messages online, and relying on normal human word-of-mouth discourse to take it from there. These are the same tactics used by political propogandists, and there can be a blurry line between corporate marketers and political propogandists. An informed public recognizes the attempts at manipulation for what they are and rejects them outright; an uniformed public becomes more easily radicalized and brand-loyal.   All of that goes to how locus of control operates on the larger scale. Understanding that, the next question here is, "How can that knowledge be applied in the classroom?" My response is that it depends on the ages and developmental levels of the students involved.   If you're talking about young children or older students with developmental delays, these concepts need to be explicitly taught and the students need to be given clear, succinct, easy-to-understand descriptions of what they have the power to do for themselves and what requires the authority of others. Visuals, including classroom artwork and graphics, should be placed where students can see them during the school day to reinforce the messaging from the explicit instruction.   Honestly, if School House Rock were to make a new video teaching kids about locus of control, that would be amazing. Until then, it's up to parents and teachers to learn about it and incorporate it into their parenting and classroom management practices, respectively.   With our older kids, my go-to is always Project-Based Learning (PBL). If the project is to assemble an Ikea cabinet using the instructions as a small group of three or four students, then it's a great way to teach locus of control concepts. The students can't change the physical features of the cabinet being built, the parts that come with it, or the instructions provided. That's beyond their control. What they can control is their own behavior in response to these uncontrollable facts. How they go about putting together the cabinet is a choice. What they are putting together is not. This is a balance of external and internal locus of control to fit the situation.   It doesn't have to be Ikea furniture. It could be anything. In our sister program, the Learn & Grow Educational Series [https://learn-and-grow.org], I've embedded this locus of control instruction into PBL lesson plans that require students to create self-watering gardening containers from 5-gallon buckets and use them to grow food. Anything that is project-based will come with fixed parameters that go to an external locus of control, and students will have to make choices and act upon them, which goes to internal locus of control, to achieve the intended outcome. For most people, having at least a little bit of external imposed structure helps them organize their thoughts and get things done.   Products that provide at least part of the solution by their very nature will impose some structure on the situation that limits the number of choices a person has to make to get the job finished. For example, simply having shopping carts available by the front door of the supermarket immediately solves a problem for shoppers that makes gathering what they need to buy without a huge hassle more accessible to them than if they had to figure out how to carry around their stuff while shopping on their own.   This can be equally applied in the classroom. A teacher can use a desktop office tray for papers and folders, perhaps several stacked upon each other. Each tray could serve a specific purposes, such as one for turning in completed work, one turning in notes from home and permission slips, and one for suggestions for making the classroom better, for example. The system could be designed to support the teacher's classroom management strategy and impose some external structure on students' classroom behaviors.   Simple organizational strategies that set the stage are often enough externally imposed features for our typically developing learners to develop effective and efficient learning practices, particularly if these practices are modeled by the teacher in the beginning and by other students once they adopt these practices as the school year progresses and these strategies are being regularly used. These strategies eventually become part of the routine because they work, freeing up mental energy that can then be invested in troubleshooting more complex concerns.   Routines are convenient because they relieve us from having to think too hard about what we need to do in the moment, which allows us to then think ahead about what else we can take on now. When we have a lot of actual thinking to do about other things, reducing the things we always have to do in the moment to simple, thoughtless routines is an efficient use of time. Routines that can be memorized using music can become some of the most relied upon routines in a person's life, because music seems to amplify the strength of the routine -for most people when they are paired together. This has implications for day-to-day life, as well as classroom practices. It's just a good strategy for life for most people, though everyone processes information differently and not all strategies will work for all people.   It appears that, generally speaking, it is normal for humans to strive for some kind of equilibrium that strikes a balance between external and internal locus of control. In general, we want enough external controls to limit the number of choices we have to make in a given situation, but not so many limits that the only options for us to choose from are bad ones. Too many choices and we can't decide what to do. With somewhat limited choices, even if its the lesser of all evils, at least you can make the best of what you're given to work with. With extremely limited choices, it really doesn't matter what you decide because you're screwed no matter what.   Creating a safe and nurturing classroom that fosters functional independence among its students requires the same kind of thought and planning as does creating a safe and nurturing society that encourages individual freedoms. An understanding of locus of control can go a long way towards improving both, and I'm encouraging you to invest the time to learn more about it, contemplate your own perceptions regarding your own locus of control, and consider how other people's choices are influenced by their own perceptions of locus of control. It gives you a new dimension by which to consider other people's behaviors, but it only makes sense once you've learned to understand it about yourself.   From there, you can begin to think about what someone else's concept of locus of control might be. You must have a relatively healthy self-concept of your own locus of control in order to be able to conceptualize and empathize with someone else's. You basically have to walk a thousand miles in your own moccasins before you're able to walk a mile in someone else's with understanding.   All of this goes, then, into a larger analysis of the function of a person's behavior, which requires a behavior analytic approach. When you're trying to figure out where another person is coming from, whether as a parent trying to understand your child or as an IEP team member trying to understand another member of the team, having a fairly accurate understanding of that person's sense of locus of control about whatever is being discussed goes a long way towards understanding whether that person is going to seek solutions or make excuses for a problem you need solved.   In applied behavioral analysis, the function of the behavior is ascertained by determining what antecedents triggered the behavior and what consequences rewarded its use. Ecological factors are examined to further determine if anything specific in the environment, such as a specific noise or person, and/or any other specific circumstantial factors, such as time of day or disruption in routine, increased the likelihood of the behavior occurring in the presence of the antecedent. These exacerbating factors are referred to as "setting events" or "motivating operations." Many professionals use the term "M.O.s" to refer to these exacerbating factors.   Some antecedents arise from internal body and/or mental states experienced by the individual that no one else can observe, which are referred to as "private events." In other instances, the antecedent may be an externally observable factor, but there are private event M.O.s involved. Locus of control is an internal, private event, that often influences how a person responds to antecedents in their immediate environments, and it can often be deduced by observing the person's behaviors. How someone reacts to external stimuli can reveal a great deal about how much control that person believes they have in a given situation.   Whether you're talking about working with learners or participating in important meetings, understanding where another person is coming from in that regard can be an eye-opening experience that better informs how you need to respond to their efforts to work with or against you. It also tells you just how much of the situation is within your control and how much of it isn't, so you can choose your actions wisely. It helps you discern that which you can control from that which you can't so that you can exercise the courage necessary to achieve what is actually realistically within your reach, making as much positive progress as you are able and creating opportunities to create even greater improvements later on in time.   As much as I hope you are able to use this information to create and implement good IEPs, I equally hope you can incorporate it into your understanding of yourself and others and you progress along your own journey of self-discovery and growth as a person. The more we understand each other, the easier it becomes to relate with each other and work more collaboratively than competitively. I believe it is the responsibility of those of us who study these sciences to explain what we know about healthy human development so as to help humanity develop in healthy ways as time goes on. We need to be getting better as these kinds of things over time, and that can't be achieved by withholding the professional knowledge from the general public.   I'm happy to democratize that knowledge to the degree that I am able, and I encourage you to do your own additional research into the science around locus of control and related psychological concepts. I hope this helps you develop a healthier understanding of yourself and others, and contributes towards your successful efforts to make the world a better place. I think this is critical knowledge for any and all parents participating in the IEP or 504 process for their children in the public schools. It's relevant to understanding your child's individual needs, as well as where everyone else on the team with you is coming from and how to respond to them in ways that are most likely to protect your child.   From an advocacy standpoint, it is important as a parent in one of these meetings to know if you're being shut down by a bureaucrat agency loyalist enforcing an internal policy that violates the law because they believe they lack the authority to buck the unlawful policy, and are thus acting according to an external locus of control. Someone like this is incapable of legitimate problem-solving and it's a waste of time arguing with them. This is when you, as a parent, may find it necessary to file a compliance complaint with your state's education department, a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a due process complaint with your state's special education hearing office, or some other legal action.   In a situation like this, once they've said, "No," and blamed agency policy in spite of the language of the law, go straight to accountability. You're wasting time trying to convince them they are breaking the law once you've made the record about it the first time. You may still end up resolving things through a confidential settlement agreement, but the offending agency may not be willing to make things right by you until you file something that gives it the opportunity to settle with you in secret. Sometimes, a governing board of a public agency will not authorize the costs of resolution unless it gets rid of a legal action; as a policy, they will not do the right thing unless/until they are forced to by a legal action of some kind taken by the parents.   When you're talking about locus of control, such "leadership" starts out by laying heavy on the internal locus of control by choosing not to comply with the law, but shifts to external locus of control once a parent actually takes some kind of formal, legal action to resolve the matter. The only way the agency can regain and restore internal locus of control to the point of functional equilibrium at that point is usually to settle the matter by way of some kind of confidential agreement by which it gives up all kinds of considerations to the family but admits no fault on the part of the offending agency.   When you can understand the power dynamics that revolve around locus of control, it makes you a more savvy and practical negotiator. It makes you better at assessing other people's credibility, as well. Most importantly, as a parent, it makes you a more compassionate teacher and cheerleader for your children as you help them navigate all of the situations and relationships they will experience throughout childhood in your care. You are better to yourself and everyone else being as whole as you can be. I wish you nothing but the best as you become increasingly healthy and whole throughout your journey through this life, and thank you for the support you provide to my efforts to bring this kind of information to you. Peace be with you, my friends.