Making Special Education Actually Work

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/canary-in-the-coal-mine.png Many people don't know what the word "eugenics" means, but parents of special education students will recognize the behavior associated with eugenicist thinking. Special education is not an isolated, siloed experience with no bearing on the rest of society, and history shows us that societies don’t just collapse because of a few bad actors or terrible ideas. They collapse because their systems stop evolving with the needs of their people.  I have spent the last 34 years upholding democracy at the local level through special education compliance, asserting all the while that special education is the “canary in the coalmine” for the rest of our civilization. The degree to which a society is civilized is revealed by the degree to which it takes care of its most vulnerable members. When societies collapse, systems that once protected people can no longer fulfill their functions and start existing for their own benefit, causing constituent needs to become the means of perpetuating the system rather than the ends served by the system. These systems stop spiraling upward through stages of reflection, accountability, and self-correction and, instead, stagnate and drift into patterns we recognize all too well; patterns that include horrors like eugenics. What Is Eugenics, and Why Should We Be Worried? Eugenics is the scientifically discredited and morally indefensible idea that society can be “improved” by encouraging reproduction among people with “desirable” traits while suppressing or eliminating reproduction among those deemed “undesirable.” In the early 20th century this ideology fueled forced sterilizations, segregation, and systemic discrimination against the poor, disabled, mentally ill, and minority populations (NHGRI [https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism]). Even after the Holocaust exposed the full horror of where eugenic thinking leads, many of its assumptions remained embedded in law, policy, and cultural attitudes. Today we are seeing a resurgence of these ideas under new guises: * Coerced sterilizations [https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/immigration-detention-and-coerced-sterilization-history-tragically-repeats-itself] of women in immigration detention centers * Cuts to disaster relief and public-health infrastructure [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/03/us-climate-crisis-poverty-cuts] that disproportionately impact marginalized communities * Erasure of tracking systems [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/us/disaster-data-tracking-cutbacks.html] for disease, disaster, and civil-rights data, making vulnerable groups less visible and less protected These actions aren’t accidents. They are systematic attempts to decide who deserves to survive and who doesn’t, without ever saying the real intent out loud. One of the things about my tendency to use Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in any attempt to understand behavior is that it really helps identify when actions speak louder than words, which is why I recommend that everyone have a basic understanding of ABA. It's hard to miss the function of a behavior when it's this obvious. Project 2025 Threatens Publicly Funded Special Education Project 2025 [https://www.project2025.org/] is a published blueprint backed by major political operatives that calls for dismantling federal civil-rights enforcement, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education [https://www.ed.gov/]. Key figures inside the current administration have publicly stated that their job is to “eliminate” the Department. Project 2025 proposes to: * Eliminate or severely weaken the USDOE * Roll back enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) [https://sites.ed.gov/idea/] * Shift authority to states without guaranteeing civil-rights compliance * Divert public funds to private schools that need not serve disabled students equitably So, Project 2025 and Eugenics: Here's the Link At its core, eugenics builds systems that decide whose lives are worth protecting and whose are expendable. Project 2025 follows this template by removing protections for disabled, poor, and marginalized students, making survival and success conditional on wealth, ability, and conformity. While supporters frame these moves in language about “freedom” and “efficiency,” the practical effect is to systematically privilege some groups while abandoning others. Selective protection of life, determined by productivity and conformity, is the operational definition of modern eugenics (ACLU analysis [https://www.aclu.org/news/disability-rights/project-2025-is-a-threat-to-disabled-americans]). Understanding this connection matters because it shows that the fight for special education compliance is not merely bureaucratic; it is a defense of human dignity against an organized eugenics campaign.  If the rights of a nonverbal child with autism don't matter, why should anyone else's? The eugenicists refer to our most severely impacted special education students as "useless eaters," just as the Nazi's did in WWII Germany as they tossed them into concentration camps, experimented on them, and later disposed of them in gas chambers. This is How Special  Education Compliance Fights Eugenics Eugenics thrives where human dignity is rationed. Special education compliance, by contrast, mandates recognition of each individual’s inherent worth, no matter what it takes to give them equitable access to everything that everyone else can access. The IDEA requires schools to identify, assess, and individually support every eligible student, with continuous review through the IEP process. Every compliance cycle, which includes assessment, planning, intervention, and progress review, is a deliberate act of justice scaffolding. It interrupts the slide toward selective harm by making it illegal to “write off” a student as unworthy of investment. Developmental Science Shows Us the Right Way Forward Jean Piaget taught that learning happens in stages. Lev Vygotsky emphasized guided support within a child’s zone of proximal development. Erik Erikson described psychosocial milestones that, if skipped, lead to lifelong instability: Trust ➢ Autonomy ➢ Initiative ➢ Competence ➢ Identity When these stages are supported, society spirals upward toward resilience. When they are abandoned, societies fall into fear, shame, hatred, and authoritarianism, which collectively creates a breeding ground for eugenic thinking. People who lack the problem-solving skills to overcome life's hardships look for others to blame for their unhappiness while unscrupulous profiteers exploit their limitations for power and profit and provide them with convenient scapegoats to blame for all their problems. Very often, people targeted for extinction by eugenics will be unwittingly enlisted to facilitate their own demise, not realizing that they are among one of the groups being targeted for extinction when they are being pitted against another. Spiraling Is an Instructional Strategy that Can Improve Our Chances In education, the term "spiraling" refers to referring back to previously taught material or concepts and relating it to new material being instructed. For example, a refresher on basic addition before launching into new instruction about subtraction would be an instance of spiraling the addition instruction into the subtraction instruction to help the learner make the mental connection between what is already known and what is being presented as new. In day-to-day human discourse, spiraling can be used to inform what we understand about the world around us based on what we've learned from past experiences relative to new information being presented to us in the news and from the people we know. By weaving in what we've already learned and mastered and connecting it to the new information being presented, we can create better outcomes for ourselves. Compliance Is Not Pointless Red Tape Sound compliance structures create a lifeline, not just for individual students but for all of us. They remind us that justice is a habit, growth is a cycle, and survival is collective. Every IEP, every audit, every procedural safeguard is a step upward, away from the abyss. Without spiraling structures of accountability and care, the risk of falling backward into destructive hierarchies grows exponentially. The measure of a civilization has always been how it treats its most vulnerable. When we protect the rights of students with disabilities, we protect the soul of our nation. Special education law isn't about pointless obedience. It's intended to be a bulwark against eugenics in American society, which is why it is currently being targeted by the Project 2025 eugenicists. Regardless of whether you're a parent of a child with special education needs, a concerned taxpayer who didn't volunteer to bankroll eugenics as a function of our government, or both, you have a beef here with how things are currently being operated at the federal level. The only way to preserve our democracy is to participate in it, including at the local level. Every IEP meeting is an opportunity to uphold the rule of law and facilitate the government serving the needs of the public accordingly. And to make sure our society attends to its most vulnerable members like a civilized society should.

https://kps4parents.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Using-ABA-to-ID-Deal-wMisinformation-1.png Special education and disability-related areas of civil rights law are complex systems of law and science that require an understanding of how an individual person is impacted by their unique disabilities within the unique contexts of their unique individual lives. The whole person has to be taken into account in order to determine the degree to which their disabilities impact their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), which includes learning, employment, and community access. In special education, the presence of disability alone does not automatically make a student eligible for special education, though it still makes them protected under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (504) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In special education, having a disability satisfies only one prong of a two-pronged line of inquiry that requires, upon evidence of a disability, further evidence that the disability interferes with the student’s access to education in some kind of meaningful way that requires specialized instruction of some form. In some states, such as California, if a student demonstrates a speech and/or language impairment such that they satisfy the Speech-Language Impaired (SLI) eligibility category pursuant to the regulations, and require speech-language services but not Specialized Academic Instruction (SAI), the speech-language services can be considered SAI for the purposes of finding the student eligible for special education. This is because public school instruction is so heavily weighted on language that having intact language skills is necessary for accessing the instruction. That said, many students, particularly those found eligible under the Autism (AUT) criteria, experience significant impairments in pragmatic language that many not interfere with their academics in most cases, but greatly interfere with their ability to interact in socially appropriate ways with others. This can impact their peer interactions during unstructured times like lunch and recess or passing periods, participation in group learning activities in the classroom, safe behavior during school drills or actual emergencies, etc. Addressing these kinds of challenges through special education can be just as educationally necessary as addressing the academic needs of a child with an intellectual disability, profound medical condition, or learning disability. Figuring out who needs what, if anything, in special education requires an expert level of assessment and data analyses. Furthermore, special education is a regulated process. Local education agencies have to abide by the rules attached to the federal special education dollars in order for their states to receive said dollars. Compliance with 504 is non-optional for any entity receiving federal dollars of any kind, such as public schools, and compliance with the ADA is mandatory, period. Federal special education law mandates the application of the peer-reviewed research to the design and delivery of special education, to the degree doing so is practicable. This means that approaches that have already been proven to work, that is, evidence-based practices, must be used when addressing the individual needs of each special education student pursuant to the applicable regulations. In theory, logic should prevail under the circumstances. However, as the whole world is now seeing first-hand, the government in America has always been infiltrated by anti-democratic thinkers and morons who have no idea what they are doing. Sometimes these people are one in the same. Not to say, “I told you so,” but back when people kept comparing me to Don Quixote when I’d make a stink about special education violations as a matter of a departure from the rule of law by local government agencies, I kept telling people that special education was the “canary in the coal mine” for democracy in this country. The measure of how civilized a society is goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members. If the civil rights of children with disabilities means nothing, no one’s rights mean anything. If one of us is denied liberty, all of us are denied liberty. There cannot be any class of humans who are excluded from human rights in a civilized society, but there are many mentally ill people currently in power who regard other people with disabilities as “useless eaters.” The irony that this is the mentally ill calling other people with disabilities unworthy of life doesn’t escape me. Only broken minds do the kinds of things we’re seeing happen within American government at the federal level, right now. This is what I was up against for the first 25 years of my career at the local and State level. It’s now finally escalated up the food chain to the national level such that it’s now finally affecting everyone and not just marginalized populations. Police are now putting up barricades and blocking off streets so that white people can safely peacefully protest, instead of beating and arresting them like they have when black and brown people have peacefully protested in the streets. White people aren’t being disappeared to El Salvador, yet, but the writing is on the wall if the American public doesn’t unite against what is happening, right now. It’s a lot to process, but for those of us who have been fighting this affront to democracy through official channels for decades, the narcissistic abuses of power by government officials are all too familiar to us. Interestingly, at the local level, the energy has shifted in the last 15 to 20 years as more old, crooked cronies retire or move on  and more and more young people fresh out of graduate school come in to inherit the messes left behind by the crooked old cronies they replaced. These science-minded, pro-democracy young public servants are inadequately trained on how to apply the science in the field and the regulatory process that describes how they are supposed to do it. None of the systems they have inherited lend  themselves to complying with the law; they’re broken and fraught with decades of mismanagement. I’m finding as I go to IEP meetings that I am a welcome member of the team because I’ve been around long enough to know the applicable science and law, and I’ve been trying to prevent the harm done by the old cronies since 1991. At this stage in my career, I’m spending more time helping IEP teams create legally compliant IEPs that deliver meaningful educational and therapeutic results as appropriate to the individual needs of the student, and far less time fighting with school districts over whether or not to assess a student, amend an IEP goal, provide a service, or change a placement. It appears that the toxic energy that I was up against previously has moved on in the pursuit of power to higher offices where people are less familiar with contending with these types of behaviors. Part of what keeps people like this in power for so long is that they lie, withhold information, spoliate evidence, violate privacy rights, engage in gaslighting, and are often really good at finding someone else to be their scapegoat to take the fall if they get caught doing something wrong. It all catches up with them eventually, but there is a wake of destruction behind them 100 miles wide by the time that happens, and remedial, compensatory strategies that are eventually forthcoming never make the injured parties fully whole. America is going through something akin to one of my worst-case scenarios in a special education advocacy case, which I’ve not had to deal with since 2005 to 2012. The worst-case scenario is when, despite my best efforts to keep things scientifically valid and procedurally compliant, I was unable to get an appropriate program for a student, at which point I’d pull in an attorney to file for due process to fight for an appropriate Individualized Education Program (IEP) for the student pursuant to the regulations and applicable peer-reviewed research. Worst-case scenario, the losing party in the due process case appeals to the federal District Court in the student’s local area, which can delay some remedies for two to five years. If the District Court matter is appealed, it goes to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. If I never have to work on another table of uncontroverted facts again for the rest of my life, it will be too soon. The tedium and detail required is like trying to paint the Mona Lisa on a grain of rice with an eyelash. It can also further delay resolution by another year or two. In short, litigation blows. I’ll do it if I have to because that’s the only lawful process to resolve violations of the law committed by government officials to the detriment of children with disabilities that I’ve got, but I’ll resent the hell out of everybody who has made it necessary for me to put forth that kind of effort to resolve a problem they created. It’s an act of patriotism and protectiveness of children with disabilities that I do it. It's out of necessity because I can and most people can’t. That’s got to change. More people need to know what I know so that they can be better advocates for democracy in their own lives, however it might uniquely manifest. There has to be a way for me to share the knowledge I have about how pro-democratic people can handle anti-democratic people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. A democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people is upheld when all the people work together in a manner that makes them woven together like fabric, to make up the fabric of the community in which they live. Or, to quote guerilla gardener, Ron Finley [https://youtu.be/EzZzZ_qpZ4w?si=pnR3_-jg59Y16LcR], “To change the community, we have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil!” Community building is a lot like building up soil for planting and growing food. In order for people to weave together into a fabric that creates a healthy society, the people themselves need to be socially-emotionally healthy. If we are all collectively the soil, the soil needs to be amended because not everyone is getting the nutrients they need in order for us to all interact together in a mutually beneficial and healthy way. To that end, I want to put it out there that I think there needs to be an “every person’s” version of basic Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) taught at the high school level as part of every student’s health curriculum, along with instruction regarding how to discern truth from fiction in media of all forms. Civics classes should also include examinations of propaganda efforts in the past and present around the world that are used to subjugate people and deprive them of their freedoms, and how that compares against the United States Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and our system of three equal branches of government at the federal level for the purpose of checks and balances. With respect to ABA, this is something the general public should really understand and it honestly isn’t that complicated. For the purpose of educating the public and helping people equip themselves with a way of thinking about behavior that will serve them for the rest of their lives, I’m offering a basic breakdown of the applicable science, here. The first thing to understand about ABA is that there is no trying to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling involved. You can’t observe what’s going on in someone’s mind or how their body feels inside, and you can’t make any informed decisions in ABA about things you can’t observe and measure. As such, only objective, observable behaviors can be used to inform an ABA analysis of any kind. Internal thoughts and feelings are referred to as “private events” in ABA. This actually helps you be more methodical and less emotionally biased about your data, because you’re purely working from what anyone can observe and measuring it in meaningful ways. For example, what is the frequency, intensity, and duration of an inappropriate behavior that you are witnessing? All of those things can be quantified in some kind of way. Another important data collection tool in ABA is called “ABC data collection.” Here, “A” stands for “antecedent,” “B” stands  for “behavior,” and “C” stands for “consequence.” An antecedent is whatever happened just before the behavior that triggered it. The behavior is the behavior you’re analyzing. The consequence is the outcome naturally produced by the behavior. ABC data is taken to determine the function of a behavior. The function of a behavior is indicated by the degree to which the consequence rewards the behavior and thus encourages it to happen again under similar circumstances in the future. The more often a behavior is rewarded, the more likely it is to occur again. This rewarding of a specific behavior is called “reinforcement,” and can come in various forms. Many people misuse the terms “positive” and “negative’ with respect to “reinforcement,” and that really undermines their ability to accurately apply the science. “Positive” and “negative” no more mean “good” and “bad” with respect to reinforcement as they do to the poles on a magnet or a battery. This is science. “Positive” and “negative” are neutral terms that have nothing to do with emotions or judgment. In ABA, “positive” means “to present” and “negative” means “to withdraw.” Therefore, “positive reinforcement” occurs when something desired by the individual is received in response to a specific behavior, and “negative reinforcement” occurs when something aversive to the individual is taken away in response to a specific behavior. One of the best research examples of that was B.F. Skinner’s experiments with rats. He created what came to be known as “Skinner Boxes” in which different tests were conducted with rats to study positive and negative reinforcement. In one box, a rat would have a lever built into the cage that, if pulled by the rat, would dispense a food pellet, thereby positively reinforcing the behavior of lever-pulling. In another box, the floor of the cage would carry a mild electrical current that was unpleasant but not painful to the rat, which it could turn off by pulling a lever, which thereby negatively reinforced the behavior of lever-pulling. In both instances, the rats learned to pull a lever, but in each trial in which this experiment was conducted, the rat who had been positively reinforced seemed to be better off at the end of the experiment than the rat that had been negatively reinforced. The conclusion was that reinforcing a behavior increases its likelihood of occurring again in the future under similar circumstances, but positive reinforcement is usually the more ethical form of reinforcement, and it’s highly effective. In some instances, negative reinforcement can be a good thing. Removing something non-preferred in exchange for specific behaviors is negative reinforcement, and that isn’t always bad. Reducing the amount of time a teenager is grounded for being behind in their homework according to how much of it they complete can reinforce the behavior of completing their incomplete homework. Reducing the number of math problems they have to complete if they can show mastery with just a few reinforces the behavior of diligent application of math knowledge. I’ll gladly vacuum the living room if someone else scrubs the toilet. Let me escape the aversive task of scrubbing the toilet and I will engage in the behavior of vacuuming the living room. But, the science shows that working for rewards is a more powerful and emotionally healthy motivator than working to escape punishment. The whole “positive” and “negative” thing applies to punishment, as well. “Positive punishment” is the presentation of something aversive in response to a specific behavior. “Negative punishment” is the withdrawal of something preferred in response to a specific behavior. The effectiveness and ethics of punishment are a mirror image of reinforcement. Negative punishment can be far less harsh and more effective than positive punishment. In ABA, punishment is also referred to as a “response cost.” The intent of punishment is to serve up a consequence that is unlikely to reinforce the behavior from happening again under similar circumstances. Negative punishment can be taking away the wi-fi by changing the password until all the clean dishes in the dishwasher have been put away and the dirty dishes have been loaded into it like some young person’s chores list says they’re supposed to do. Giving them the new wi-fi password once the dishes are done positively reinforces doing the dishes. There’s a time and a place for everything. Positive punishment in its ugliest form is abuse. It is usually the least effective and ethical approach to use. However, as I said, there is a time and place for everything. Sometimes consequences have to hurt badly before the lesson is learned, as a lot of pro-47 investors are starting to realize these days. Another ABA concept that people need to understand and master is that of the “Extinction Burst.” There is misinformation about what this term means floating around out there and it doesn’t simply refer to the death throes of a behavior on its way out. That grossly oversimplifies the whole situation. An extinction burst occurs when a behavior that was previously reinforced is no longer being reinforced. The individual escalates their behavior in an effort to force the reinforcer to nonetheless come. For example, if you put money in a vending machine and a candy bar comes out every time, the candy bar consistently reinforces the behavior of putting money in the machine. If, however, the candy bar gets stuck in the machine and won’t come out one day, we don’t walk away sad never to use the machine again; we kick the crap out of the machine until the candy bar falls out. We only give up on the machine if kicking it doesn’t work. After that, we’ll stop using the machine, and the machine-using behavior will become extinct. We might replace that behavior with another behavior, like using a different vending machine or buying snacks at the store, but we won’t go back to the machine that stole our money and candy again. A lot of the insane behaviors we’re seeing at the federal level are an extinction burst of a sort on behalf of old, rich, white men who have gotten away with horrible things their entire lives and are just trying to maintain until they die. They are pulling every last desperate stunt they can think of to hold onto the power they managed to acquire over time through unscrupulous means in what was never an indefinitely sustainable plan due to its inherent flaws and departure from morality as their house of cards finally starts to fall. And, they don’t care who they hurt in the process, least of all children with disabilities who they regard as “useless eaters.” What we cannot do is reinforce their behaviors. We have to starve their behaviors of rewards and mete out response costs where appropriate, which seems to be in a whole lot of cases. This is going to burden our judiciary for a long time to come, but it will also likely make the careers of up-and-coming attorneys and judges who come down on the right side of the rule of law, save democracy, and make history. Our system of checks and balances are being put to the test and our judiciary is largely standing up to the assault on our democracy that the executive branch is leading. In our day-to-day lives, when we encounter the kinds of people who are swayed by the influence of 47 and his minions, we need to go in understanding that logic will not serve us and understanding the functions of their behaviors will get us much further. What is the thing that happened right before they did whatever they did that has us concerned? That’s our antecedent. What was the consequence they received immediately after engaging in the behavior? Did the consequence reward or punish their behavior, or did it have a neutral effect? If you can learn to read the room according to the basic principles of ABA, it’s like Neo seeing “The Matrix” in code rather than as it renders. Once you learn how to see the world that way, you can’t turn it off and is so helpful! At the end of the day, any behavior happens for only one of two reasons: to attain/acquire something or to escape/avoid something. This renders the function of a behavior down to binary code. Attaining/acquiring something is a 1 and escaping/avoiding something is a 0. In every scientific and mathematical sense, behavior can be reduced down to 1s and 0s. If you can figure out what someone is trying to attain/acquire or escape/avoid, you’ve identified the function of their behavior. Once you know that, you can affect what types of consequences meet them when they engage in the behavior, as well as prevent antecedents from presenting themselves that would set them off in the first place. Proactive strategies seek to prevent the behavior where reactive strategies plan for what to do if the behavior still happens. Proactive prevention is more effective and healthier than allowing the behavior to happen and then having to react to it. The best behavioral intervention strategies proactively teach a socially appropriate replacement behavior that serves the individual better than the maladaptive behavior being replaced. Extinguishing the maladaptive behavior without replacing it with a learned skill leaves the individual to their own devices to cook up a new way to address the same want/need that drove the maladaptive behavior in the first place. If you don’t give them a replacement behavior, they’ll come up with one on their own that has a high likelihood of being as maladaptive as the behavior that was extinguished. Basically, it’s not enough to make them stop. We have to reward them for doing something more appropriate, instead. For example, one hypothetical solution to our current, modern-day problems with 47 and his administration could be that he negates all of his executive orders, voids all of his pardons of the J6 offenders, terminates his tariffs, resigns, and retires, and in exchange, upon assuming the Presidency, J.D. Vance pardons him of all federal crimes. At that point, 47 could go live out the brief remainder of his life at his resort in Florida surrounded by sycophants as the president who saved the economy by sacrificing his elected office, “a hero of the people forever.” This hypothetical scenario would still leave 47 vulnerable to prosecutions at the State level, but I’m willing to believe he would die of old age before he ever saw the inside of a jail cell. At this point, the world is so broken that it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to do much to hold him accountable. He’s basically holding us hostage in exchange for a literal “get out of jail” card. He’d likely gladly give up the presidency in exchange for simply being let off the hook. On a more personal level, that one crazy uncle, neighbor, sister-in-law, etc., who just doesn’t get it cannot be responded to with logic, but you can change what kinds of consequences they receive when they engage in certain behaviors. Ignoring minor behaviors and being overly thankful and attentive when they behavior appropriately goes a long way towards shaping their behaviors without them knowing it. Suggesting alternatives to conspiracy theories as questions rather than assertions allows them to arrive at the sensible conclusion on their own. You just need to plant seeds. If they say something crazy, you can say, “That’s really interesting. I’m just wondering how they account for XYZ?” and describe some logical aspect of the situation they hadn’t considered. Follow it with, “Did they say anything about that?” Once you plant that seed of doubt in their minds, they’re more likely to Google it later when you’re not around to see if it means anything. If your logic blows their conspiracy theory apart, they may not come back and say anything to you about it. In fact, you may never hear about that particular conspiracy theory again. The more you pique their curiosity with innocent questions that don’t imply you doubt them at all, the more they will figure it out on their own. They are far more likely to own it if it was their conclusion rather than someone else correcting them directly. If they do come back and say something about it, it’s to say they looked into and it turned out to be crap. The question you asked got to bugging them and they had to look It up. When they did, they realized the whole thing was a bunch of BS. They may be chagrined, but nonetheless wiser. If you have a good relationship with them, they may even laugh with you about it and appreciate that you didn’t make them feel stupid by correcting them and let them figure it out for themselves. You want to positively reinforce their curiosity, not positively punish their uninformed opinions. You want to positively reinforce their self-discovery of the truth. You want to ignore their misstatements of facts and/or inaccurate conclusions and redirect them towards the truth with an innocent curious question. Shift the blame for not understanding onto yourself when posing innocent curious questions. Say things like, “I guess I’m just not getting it. Why do they do XYZ when ABC is happening?” or “Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand why they don’t just do XYZ and call it good. Am I missing something?” End with comments like, “Wouldn’t that be interesting to know?” or “Let me know if you ever find out anything about that.” Keep it friendly and cordial, knowing that you are guiding them towards the truth in the kindest way possible, maintaining their dignity, and not humiliating them when they finally own the truth. Punishing them for finally getting it defeats the whole purpose of trying to get them to get it. When they finally have their “Come to Jesus moment,” it has to be rewarding for them to “come to Jesus.” There has to be forgiveness and mercy on the other side of that experience once they finally get it, or we’ll lose them and we need them as allies to oppose the forces that would otherwise oppress us all. Conscripting them into the fight would not earn their devotion to the cause. They need to understand what is really going on so that they are invested in fighting for democracy with the rest of us according to a shared understanding of the facts. We need to earn their partnership by graciously helping them overcome their knowledge and skill deficits through reinforcing their appropriate behaviors and discouraging their inappropriate ones on a person-by-person, day-by-day basis, and only a public informed about ABA is going to be able to do that, hence this post/podcast. All of this further translates to what I’ve been building up to this whole time, which is discerning truth in media. When you can apply ABA principles in your day-to-day interactions with people without having to think about it, you will find yourself picking apart things in the media that don’t add up. The functions of some people’s behaviors will be suspect based on what consequences have rewarded them and won’t match how they’re being reported. With peer-reviewed research and other technical reports, the true test of validity is when other people can replicate the same study or practices and obtain the same or similar results. The more times different people come up with the same results doing the same things, the more reliable the science becomes; this is what we called an “evidence-based practice.” When people attempt to assert that something has been scientifically proven, a quick trip to scholar.google.com [https://scholar.google.com/] and a search on the topic will provide you with whatever science has been published on the topic. Some of it may be behind a paywall, but you can at least read the abstracts and see what their conclusions were. In any event, if something is legitimately supported by science, you can verify it this way. Similarly, when people say that something is “the law,” ask them “Which law?” If they can’t identify the actual law, or at least the section of law (i.e., “state vehicle code, “ or “state education code,” etc.), then ask them where they learned it was the law and search the internet for trustworthy information about whatever they say in response. If it’s case law from a court case, then they should know the name of at least one of the parties and where the case was tried. They may not know if it was state or federal, but they know what state it was in. Or, they may not know the state, but they know it was a state case and not federal. They should have some details about which case it is if they’re citing anything even possibly legitimate, in which case you can look it up through one of the many state or federal case look-up sites or just Google it. PACER [https://pcl.uscourts.gov/pcl/index.jsf] is the site I use for federal cases, but just a Google search can often turn up the cases I’m looking for, state or federal, if I have enough information about them to feed into the search engine.  PACER is cheap, but it’s not free like Google. The beauty of PACER is that it will give you all the publicly available records on a federal case once you’ve pulled it up, so you can see exactly what the court documents say and reach your own conclusions. Every state has its own unique system of case look-up portals that work in a similar fashion. Because most of the arguments that need to be won are between fact and fiction, graciously steering misinformed people to discover the facts for themselves from reliable sources of information allows them to come to more accurate conclusions on their own, become more educated voters, preserves their dignity, and allows them to become part of the pro-democracy community with forgiveness and caring. Making sure you don’t become one of the misled means looking to where the reliable data comes from and keeping things as simple as 1s and 0s as possible. When you can reduce things down to their simplest expression, it’s easier to figure out what to do. You have to eliminate all the noise of the pieces of data that aren’t the most important and focus on the few that are critical in order to create working system. You can tweak the details and make it pretty later, but you first need a functioning construct. Please do your own personal research into ABA and how it can be applied in your day-to-day life. I promise it will change your perspective on the whole world and equip you with skills to navigate the world around you better than anything else you could learn. What I’ve included herein is very basic, but I hope for our lay readers and listeners out there who were not already familiar with this science that I’ve given you a lot to think about and a new way to do it. I hope this information borrowed from my work in special education lay advocacy, paralegal support to attorneys, and educational psychology has translated well into information you can apply in your own unique life situations and that it serves you now and forever.  #ABA #specialeducation #504 #ADA #IEP #students #parents #democracy #civilrights #disabilityrights #handsoff

Hello!  This is Anne Zachry, author and moderator of “Making Special Education Actually Work,” an online publication, produced in blog and podcast form, by KPS4Parents, a nonprofit child and family lay advocacy and consultancy organization focused on learners and workers with disabilities.  I am excited to announce that, because of work I am doing on behalf of one of my direct services clients, I will be participating in an Instagram Live event with the CEO and co-founder of Talkido, one of the technology tools I am using as part of my client’s highly individualized program of intervention.  My client has a seizure disorder, intellectual disability, autism, and vision loss.  Creating an effective program of intervention given his unique challenges has required some innovation, but I was able to achieve it using affordable, and often inexpensive, resources. Find out more about how I’ve used tactile icons with auditory tags using Talkido’s technology to teach emotional vocabulary, and how these vocabulary concepts are further supported by personally created AI-generated songs using social scripts and stories as lyrics with the targeted emotional vocabulary terms worked into them by attending our Instagram Live Event on Friday, February 7, 2025, at 5pm PST, which is 8pm EST. Follow this link for more information:  https://kps4parents.org/individualized-interventions-using-talkido/ [https://kps4parents.org/individualized-interventions-using-talkido/]  I’m looking forward to answering questions about how I individualized this program, how others can apply the same strategies to individualizing programming for other individuals, and how the technologies I’m using can be used to help others.  I hope you can join us on Instagram on Friday, February 7, 2025 at 5pm PST/8pm EST.  Thanks for supporting our important work!  We look forward to bringing useful information to you.

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?