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School
Advocacy
hamilton

Quick Links

:: Finding a Support Person

:: Identification, Placement and Review Committe (IPRC)

:: IPRC Appeal Process

:: Individual Education Plan (IEP)

:: Kid's Help Phone

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Preparation and Planning

Identify Problems Clearly

Before communicating with school staff, it is important to think about your concerns, or problems, to be clear about your options, and to think about how the problem might be resolved.

Set Priorities

Setting priorities will help you to figure out what is really important and what is not.

Exercise:

Write all of your problems or concerns on a piece of paper.

Rank your problems.

“1” for the most important or urgent.
“2” for the second most important.
“3” for the third most important, etc.

Deal with one problem at a time. This will help you and your child’s education team to focus, and to solve each problem one at a time.

Choose your battles carefully—you may not have enough time and energy to fight them all.

Set Positive Goals

For each priority problem or concern you must decide what you want to happen.

If you are not sure what you think should happen, you probably need more information, or you need to talk to a support person.

Sometimes you only know what you don’t want to happen. You might be thinking,

“I don’t want my child to be suspended.”

This can be stated as a positive goal. Your positive goal is to do what you can to prevent your child from being suspended.

Figure Out Your Options

Before you decide what you want to happen, find out what your options are.

Once you have examined all of the options, then you will be ready to make an informed decision about what you want to happen.

This will be your position when you meet with other members of your child’s education team like the classroom teacher or principal.

Before meeting with members of your child’s education team, write down how you would answer the following questions. Don’t worry if you don’t have the answers to these questions right now.

What do I want to happen?

When do I want it to happen?

Who needs to take what action to make it happen?

Who is going to monitor whether these actions are taken?

These are questions you should be able to answer either before a meeting with members of your child’s education team, or which you will be able to answer after you have had the meeting.

Make sure that what you want to happen is realistic. This does not mean giving up, or letting other people tell you that something is not possible.

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