Hi everyone and welcome back to the Empowered to Advocate podcast. This is Dana Marie and I am back with part three of our series on behavior and school discipline. This is the third and final part of the series. In this specific episode, we are going to talk about a couple of special circumstances that come up, not often, but they are important to the conversation about behavior and school discipline. So we'll talk through those couple of special circumstances that we had previously mentioned in other episodes.

Then we'll answer a frequently asked question, a listener question, and then we'll finally leave you with a tip, a strategy, something that you can do if you are concerned about how the school and the district are handling your own child's behavior and discipline. So let's jump right in. We had talked briefly in one of our previous episodes about informal removals, but never really got into what they actually are. And believe it or not, the term informal removal, you've maybe heard it before, but it's really a pretty new term. The Office of Special Education Programs through the government really just coined the term in the summer of 2022 is when they actually published this term and some guidance around what it means.

So what does it mean? In one of our last episodes, we had talked about sort of what happens when the school calls you to pick up your child early, or it feels like they keep calling around the same time every day to come and pick up your child, but it's not through an IEP meeting. It's not like you have a meeting where you decide to shorten a school day. It's more like something happens behaviorally with your child and then somebody from school is saying, you know, they can't be here, they can't be safe, whatever the case may be. And then you're asked to come and pick them up. Like I said, usually around the same time every day or, you know, earlier than the school day. So this is considered an informal removal. So that is a shortened school day asking you to pick up your child is a shortened school day. It might happen once, it might happen every day, it might happen a few times, but just note that is, where it falls under, that's the category that it falls under. The difference here is, if the school team were to call an IEP meeting and have a conversation with you, the parent caregiver, and the rest of the team about shortening or lengthening a school day in order for your child to receive FAPE, free, appropriate public education. That is very different than these informal phone calls every day or every couple of days to pick up your child. Why this is important is when we talk about school discipline and the rights of children with disabilities, these informal removals are not documented typically.

They are not reported as suspensions to the Department of Education. They are uncounted in a lot of ways, even if the school might be keeping count on their end in a lot of ways, they are uncounted and quite frankly, they fly under the radar. So while there are lots of policies in place to ensure that your child is getting their education every day, all day to the extent that their same age peers are, these informal, calling you for a shortened day, really fly under the radar. So as a parent or caregiver, I want you to think about that. Are you getting called often? Are you getting called sometimes to pick up your child because they're experiencing a challenging behavior and the school's having a hard time helping them manage that behavior or just they're dysregulated or whatever the case may be? If this is something that feels like it's happening often, and no one from the school side has asked you to attend a meeting, come in for a meeting, anything like that. One thing we would definitely recommend is reaching out and saying, listen, I'm noticing a pattern of informal removals. It's really important to me, obviously, that my child attends school for the full day, is educated for the full day, gets all of their services, gets access to the curriculum, the same as their peers. let's have a conversation because perhaps something's not working in their IEP and their behavior plan, so on and so forth. So one time might not be a huge significant concern, but if you are starting to see a pattern of these informal removals, we really recommend that you reach out to the school, ask for a meeting, and ask to relook at the IEP, like I said, and the behavior plan to see what's something's clearly not working if you're having to go pick up your chats from school.

Which kind of brings me to the next piece, which is a formal removal or suspension from school, right? So hypothetically, a child breaks the school's code of conduct and is suspended for at least one or more than one days in school or out of school for that breach of the code of contract. code of conduct, sorry.

Once again, if this happens once, make sure you get it documented, make sure you have a sense of what happened, make sure you're able to see the incident report, so on and so forth, but it might not be cause for alarm. It is cause for alarm when it, like I said before, becomes a pattern. Has your child been suspended more than once this school year? Have they been suspended for multiple days in a row?

These all constitute patterns of disciplinary removal, of discipline removal. So that's when we want you to be vigilant and to be looking at what's going on. Now, after 10 days, which many of you, I know have heard before, but after 10 days, this is actually considered a change in placement. So if the school suspends your child for 10 days or more, it's actually considered a change in their placement. At this point, surely an IEP meeting should have happened. It should have happened probably a long time ago to see, like I said before, if the IEP is not meeting your child's needs, if the behavior plan is not meeting your child's needs, if there are other things that need to be put into place so that your child is not removed from school. But as you near those 10 days, or as you get to those 10 days, there should absolutely be a team meeting, an IEP team meeting, to about this change in placement and to determine next steps. Now, by law, when you are approaching these 10 days, but it could happen before then, but by law when you're approaching these 10 days or when you have hit the 10 days of disciplinary removal, suspension, et cetera, the team should be inviting you to a manifestation determination meeting anyways.

What is a manifestation determination meeting? It is a big term for a conversation, a meeting, where the school team and you, the entire IEP team, look at your child's profile, look at their disability, and determine if their behavior that caused them to be excluded from school was a manifestation of their disability because if it is or if it was, the school should not be excluding them disciplinary wise. That should be, like I said, another opportunity to look at the services that the child is getting, look at the IEP, look at places where we can add things, change things, so on and so forth. Now, if the school and you at that team meeting determines it was not a manifestation of your child's disability, it was unrelated to your child's disability, the behavior that they engaged in that caused their removal, then the school and the school district have the right to remove your child like any other child who breaks the code of contract.

What's important here is that these steps are taken in order to try to not get to the point where you're sitting at a manifestation determination talking about your child being excluded from school for 10 days or more than 10 days, right? Hopefully, in theory, in a perfect world, the school will have had lots of communication with you beforehand. You will have been invited in to have conversations, to a meeting, to troubleshoot, to, like I said, find ways to improve the IEP, to find ways to improve your child's programming. If it's got to this point, if it comes to the point of the manifestation determination meeting, that is when you have a bigger conversation about your child's challenging behavior, its relation to their disability, and then what the next steps are. Because the next step could be that perhaps this isn't the right placement for your child. Perhaps the next step is exploring different options for educating your child. So it's really important to kind of keep, it's a magic number, that magic number 10, to keep it in your mind, especially if you are experiencing suspensions, disciplinary removals this school year for your child who has challenging behaviors. Now, all of that said, and like I said before, I will drop the nuances, the law, the policies, I'll drop them in the show notes because it can be a little complicated and I just gave you the short seven or eight minute version of what this looks like. But all of that said, as a parent or caregiver, What we want you to keep in mind is just being aware of what's going on. You're the one who's going to be able to see, hmm, do I notice any patterns? Do I notice they're always calling me on a Monday? Do I notice they're always calling me on a Friday? Whatever the case may be, notice any patterns with informal removals or with formal removals? And then when, hopefully this doesn't happen, but if there's a case where they start to sort of stack up and you're realizing that there are five or six or seven times this has happened, or your child's now been suspended, it's only November and they've been suspended a couple of times, that's when you should absolutely reach out to the school team in order to get back together and see what can be done. And as always, we encourage you to make sure that everything is documented especially when it comes to those informal removals. Like I said earlier in the episode, they really aren't counted, they fly under the radar a little bit, the school district doesn't have an obligation to report those to the state, so on and so forth. So you can be keeping track of those days when school is calling you to pick up your kiddo. You can be sending an email to school on those days, following up and just saying, hey, I just want to follow up about today's incident, here's my understanding of what happened, you asked me to come pick up. So and so at 11 o'clock this morning, I just wanted to make sure that this was our understanding of what happened today. That's always a good idea, you have it in writing. The school team can come back and say, oh, that's not our understanding of the incident, whatever the case may be, but at least you will have documented that you were asked to pick up your child early.

Same thing goes for suspensions. The school team should be obviously keeping track of those on their end, but it's always okay as a parent or caregiver, whether it's about behavior or some other area of need for your child, to ask for information, to ask for documentation. Don't forget that. So you can reach out and say, you know, I never received the suspension letter from the building administrator outlining what happened and what the consequences, can you please send that to me? You can follow up and ask if there was an incident report, please share that incident report with me. You know, and we say that, we're not trying to catch people, you know, we're not trying to prove that people aren't following the law or, you know, is that happening? Sure, obviously, but as a parent or caregiver, we're trying to encourage you to be as informed as you possibly can because you're not in school when these incidents happen. You're not right next to your kiddo when they happen. This is your way getting the documentation, asking for incident reports, following up by email. This is your way of getting as much information as you possibly can about what is going on in school, particularly in this case around your child's behavior. It's also super helpful for when you do attend those meetings because you will be called to an IEP meeting, the team will reconvene or you can request it, like I said, in the context of those meetings, it can be hard to remember everything, it can be hard to remember what days you were asked to come, it can be hard to remember what times, but if you have everything with you documented, printed out on a piece of paper in a Google Doc, whatever the case may be, you will feel more prepared going into that conversation, especially if it gets to the point where you're in a manifestation determination meeting.

That's a lot of information. That's like the sort of shortened version of everything. Like I said, we'll drop some links in the show notes of things that you can look further into if this is something that you are concerned about. Go back, listen to the first episode of this series if you have not done so already because we dropped some information in that one as well. But we will give you more information if this is something that you are interested in exploring further and deeper, please reach out, please let us know, but we'll try to get you started with some information today.

I wanna move to, like I said, a listener question, a frequently asked question that we get because you might be a parent listening right now and this might apply to you. We, the school year in particular, have heard from lots of parents who have preschool aged, daycare aged children and their children's challenging behaviors, making it hard to stay in their daycare, to stay in their preschool setting for any number of different reasons. Kids who've been asked to leave their daycare, so on and so forth. I think one thing that's really important to realize is that daycares, private daycares in particular, do follow a different set of rules and policies than your public preschool, public kindergarten, public school in general. And so while there are lots of these safeguards in place in your local public school district when it comes to disciplinary removals and behavior and so on and so forth, those same safeguards unfortunately just don't exist in private daycares.

And that's sort of the short version of the story. Now, if your child attends a public preschool, so a public preschool, and your child has already qualified for special education and an IEP, that is when these safeguards kind of kick in. That's when these ones become applicable to your situation, your child's situation. So, It can be confusing. We hear from a lot of parents who are actually making the transition from daycare to a public preschool or from daycare right into a public kindergarten, understanding sort of the shift from the policies that oversee and govern early childhood education and daycares and then those that govern and oversee preschool and kindergarten for public school students who are on IAPs. So if that's a specific question that you have certainly reach out and we can help you sort of through that transition. It's a hard transition for a lot of reasons, but oftentimes we see that parents and caregivers are pleasantly surprised when they do transition their children into a preschool or a kindergarten setting and realize that there are more, like I said, safeguards in place and they're not getting called to pick up their child anymore or for shortened days, so on and so forth. So if that resonates with you, if that's something that you have been thinking about, please do not hesitate to reach out.

And then finally, the tip that we've talked many times about today, but we've talked many times about in the past as well, is documentation. We encourage every parent or caregiver, outside of the context of a conversation about behavior and discipline, we encourage every caregiver to the best of their ability, make sure that things from school are documented and that you have somewhere safe, accessible, to get that documentation and to get that information. We have a parent and caregiver binder set up that we've shared with folks. In the past, that's on our website, that's free. It's just to keep track of all your documents. We know parents who love to just use a Google folder and put everything in there. Like I said, if you're emailing the school for documentation, you can cut and paste it to a Google Doc and keep it right in your Google folder, whatever works for you. But we do encourage you to document, especially when it comes to these harder conversations about behavior and about your child being removed from their classroom, from their school, so on and so forth. And if you need some help with that.

We would love to help you get organized, so definitely reach out about that. All right, with that, I am going to end for today and end this series. There are so many more things to talk about when it comes to behavior and school discipline. We really just scratched the surface in the last three episodes. We hope that we've given you some things to at least consider and think about and some links to information where you can dive a little bit deeper. But if you have specific questions, we encourage you as always to reach out and ask them. We can chat with you. We can cover them in a next episode. And we have just one more episode of this season before we take a little bit of a holiday hiatus, a holiday break, and then come back in the new year with some really great guests and some really great episodes. But in the meantime, we will see you next week with our last episode of this season. And as always, drop us your comments, drop us your questions, and thank you so much for listening to the Empowered to Advocate podcast. Bye everybody.