I am a special education advocate working in New Hampshire with parents of children with disabilities.
A special education advocate helps parents of children with disabilities obtain the education and services for which their children are eligible. Advocates work with families to help them understand their child's disability, prioritize concerns, locate private sector evaluators and service providers, assist in developing Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), attend IEP meetings with parents, and serve as a resource for information about the special education process and using it efficiently to obtain an appropriate education for their children.
Other interests ~
I am the co-author of Wrightslaw: No Child Left Behind with Pete and Pam Wright. In my Doing Your Homework column I write about reading, research based instruction, No Child Left Behind, and creative strategies for using federal education standards to advocate for children and to improve public schools.
Currently I serve on New Hampshire's Special Education Advisory Committee on the Education of Students/Children with Disabilities (SAC) and volunteer with the New Hampshire Educational Surrogate Parent Program. I am the research editor at Wrightslaw.com.
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I have completed several hundred hours of supervised practicum in the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LiPS) and the Multisensory Teaching Approach (MTA). The LiPS program develops phonemic awareness - the ability to identify individual sounds and their order within words - for competence in reading, spelling, and speech. MTA is a comprehensive language arts program addressing the areas of alphabet/dictionary skills, reading, reading comprehension, cursive handwriting, and spelling. It is based on the Orton-Gillingham philosophy and techniques, and follows the introduction sequence of Alphabetic Phonics. |
