ISO Stories about Parents Who Could Not Afford Expert Witnesses for Due Process
Without experts, parents and students with disabilities have little chance of success in due process hearings, and poor and middle-income families suffer the most. The Autism National Committee is seeking stories about parents who could not afford expert witnesses for IDEA due process hearings to share with members of Congress.
Advocates are working in support of a Congressional bill that would enable parents to recover expert witness fees for IDEA due process hearings and cases.
Autcom is looking for parents who would be willing to share their stories about being unable to afford expert witnesses with members of Congress. These could be families who were unable to go to a due process hearing because they could not afford it. They could also be parents who went to due process but their case suffered badly without expert witnesses. They could be parents whom the school district took to a due process hearing, but they could not afford expert witnesses they needed to defend themselves.
The parents’ stories will ultimately be shared with members of Congress.
Please contact Jessica Butler, Congressional Affairs Coordinator, Autism National Committee, at jessica@jnba.net if you have helpful stories or if you would like more information.
My wife and I have had an Advocate and the Director of the University Autism Center(who diagnosed our son as as Aspergers Student) accompany us to our IEP meeting. Additionally we paid for the Autism Ctr to perform private testing, we wanted an objective Dx and we paid for a private Psych-ed Eval by a MD, again for objectivity. Our son has a Vision and a separate Autism IEP after over a year of stressful, unneeded meetings required by the school. The school does not follow the IEP’s as written and we were not allowed to evaluate the final IEP document, rather we were simply given a copy of the plan they decided on. We have reached the point of pursuing Due Process, however our finances will prevent us from having the experts we have already paid once and 2 additional experts that will solidify our case present for this important event.