Want to become an advocate or fine tune your advocacy skills?
It’s never too late to catch up on Summer School for Advocates at https://www.wrightslaw.com/nltr/09/summer.school.advocates.htm
When you complete the 5 part series, you’ll find your certificate here.
Need A Pocket Manual for Advocates? Get a free download…
A lay advocate can be a parent, family member, friends, a teacher, or a professional advocate.
Lay advocates are those willing to provide support to parents, from simple hand-holding and organizing paperwork, to attending important meetings, to taking notes. Lay advocates are not associated with the legal profession, but can be paid or volunteers.
This information (and much more) comes from the Pocket Manual for Advocates written by Janie Bowman and Debbie Lynn Sorrells at Brightword. Download the manual
http://www.brightword.com/advocacy_manual.pdf
In this advocacy manual you’ll find shared experiences, information and resources for lay advocates, and information about advocacy training. You’ll also find information to help you make the right decision when selecting a lay advocate.
Advocacy Resources
A crisis can hit without warning! How do you prepare? Join several organizations in order to receive their national, state, and local newsletters. Read about and understand the law. Know how to write an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and become an expert in the global nature of your child’s abilities, disabilities, the law, IEPs, tests & measurements.
Where Do You Begin? Get the Advocacy Resource Checklist from Brightword
Advocacy Training
You hope it never happens yet you know it eventually will— a school crisis. You’ve attended multiple IEP meetings, are on good terms with your child’s teacher, and advocate for others in your school district. You’ve attended multiple conferences and trainings, and have a bookshelf devoted to books about special education and your child’s disability. You’re prepared. But now, here you are—a school crisis. What next?
Read A Parent’s Plan for Success
Get Wrightslaw Advocacy Training on CD-ROM
I agree. At some point, advocates need to work themselves out of a job and move to the next client. If they are successful, they have given the parents and the school the tool to insure that a child will make progress. I get concerned as I have heard some parents complain that they have paid a lot for advocates and attorneys to only realize that they, over time, had become educated and realized that they could sucessfully advocate on their own. I value advocates but remember that parents are willing to pay a lot of money for advocates but there is a point where parents can do it on their own.