NEW HAMPSHIRE SPECIAL EDUCATION DICTIONARY

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NEW HAMPSHIRE SPECIAL EDUCATION DICTIONARY

[Apologies to Ambrose Bierce and Samuel Johnson.]

Annual Statement of Placement (ASP) The form that shows student 312576 from 357 was given an 01, 02, 03, 06, and 08 by an 04, 14, 16, and a 20 and was therefore identified as 09 and 04 and placed in an M01 in 3578997 with 2 units of 18. The parent signs the ASP to indicate informed consent.

Calendar Day The legal unit of measurement for all special education deadlines and time limits, without exception, especially during holidays, vacations, and school closings for blizzards, tornadoes, and backed-up septic systems. This information is available from Congress and the Department of Education, but don’t try to get copies of the laws and regulations during holidays and vacations.

Inclusion The complicated, difficult, challenging, and expensive effort to provide, for a student with educational disabilities, a program of intensive, individualized special education services entirely within the confines of regular classrooms. The complicated, difficult, challenging, and expensive undertaking simultaneously to pursue remedial special education instruction and the mainstream curriculum. The popularity of inclusion stems in part from the conviction that it is cheaper than regular special education services.

Individualized Education Program (IEP) A mass-produced, computer-generated document describing in considerable detail the pre-existing program into which the student will be placed. The individualization occurs when the student’s name, age, grade, and birth date are entered in the appropriate computer program fields.

Language-Based Program An educational program in which teachers strive to impart oral and written language skills and rely, for the most part, on language to communicate with their students. Reportedly, such programs are very rare.

Least Restrictive Alternative 1. Wherever the attorney’s client currently wishes the child to attend school. 2. Whatever the school has available.

Master Contract A document guaranteeing that teachers do not have to attend meetings more than 30 minutes after the end of the last class period. This contract is signed by the same superintendent and school board chairperson who sign federal assurances that all special education meetings will be held at the reasonable convenience of parents.

Mental Ages/Grade Equivalents The worst possible test-score statistics; the statistics most commonly demanded by readers of test reports.

Multi-Disciplinary Evaluation Several relative strangers reading aloud, but not listening to others reading, reports of their various interactions with a student. The independent and possibly contradictory assessments are then “integrated” with a staple as the group disbands. This is a team in the sense that a pole vaulter, a hurdler, a shot putter, and a runner constitute a track team.

%ile The favorite abbreviation for “percentile rank,” employed to guarantee the already probable confusion between “percentile rank” and “percent correct.”

Phonetically Based Reading Instruction The attempt to persuade a student with auditory perception difficulties, a history of otitis media, and a severe sequential processing disorder that kuh - ah - tuh spells “cat.”

Prenatal Ultrasound The ultimate in early identification. Womb with a view.

School District Meeting An annual exercise in participatory democracy during which special educators are lambasted for spending 13% of the school budget to educate the 11% of the school population that needs the most intensive, specialized, and individualized education. In any other forum, that feat would be considered a miracle.

Severe Discrepancy One of the regulatory requirements for identification of a specific learning disability: “a severe discrepancy between [academic] achievement and intellectual ability.” Frequently misinterpreted as a severe discrepancy between other pairs of variables never contemplated in the regulations, such as Verbal IQ and Performance IQ, height and weight, or hope and experience. Despite Congress’s wise and explicit rejection of proposed mathematical formulae to quantify the severe discrepancy, some school districts impose various and wondrous arithmetic criteria that blindly identify students with no particular learning problem and deny services to students with severe learning disabilities. These school districts tend over time to come to mistake their policies for state law.

Speech/Language Disability Any disability -- particularly a very severe one involving everything except speech and language -- in a preschool child.

State Aid to Education

Substantially Separate, Self-Contained, Language Learning Disabilities Program Any private school.

Ten-Day Waiver A document reluctantly signed by a parent, grudgingly permitting the Team not to wait ten days to hold the meeting that the parent demanded be held immediately.

Triennial Re-evaluation Retesting every three years to see if the student with deafness, blindness, or cerebral palsy still has a disability. A special case exists for specific learning disabilities. If, as a result of three years of special education, the student’s achievement remains low, and the student’s IQ score drops, there is no longer a severe discrepancy between levels of achievement and intellectual ability, so the student no longer has a learning disability and is no longer entitled to special services.

Whole Language A triumph of hope over experience in which young children are expected to learn to read and spell – without instruction – through exposure to good literature and by practice in pretending to write with “invented spelling.” To date, this approach has not been attempted for teaching trigonometry.

Written Prior Notice An oxymoronic document written in the future pluperfect subjunctive in which the Team informs the parent of what the Team is going to be about to have already done, much as a nimble-fingered nurse with a hypodermic says, “This won’t hurt, did it?”

Burl Pickering 5/20/97