Ordered off school property

OK, parents. What do you think of this one?

How about a situation where an elementary kid can flip off another student and his parent and, when the other parent attempts to complain, that parent gets a letter from the school district superintendent, threatening her with Trespassing if she sets foot on school grounds?

How can that parent take her children to school or pick them up, if she must stay off school grounds? Oh, ride the bus, you say? Not with the history of abuse on that school bus!

How about when a young elementary school girl comes home with human excrement smeared on her clothing, and the school won't do anything about it?

Would you say there is a huge problem with this school, its staff and its superintendent?

Not only is there a huge civil rights problem here, but there is also a criminal problem, because the parent was battered by a school district employee - on school grounds!

Next, toss in a DCFS worker who battered her child on the child's own home property.

Just how big are the problems in that small school district? Where is it? Not in Chicago. Not in Cook County. In McHenry County, Illinois!

Kirk Martin - back in Chicagoland

Kirk Martin will be back in the Chicago area this month and next, and I urge you to attend one of his two-hour workshops for parents and teachers. Visit his website to learn who he is and what he is all about. I highly recommend his free email newsletter, too.

You can find dates and locations on www.CelebrateCalm.com

He'll be in the western suburbs this month, and in April he has a workshop scheduled in Huntley.

I have sent information to District 200, in hopes that they would schedule him, but I haven't heard anything about it. Wouldn't it be nice if District 200 began providing workshops and other services to parents of students in Special Education?

Parents & Teachers as Allies

What a novel idea! And this is the way it should be. What if teachers and parents of children with special needs actually worked together for the benefit of the student???

Once a month the Family Involvement Team (formerly known as the Parent Council) of the Family CARE Project of McHenry County meets at the McHenry County Mental Health Board, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake. This is a parent-led group for parents of children with a mental health diagnosis.

The speakers this evening drove from Wheaton to present a new NAMI program called Parents & Teachers as Allies. What's NAMI? National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Pat Doyle, Education Program Director of NAMI-DuPage, and her colleague, Brenda (whose last name, unfortunately, I did not write down), presented an excellent new program that is designed to help teachers better understand mental illness and the classroom experience with, and of, students with mental illness.

Not that they don't have the experience" with it; they do. What may be lacking in many schools is the understanding of the experience. A two-hour in-service has been designed for teachers and staff of schools, and a shortened version is designed for classroom presentation and other settings, such as workplace, church groups, service groups and any other setting where people gather.

The NAMI-DuPage team started with three people and has grown to more than 40. They present about 300 programs in a year and use a set of first-class materials.

For more information about this or the Family Involvement Team, send an email to gus@specialkids-specialparents.info and I'll help you contact the right people.

The Family Involvement Team meets on the second Wednesday of each month at the Mental Health Board. Arrive at 6:00PM, enjoy a light supper (no charge) and learn during the program from 6:30-8:00PM. Reservations are not required, but it is helpful if you will email Michelle at mlaluz@mc708.org to let her know you will attend, so that an adequate amount of food can be on hand.

The April 8th meeting will feature Educational Advocacy, and the speaker will be Dawn Melchiorre, Senior Policy Director, Voices 4 Kids - Illinois. Learn how to advocate for legislative change to positively affect the future for our children.

De-toxify your home!

The next TACA (Talk About Curing Autism) meeting in Crystal Lake will be on Saturday, March 21, 2009 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

The guest speaker will be Dr. Julie R. Wilson, a chiropractor and nutritionist from Dr. Mercola's Natural Health Center at 3200 West Higgins Road in Hoffman Estates. Dr. Wilson will be presenting on how to detoxify your home — water quality, air quality, personal hygiene products, home cleaning products, paint and floor coverings in the home, toxicity in toys, and the effects of electromagnetic fields.

Learn what chemicals and substances to avoid in your home environment.

The meeting will be at Home State Bank's Community Meeting Room (basement level), 611 S. Main Street (just south of the intersection of Rt. 14 and Main St.), Crystal Lake, Ill.

For more details about this speaker and future meetings visit the TACA website: http://meetup. tacanow.org/ illinois/ index.html

No childcare will be available at this meeting. If you have any questions, call Linda at 847-961-6914.

Guardianship Program - well done!

Today's workshops on guardianship and powers of attorney, presented this morning at 11:00AM and repeated at 3:00PM, were well done and worth the time to attend. I attended this afternoon and heard that there were many more in the audience at this morning's session.

This afternoon's smaller audience meant more personal attention to the specific needs of those attending, and the session was structuring around questions asked by the audience. Some were familiar with guardianship and powers of attorney; others are just starting down the path of learning.

Speakers included two attorneys, Bob Farley and Brian Rubin, two providers of coaching and advocacy services, Annette Hammortree and Carl (Monk?) of Protected Tomorrows (sorry, Carl, I didn't get your last name), Deborah Leurquin of the Office of State Guardian and Rahnee Patrick, participating on the panel as a person with a disability.

If you are, or know, a person with a developmental or mental health disability who might need or want information on guardianships or powers of attorney, I'll be glad to provide contact information for those on the panel. Just let me know.

Discussions included guardianships of the person or the estate, special needs trusts, payback trusts, SSI, and other topics of concern to persons with disabilities and to their caregivers.