I am a Licensed Psychologist and Attorney at Law in California. I serve families of children with special needs in the Los Angeles, and Ventura county area as a Special Education Child Advocate. This site contains information I have found, or written that is of value to parents of children with special needs. Please feel free to browse our collection of articles and videos, and the additional books, educational games and other products we have identified for children in our Online Store.

Rene Thomas Folse, J.D., Ph.D. Editor

Advocacy School Opening Here Soon!:

There are not enough adocates and not enough trained professionals to serve the needs of the professionals who serve our children and adults with disabilities. I have taught a three day, 18 hour seminar each year to help parents and professionals learn how to adovcate for their children. You may have noticed the video recordings I made of this workshop back in 2002 at the bottom of this page. While I have continued to give this class in my community annually, I have not updated the online version for six years now.

I will be giving this course again beginning in January 2009 and soon thereafter will have a full featured online school ready for parents and professionals by mid summer. The State Bar of California has approved me as an MCLE provider in California, and I have applied to the American Psychological Association for approval of my status as an approved provider in psychology as well.  It is expected that our online school once opened will offer continuing education credit for professionals who attend our live and online offerings. The three day course will be broken down into nine online segments as follows:

Day 1
Unit 1: Introduction to special education advocacy. Glossary and acronyms. Assessment, and Eligibility issues.
Unit 2: Free and Appropriate Public Education, the Rowley decision, LRE, Aids and Services.
Unit 3: Life Span goals and objectives, developing the big picture for the child.

Day 2
Unit 4: De-mystifying and understanding the math of psychological and educational assessment tools.
Unit 5: Survey of specific psychological and educational assessment measures of ability (IQ), achievement, and adaptive skills.
Unit 6: Forensic issues including presentation and cross-examination of psychological expert witnesses.

Day 3
Unit 7: The IEP team process, goals, and objective writing, and measuring success or failure. Behavior problems, special discipline rules, stay put orders, and the functional assessment of behavior
Unit 8: Dealing with due process, attorneys, and attorney fees; Special Education Hearing Office decisions - what wins and what doesn't win.
Unit 9: Integration with other systems - Regional center issues and the IPP; Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act; Private group Health Insurance and more.

Advocacy Training Videos
These are some of the recordings of the advocacy course I taught In 2002. You should be able to view these videos over a broadband Internet connection.  If you have difficulty, each video is also available in a low bandwidth version next to each link.  The low bandwidth version is slightly  lower quality, but nonetheless conveys the material adequately. These will be all updated by summer, 2009 and will then be moved to a full featured online school here on this site.

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world” so they organized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming. In fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school so nobody worried about that, except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of the treetop down. He also developed a “charlie horse” from overexertion and then got a C in climbing and D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class, he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceeding well and also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

Does this fable have a moral?