Surviving Due Process: When Parents and the School Board Disagree, Stephen Jeffers v. School Board

Starring:Esq. Kathleen S. Mehfoud, Esq. Peter W.D. Wright, Esq. Darrel Tillar Mason
Director: VAVS Productions
Studio: VAVS Productions
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

A must-have for understanding the process

Surviving Due Process: When Parents and the School Board Disagree, Stephen Jeffers v. School Board
Starring: Esq. Kathleen S. Mehfoud , Esq. Peter W.D. Wright , and Esq. Darrel Tillar Mason
Director: VAVS Productions
Manufacturer: VAVS Productions
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0007CSFU8
Release Date: 2004-10-01

Customer Reviews:

A must-have for understanding the process.......2007-03-11

I sincerely wished this DVD was available when my family went thru the process with our previous school district. At least, I could have saved nearly two thousand dollars of attorney fee by getting the questions answered in this video, instead getting charged $75 per email, or $250 an hour for phone discussion, from our attorneys.

I prefer not to give away too much details from this video but I could tell you whatever strategies the school district deployed in the video, they are EXACTLY what we dealt with in our real case even our situation is quite different from what's in the video.

But please keep in mind of the followings:

1) This video only tells you what is it like during the process. It does not tell you much trouble you need to deal with before it. For example, you don't walk out of an IEP meeting and start the due process right away. You have to retain third-party experts who will charge you $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to spend weeks/months to write an report in your favor, AND who will agree to appear in the hearing (that would be another $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ on an hourly basis). Your school will ignore your request to have an expert to observe your kid for weeks too (yes the law says 21 days, but how do you enforce it????). During the interim, your attorney will need you to track and submit all ongoing docs from school, and each doc / weekly status update would be $75 an email in our case(longer one would be $150). If you do the math, you won't even file the request for due process until you spend thousands of dollars already.

So don't think like you could just call up somebody and have the attorney ready for you in 30 days like in the video. You gotta be dreaming (esp when you are talking about retaining the legendary Peter Wrights!)

2) This video does not show all strategies used by many school districts. For example, if your kid is not showing enough progress, they will reduce the IEP goals to cook the annual progress reports. Some IEP goals would be so ambiguous that you can't even measure progress (in our non-verbal son's case, one goal in the speech section reads "To make a variety of sounds"). Some will force your kid to mainstream and then cook the reports there (many parents told me their kids were forced to become mainstream, and when they suffered academically, the schools would go as far as sending in exams the night before for the parents to prep their kids the next day!)

3) You are fighting the school district using your own money. The school district is fighting you using your own money too. Think about it. In our case, our school districi disagree with EVERYTHING our experts said, and demand to have their own expert witnesses to do "independent" evalulations which drag on over an 8 months period. This video doesn't tell you that. What's in the end game is the school drag on and on using your money, while you pay your attorney ongoing status reports fees using your bank book. School won't feel the pinch of attorney fee, you do.

4) Burden of proof: Some courts nowadays do not decide the burden of proof during the hearing as hinted in the video. Instead, they'd use precedence as a guideline. In New Jersey, for example, you're lucky if the hearing office does not automatically place the burden of proof on the parents.

5) Alternatives: This video does not mention about alternatives to due process. In some cases, you may be better off moving to another school district than fighting yours. This is exactly what we did and we feel that's a much better choice then trying to engage in due process with our previous school district.

Overall, this video worths 6 stars regardless, as the information presents are simply priceless!

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