Special-Education Director Takes Handicapped Space, Gives Attitude

Here's a guy you don't want to meet around an IEP table.

According to a story from The Arizona Republic, kindly forwarded to me by About.com's Stay-at-Home Dads guide, David Worford, an altercation involving a school handicapped parking space became particularly upsetting when it developed that the dad stealing the space from the father of two boys with muscular dystrophy was none other than the district's director of special education.

Well, it was raining, you see? Traffic was blocking other parking spaces. The guy just wanted to park for a sec and run his own two kids into the building. And when he comes out, here's some angry father asking him not to park in those spots without a permit, explaining that parents of children with disabilities really need them, not just for convenience on a rainy day but to be able to get their kids out of the car at all.

What's called for here is an apology, it's easy to see. A sincere statement of sorriness. You'd think someone whose job it is to oversee the education and well-being of the very children handicapped parking spaces are created to assist would be particularly sensitive to this, even if he did make a spur-of-the-moment bad parking choice. That's not what happened in this Mesa, Arizona, parking lot, though.

What happened was that the special-education director told the father of children with disabilities, "Just because you have a hard life doesn't mean the world owes you everything."

Ouch.

The father, naturally, complained to the district. The district superintendent sent an apology. The special-education director was counseled as to the proper use of handicapped spots. If there's enough squawking (squawk! squawk!), maybe he'll face stronger discipline. If nothing else, maybe a ticket will help him understand that while the world may not owe people with disabilities everything, the law assures them a place to park.

What strikes me most about this story, however, is its illustration of the fact that special-education personnel badly, badly need to be schooled in the art of public relations. It should be a required course for anyone who wants to be a special-education administrator. In this case, absolutely all that was called for was the feigning of sincere compassion and contrition. The problem would be gone. The dad would be appeased. There would be no newspaper articles or blog posts or comments calling for his head. It is so easy to make problems like this go away. And yet, so often, the powers-that-be don't seem to have a clue how to do that.

In my own district, I've seen situations that could have been contained with just a few words of basic information for parents blow up due to months and months of silence and secrecy. I've seen administrators act like parents are barbarians at the gate, waiting for the slightest sign of weakness to get their raid and pillage on. What should be a partnership between parents and educators -- or taxpayers and service providers -- becomes so cloaked in secrecy and mistrust that bad feelings and bad attitudes, the kind certainly evinced by the Mesa special-education director's comments, flourish and fester.

I attended a training session a couple of years ago at a parent advocacy center, and the goal of it was to teach parents to be noncombative with special-education personnel, to be polite and considerate and respectful and collaborative. At one point, I raised my hand and asked, "Is anybody giving this same training to the professionals?" I got a blank look, but never a straight answer. Nobody's training them. It's all on us to be polite, as we ask the world, "Please, would you give us that everything you owe us? If we ask nice? And it's not raining?"

Training the folks on the other side of the table shouldn't be considered such a pipe dream. It's not impossible for professionals to be polite. I've worked with some who actually do get it, and those have been great and productive experiences. And I've worked with others where it would be easier to push a car out of a handicapped spot with my bare hands than to get understanding and clarity and cooperation. I'm sure anybody who's been on IEP alert for very long has stories to tell.

Public relations training. It's needed. It's needed now. It can start in Mesa, Arizona. But it should spread, fast. If our lives are so "hard," surely we don't need highly paid rude people in suits to make them harder.

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