I've never been able to quite figure out the entire "disability rights advocate" system, myself.
I'm not quite sure what they do or how they do it.
Beckee mentioned that advocates can explain the law to parents - as a parent who's advocated both for a child with a medical disability and a child with an LD, having an advocate as a resource has been extremely helpful. In our situation, we've found that it wasn't only the parents who needed help interpreting the law, but also found at times we were working both with school staff who were unaware of the law as well as not informing us of our child's rights as a student under the law (note: our kids were at a school that was actually in non-compliance with IDEA at the time, as well as in a school district that is hugely stressed with not being able to meet the needs of many of the children who qualify for services under IDEA).
The way we used our local advocates was to call them when we had a question. For our dd with a medical issue, this amounted to 2 or 3 calls, one at a time, when something came up at school where we were told something by the school staff re her rights that didn't fit with what we knew from our own research. The advocate group gave us the clear interpretation of the law, and the words to use when making a request at school.
We relied on advice from advocates quite a bit over a number of years for our 2e ds. It was primarily the same type of us calling with a question of legal interpretation plus help with how to word a request, as well as help with understanding timelines, eligibility process, where to look for local and state policy, things like that. We started our ds' journey by requesting a 504 since we felt he wouldn't qualify under IDEA and we were mainly concerned initially about getting access to accommodations. When we made the request for a 504 we were told by his then-teacher that our ds couldn't have a 504 if he was in the gifted program. This is sooooo absolutely not true, and an example (one of many we ran into) where teachers really didn't fully understand or weren't aware of the ADAA. Later on as we added accommodations and began to see the extent of the impact of our ds' LD we realized our ds needed individualized instruction as well as accommodations and at that point we were given more detailed advice and suggestions re how to proceed from our advocate. We never had to bring an advocate to a team meeting because we felt well prepared with the advice we received prior to the meeting. We *did* successfully advocate for our ds in getting an IEP for his LD even though he has an exceptionally high IQ and is/was ahead of grade level in *many* areas. NOTE: he was not ahead of grade level in the area of his disability, and was in fact quite far behind and struggling tremendously. In spite of that showing up obviously in his work, it was quite the challenge to advocate in the face of a very dedicated attempt on the part of the school to prove that there "wasn't a problem".
The IEP we did get for our ds would probably be considered "weak" by Pete Wright, and our local disability law advocate reviewed it and felt we should advocate further to strengthen it. The advocate's group offered to help us fight the school to get it "strengthened" but that was the point at which we gave up, because the fight was taking too much of our energy away from helping our ds, which is something I have found happens frequently with families who can somehow put together the resources to find help outside of school.
Back to the question about advocates, another thing our local advocates group does is host help sessions and speakers on a variety of topics that are useful for parents of children with a wide range of disabilities (ASD, LD, medical, developmental disabilities etc). These sessions don't just focus on schools, but on resources available in our community as well as serving as a way to bring families with common challenges together for support.
polarbear
