Since the California Office of Administrative Hearings has begun conducting the due
process hearings in 2005, administrative law judges have ruled
completely in favor of students in only 10 percent of the 279 hearings
that have occurred since Sept. 30, 2007. When the McGeorge School of Law
Special Education Hearing Office was conducting hearings for the
state before 2005, rulings in favor of students occurred about 50 percent of the
time. (source: federal class-action lawsuit U.S. District Court )
Only about Half of School Psychologists say that their Evaluations of Emotionally Disturbed Students led to Effective Interventions
A literature search, critical review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness
of interventions with seriously emotionally and behaviorally disturbed adolescents was conducted because of increasing concern about anti-social behavior in young people (emotionally disturbed adolescents)
The research started in Dundee, was
pursued in New York (in collaboration with the City University of New York, the University of
Cincinnati, and the New York Association of School Psychologists), will be reported in journals
in the US, but has already attracted the interest of the UK government. Conference presentations
as far afield as Hawaii have already attracted international attention.
The research questions of the project were:
- What is the current evidence for the effectiveness of psycho-educational interventions
for seriously disturbed adolescents?
- To what extent is the practice of school psychologists in this area evidence-based?
Per the study, most school psychologists
agreed that they spent too much time assessing serious emotional disturbance and not enough time treating it. Only 53% of school psychologists indicated their psycho-educational evaluations
of seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents led to effective interventions.
Only 46% of Disabled Children Live in 2 Biological Parent Homes
Children
with disabilities are more likely to live with a single woman — whether
she is a mother, grandmother or a female foster parent — than other
children, according to a new study.
The findings by researchers at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill indicate that organizations aimed at helping disabled
children must also consider the particular problems faced by the single
women who often care for them, said Philip Cohen, an associate
professor of sociology at the university.
The study, conducted by Cohen and his former student Miruna
Petrescu-Prahova, now a doctoral student at the University of
California, Irvine, was published Friday in the quarterly Journal of
Marriage and Family. The study examined 2000 Census data on 2.3 million children ages 5 to
15. More than 130,000 were reported to have mental disabilities,
physical disabilities, or both.
It found that while 62 percent of children without disabilities live
with a married, biological parent in a two-parent home, only 46 percent
of disabled children do.
Single mothers care for 17 percent of children without disabilities,
but for 24.5 percent of those who are disabled. Fewer than 5 percent of
disabled children live with a single father, about the same percentage
of non-disabled children living with fathers.