The Pennsylvania Department of Education will be sending out a survey to parents of students receiving special education services. By responding to this survey, parents can participate in an important evaluation of the quality of special education services being provided to students with special needs.
The parent survey is part of Pennsylvania’s new State Performance Plan (PDF file, 593kb; requires the free Adobe Reader to view). Under this new Plan, the state will collect data each year from a representative sample of parents. Not every parent will receive a survey, but we hope that all parents who do receive a survey will take a few minutes to fill it out.
The specific purpose of the survey is to find out what parents think about the extent to which their child’s school facilitated their involvement in their child’s education. To find this out, the survey asks parents how much they agree, or disagree, with 25 statements (PDF file, 577kb; requires the free Adobe Reader to view). These statements have to do with the way schools treat parents, give them information, listen to their ideas, address their concerns, ask for their opinions, and consider them an equal partner in making decisions about their child’s special education services.
Every year, the Pennsylvania Department of Education will publish the results of the survey. The report will say what percent of parents in the state as a whole, and what percent of parents in each district that was surveyed, reported that schools facilitated their involvement to a meaningful extent.. These results will also be reported to the Office of Special Education Programs of the United States government, which oversees the provision of special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (PDF file, 423kb; requires the free Adobe Reader to view).
To protect parents’ confidentiality, responses to the survey will be completely anonymous. Schools will not know which of their parents responded to the survey or how any of the individual parents responded.
The survey we are using was developed by the National Center for Special Education Accountability Monitoring (NCSEAM). In developing this survey, NCSEAM consulted with families, parent advocates, special education staff, and community representatives across the United States. The survey was piloted on a national sample of over 2500 parents of students receiving special education services. Rigorous analyses of the national data confirm that the survey will give us a highly reliable measure of schools’ facilitation of parent involvement. Parents who would like additional information can visit the PaTTAN website at http://parent.pattan.net.