With 30 years’ experience in Special Education as a certified teacher, school administrator, advocate, and attorney, in settings from urban to rural, Michelle Kotler, Esq. has seen it all (well, almost all).
At the heart of your child’s journey is the correct evaluation and identification of his or her special needs. Very often, children suffer in silence from processing disorders that are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as other conditions. These youth are never truly helped because the real underlying difficulties are not correctly identified, resulting in frustration & school failure.
Ms. Kotler was the first to identify possible hearing loss in a 16-year-old young man reading on the first grade level. Proper testing revealed he was born profoundly deaf (the parents were told he had “ADD” because he never “paid attention in school”). Even his pediatrician, speech and language therapist, and the teachers at his private special education school missed it! Unbelievable…
She identified symptoms of a petit mal seizure disorder in a 10-year-old boy that was also missed by his pediatrician and school staff, only to be confirmed by a neurologist. Ms. Kotler has correctly spotted countless and completely treatable visual and auditory processing problems in children, that were misdiagnosed as dyslexia, Attention Deficit Disorder, emotional disorders, or Autism.
The list goes on…
Ms. Kotler has the experience and knowledge to guide parents in their quest to “get to the bottom of it” and figure out what is really happening so that you can help your child succeed. Without this type of expertise, your child will most likely continue to suffer and experience the worst outcomes in school & in life.
One-third of children in special education drop out of high school nationwide, and up to 70% of youth in juvenile detention centers have a disability. The United States is witnessing a youth mental health crisis. According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2018-2019, about 15% of adolescents ages 12-17 years had a major depressive episode, and nearly 20% (or 1 in 5) reported that they seriously considered suicide. A study by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration showed that, between 2016 and 2020, the number of children aged 3 -17 diagnosed with depression grew by 27%.
The dirty little secret that other lawyers won’t tell you is the odds of parents winning a due process hearing under the IDEA range from 1% to about 8%, depending on your state. Why should you flush $40,000 or more down the toilet on a due process hearing you will most likely lose? Due process hearings might be good for lawyers, but they rarely help you or your child.
More constructive ways of resolving problems exist that achieve good outcomes while preserving the relationship between families, students, and schools. After attending a special education meeting with Ms. Kotler, parents often say, “That was the best IEP meeting I ever had! They were never like that without you.” One mother broke down and cried after our IEP meeting because Ms. Kotler successfully got the school system to find her child eligible for an IEP under visual impairment, after she’d been trying to get this done by herself for years!
References:
https://digitalcommons.law.udc.edu/udclr/vol3/iss2/11/
Id
The IDEA is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A due process hearing is the process by which a parent can challenge school decisions about their child’s special education needs. 34 C.F.R. §300.508.