COPAA is dedicated to enhancing our capacity to continually support families seeking positive changes and improvements in their educational circumstances. Congress passed the IDEA *to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living, .20 U.S.C. § 1400(d)(1)(A) . To guarantee that children with disabilities receive an appropriate education, Congress conferred on parents the right to be full partners with the school system in designing educational services for their children, 20 U.S.C. § 1400(d)(1)(B). Significant problems remain with the quality of special education and related services, resistance to full inclusion of children with disabilities, and the lack of evidence that outcomes are improving. The process of challenging the educational system can be daunting and stressful, especially when a child's well-being is at stake. Our goal is to empower more children and families who may be unable to access necessary training or representation due to financial constraints.  The project takes a multipronged approach to assure that children, parents, their advocates and attorneys, and key educational staff have access to critical information necessary to successfully impact and steer educational goal setting.

The Project includes the following four components:

Implementing Advocacy Training in two targeted areas. Teams of students and parents from Native American and Alaskan Families and Greater New Orleans Area will participate concurrently in COPAA ‘s training to increase advocacy at an IEP or 504 meeting and collaborative teamwork to reach consensus. Emphasis for students is also on creating a presentation to help facilitate their own meeting and steer the conversation and goal setting towards their interests and strengths.

Legal Fellowships.  If you are not a family of means, it is difficult under the law to assure  an equitable education for your child (Hyman, E et al., 2011). We aim to connect new, passionate attorneys with the opportunity to fight for justice in underserved or unserved regions or marginalized populations. COPAA is partnering with Disability Rights Oregon and the Loyola Youth Justice Clinic at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Each  entity will hire and supervise an attorney fellow for a two-year period on activities relating to upholding educational equity and civil rights for students with disabilities; providing no-cost advocacy and civil legal services to an agreed upon number of families in each of the two years.

Key Indicators for Educational Opportunity - Determining whether a district has met the requirements for providing a student with an IEP a “free and appropriate public education” (FAPE) in the “least restrictive environment” (LRE) requires balancing the professional expertise of educators against legal analysis of the requirements of the IDEA (Zirkel & Yell, 2023). Using evidence-based research and best practices, COPAA’s Legal Director Selene Almazan Esq. and leaders on our Amicus Committee will work together with educator and researcher Deborah Taub Ph. D., to operationalize key indicators that can be used to evaluate the degree to which a student’s IEP has been designed and implemented to provide FAPE. The indicators draw from case law and research related to areas such as access to general education curriculum (Jackson et al., 2022), academic and IEP progress (e.g., Cole et al., 2021; Gee et al., 2020; Jameson et al., 2022; ), communication (Klienert et al., 2023), and opportunity to learn (Taub et al., 2020).

COPAA membership and opportunity to join our state level advocacy network. All participants in the training will receive two years of complimentary COPAA membership. They will be invited to participate in and contribute to any of the committees of interest. They also have the opportunity to join our state level policy and advocacy network, to keep abreast of policy issues in their state, participate in COPAA Hill Days, a day of advocacy with elected officials on key issues of importance to our membership, and grassroots policy efforts.