Abstract
It was the intention of Congress for a child with special needs and his/her parents to transition from early intervention, family-centered services to child-focused, center-based preschool special education programs smoothly. However, the research literature reveals that this transition is not always smooth and parents often feel that they are not equal partners in the transition process and subsequent individual education planning (Lovett & Haring, 2003). Factors that contribute to parents’ anxiety during their child’s IEP include unfamiliar special education terminology and procedural safeguards written at reading levels that may be too high for some adult readers. In fact, the current author was not able to locate a parents’ rights document in her district that was written at a reading level below the tenth grade, which is a concern since forty-nine percent of adults read at an eighth grade reading level or below (Fitzgerald & Watkins, 2006). Clearly, there is a need to provide parents and guardians with information that is written at accessible reading levels and has parent input in mind. The purpose of this project was to create a parent resource handbook, written at approximately a seventh to eighth grade reading level, to explain parental rights information and unfamiliar special education terminology in non-legalese wording. To provide further rationale and gather information for the handbook, three parents of children with special needs and three special education preschool teachers in the current author’s school district were interviewed to explore the difficulties and barriers that parents face in the transition of their child from early intervention services to preschool special education programs. The content of the handbook includes information about a child’s starting preschool, procedural safeguards, eligibility categories, and related services. Family-centered best practices suggest that ongoing collaborative partnerships with parent begin with special educators creating an ongoing dialogue with the parents. The hope is that this parent resource handbook will serve as one tool to assist in facilitating this dialogue.