Families Join Us in Denton for Friday Evening Family to Family Support + Children/Youth Activities!
Federation of Families - Texas
We are a family to family support and advocacy organization. We are families who have raised children with mental health needs. We have experience with mental health, education and sadly justice systems. We share what we have learned through experience and what we have come to know about the best practices that our children would benefit from.
We meet weekly on the Texas Woman’s University Denton campus in collaboration with the School of Occupational Therapy. Please see the flyer below and share with anyone who may benefit.
Advocacy Resources
Hot off the press! Download and use these Section 504 Dialogue Guide resources!
Given the lawsuit Texas has spearheaded against 504, there appears to be some misunderstanding about what Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is and its utility for providing educational accommodations to students with disabilities. To help people talk about what 504 provides to students with disabilities, Hannah Sunil has created a summary report (covering US Department of ED documents regarding 504) and a dialogue guide to facilitate discussions about 504. This has been Hannah’s capstone project and she has piloted these materials with families, advocates, teachers, therapists and other experts on 504 to refine the materials for you. Hannah’s passion extends from her lived experience as a person with a disability who benefited from 504, but she realized through this project that there were supports that would have made access to education so much easier to her had she and her family known more about all of the resources available.
The discussions also touch on school personnel who might support crafting accommodations in school settings including the role of Specialized Instructional Support Personnel (SISP) under the Every Student Suceeds Act (ESSA) which is the most recent federal legislation authorizing public education generally.
What is a dialogue guide? It is a strategy developed by the National Association of State Special Education Directors to enable advocacy originally for IDEA. You gather a group of interested people and share copies of the summary report with them. Once they have reviewed it, the dialogue guide provides you with two sets of questions to use in leading a discussion. The first set, reaction questions, get your participants into the facts presented in the summary document so that everyone starts from a fact based point. The second set, application questions, challenge your group members to think about actions that they might want to take in defense of 504.
Texas Strategic Plan
Texas Children’s Behavioral Health Strategic Plan 2025-2029
(published December 2024 … due to the dramatic changes beginning 2025, check for current relevance)
Texas’s Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council (SBHCC) released the Children’s Behavioral Health Strategic Plan for the fiscal years 2025-2029. This council represents voices from across Texas, including mental health, substance use, and criminal justice professionals, people with lived experience and their families, community leaders, and program and policy subject matter experts across other stakeholder systems. The plan focuses on the mental health and substance use needs of children in Texas and offers a blueprint for understanding and meeting these needs over time.
Education Resources and Issues
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which frames special education and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provide legal safeguards for children with disabilities in schools. The elimination of the Federal Department of Education has impacted enforcement capacity within the Office of Civil Rights (OCR, within the US Department of Education) had been a target of 2025 cuts that impaired their ability to assure that children’s rights to a free and appropriate education (FAPE) are followed. See Inside Higher Ed article. The laws requiring FAPE still exist - the concern is whether the capacity to enforce them does and how does that impact children and youth? Locally, we are seeing students pushed into the justice system when we might have expected that a Manifest Determination Hearing ( a process to determine whether a behavior is a manifestation of a student’s disability) might have kept them in school and required appropriate supports be put in place.
Apparently, former Department of Education administrative functions were placed in the Department of Labor? There are rumors about IDEA going to an even more confusing unrelated federal department which doesn’t make a lot of sense but we’ll follow and share what we find out.
Here is an IDEA Manual created by ARC and Disability Rights Texas that walks through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the processes and protections it provides. As of this writing, the 2022 version is still up, but there is a new one due to be posted soon. IDEA is still the law … who is enforcing it is what is unclear.