Welcome To Our Website
Parents Have the Power to Make Special Education Work is the comprehensive guide for parents navigating the American school system for their special needs child. It covers everything from IDEA, FAPE, and IEPs and runs through chronologically from diagnosis to transitioning out of high school. Judith and Carson Graves leave no stone unturned covering everything a parent would encounter in the education system. Knowledge is power meaning that as a parent of a son or daughter with special needs this is one of the most powerful books on your bookshelf. Public education is terrifying for most parents as the promises of IDEA 2004 often are incompatible with things like the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Graves and Graves will make sure that no parent is left behind. Pick up and share this phenomenal resource today.
— The 50 Best Books on Special Education
Parents do have the power to make special education work for their children. We spent 15 years working to obtain an appropriate education for our son, and we came through it with the goal of empowering other parents by sharing the knowledge we gained through our experience so that they don’t have to make the mistakes we made.
Parents Have the Power to Make Special Education Work is like having a trusted, knowledgeable friend to guide you along each step of your journey through special education.
—Pam and Pete Wright, authors of From Emotions to Advocacy
Carson Graves and Judith Canty Graves
We are parents, not educators, lawyers, or clinicians. Through trial and error, success and failure, we managed to learn what it takes to navigate the bureaucratic maze and the often hidden agenda of school culture so that our son could receive the education he deserved and was entitled to by law. Our goal is to help other parents achieve similar results for their children.
We know the problems faced by parents, because we lived the entire experience of special education, keeping detailed notes along the way. Parents frequently don’t have the information and perspective to understand what is happening to their children in special education.
Carson Graves is the author of two books on photography published by Focal Press. After ten years teaching and writing about photography, he worked in the software industry for companies like Lotus Development, Interleaf, and Nuance, where he worked on Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech recognition program for personal computers.
Judith Canty Graves is an award winning photojournalist whose images and articles have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and The Charleston (WV) Gazette. She has also exhibited her photographs in New York City and the greater Boston area.
