Member-only story

2024 LAUSD Elections

Sacrificing Special Education

With a Board majority at stake, families are told that now isn’t the time to confront a large, complicated, and often unyielding bureaucracy.

Carl J. Petersen
Age of Awareness
Published in
4 min readNov 5, 2023

--

Scott’s priorities and accomplishments include…improving the process for parent participation in the IEP process for children with special needs

– Scott Schmerelson’s 2020 campaign

My journey began with these girls.

In the most recent edition of my Candidate Forum series, I asked those competing for a seat on the LAUSD School Board to take on the subject of Special Education. Of the 23 candidates running district-wide, only four responded. For those in the Special Education community, this lack of participation is not surprising as our representatives on the Board do not seem to understand the issues our families face and how adversarial the system has become.

While the eight years Scott Schmerelson has spent on the School Board, in addition to his professional experience as a teacher and a school administrator, should have put him in the best position to answer these questions confidently, the incumbent Board Member has not yet…

--

--

Age of Awareness
Age of Awareness

Published in Age of Awareness

Stories providing creative, innovative, and sustainable changes to the ways we learn | Tune in at aoapodcast.com | Connecting 500k+ monthly readers with 1,500+ authors

Carl J. Petersen
Carl J. Petersen

Written by Carl J. Petersen

Parent, special education advocate and former LAUSD School Board candidate. Still fighting for the children. www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com

No responses yet