MAY 25 AD HOC MEETING

Majority of beginning of meeting revolved around email everyone received from Speaker of House saying HB 1532 (revising the SpEd statutes) was now going into interim study. This would essentially make the Ad Hoc Committee defunct An interim study would consist of legislators only - those of us that are not legislators could attend - but only as audience members - we would not be allowed at the table to do actual rewriting - there wouldn't even be a guarantee that we would be asked for input and the actual "rewriting" of the statutes would be in closed session with none of us allowed. It could also be a bit more open, depending on who was the Chair. All representatives present commended Rep. Stiles (as did all of us "lay people") for the way the committee has been run so far - very open and everyone's input taken into consideration. Everyone agreed it would be a lot more foreboding if run as interim study. Representative Stiles said she was going to approach the S! peaker and ask if same people could be on interim committee and if she could chair it, so she could invite us all in. She stated she would be given "first call" to appoint members to study and she was going to recommend that everyone in committee thus far be allowed to continue.

Discussion then turned to the parent's forums which will be held 6/14 in plymouth and 6/15 in merrimack - both had 2 times of 3:00 - 5:30 and 6:00 - 7:30 in order to accomodate those who work and don't work. Dick Cohen from DRC and Bonnie Dunham of PIC have put these together and asked everyone to pass out flyers in order to "up" attendance (i have forwarded info of same to NHHR and SNHS-NHHR)

Most of proposed language from this meetings session was "clerical" - making sure all changes were made to "children with disabilities" - changing Division of Educational Improvement with "Division of Instruction", IEP team (instead of just IEP), etc.

I raised a question on current section II(c) which reads :

"Focus resources on students requiring extensive services"

and stated that, as a parent, this read that $$$ would first go to severely disabled and if there was a "lack of funds", children with "smaller needs" would be left out. It was explained by DOE that this just relates to the DOE's need to provide additional support to higher need children (which in turn, made for a discussion relative to catastrophic aid). Discussion was made that this all boils down to "interpretation" again - which has caused problems in past. Rep. Clarke suggested changing the word focus and Rep. Pritchard suggested changing it to "to assure resources for students requiring extensive services"

Some discussion was had about collecting data and child find - that resources weren't available to collect all data (one comment was made about that they don't have a lot of data on homeschoolers with SN) - it again turned to a discussion that districts weren't providing needed services, thus, data may be incorrect - no real solution was found. Terry Brune from DOE gave some info regarding what was required of the DOE by federal law, stating data involving any child with services, test scores, graduation rates, etc. were required by childfind.