Our Services
SEA seeks to ensure that disabled students receive the public education to which they are entitled. We know that school districts resist providing the mandated special education services as they focus on school-year budgets, so we offer nonprofit organizations the consulting and funding help to overcome that barrier. Our current focus is on children in San Francisco whose families do not have the resources to access any, or quality, special education services.
Consulting Services
SEA provides the organizations with:
Consultation and training focused on more effective strategies for accessing public special education services for the children they serve. This begins with a review of cases involving the students with the greatest challenges to engagement in education. We would review those files and provide immediate strategies on how to engage school districts in accessing the actual educational, mental health and other services the students require.
Connections to high-quality independent psycho-educational evaluations, the first and essential step in determining the nature of the students’ disabilities and how they are interfering with the students’ education, and identifying the educational, mental health and other services these students require to succeed
Consortium-building with other organizations that serve these children to reduce the cost burden to school districts including:
Legal advocacy organizations and professionals to ensure that the services identified as necessary for the student through the independent evaluation are provided by school districts focused on informal settlement procedures, but formal ones if necessary.
Health insurance support for mental health and other services.
Social service and juvenile justice organizations, both public and private, that may have resources available to supplement the cost of services the students need.
Funding Services
SEA understands that advocacy costs more than just time and effort for organizations that may want to implement new programs, but there’s rarely enough money to go around.
Because of this constant hurdle, SEA provides targeted funding for child-focused services as well as high-level legal consultation. Our work with partner organizations targets four key areas that are usually the most financially problematic for low-income families of students with disabilities.
SEA provides funding for:
Independent psycho-educational evaluations
Legal advocacy
Supplemental educational, mental health and other direct services to students
Health insurance advocacy
While money alone cannot solve disabled students’ problems, funding is almost always the reason students with disabilities from low-income families are not identified, evaluated and given a program that will help them become productive adults.