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Late night last minute preparations for a CSE meeting for one of the children in the morning. I already know what I'm going to say and I already have information at hand to back me up. New York state education regulations as written and implemented tend to throw stumbling blocks in the paths of students with IEP/504 Plans. A student with an IEP/504 Plan that includes an extended time testing accommodation can end up enduring 12 hours of testing to complete Regents exams if they have two exams scheduled on the same day. New York doesn't reschedule these exams to accommodate students with IEP/504 Plans. One option is for student to take one of the exams months later during one of the other allowed testing period in January, June, and August. The other option is to not take one of the exams at all. I'm not a fan of any of those options for my children or anyone else's. So I've got my copy of the full text of IDEA, all 162 pages of it. Download your copy to

Rise Up In The Darkness

By Sam September 11, 2017

The teenager who joked with me over physics and algebra homework tonight was 6 months old the morning of September 11, 2001. He spent that day like many other 6 month olds spend their days, exploring his world and being saved from his own curiosity by mom. That morning after I got tired of hauling him back from the edge of the bed he was intent on crawling over I took him downstairs to safer level terrain. I turned on the television to check the news like I did every morning back then. At first I was horrified by what I saw. One smoldering tower. Not long after, while all the reporters and newscasters were struggling to make sense of what they were seeing, one plane, another tower, and I was pissed. At that point I understood what was happening. Why did people think, and still think, that kind of wretchedness served their cause? I didn't care what the cause was. These were arrogant fools. But the news kept coming about just how wretched humanity had been to itself that day. The