Here is One Way to Help Frustrated Parents of Students with Disabilities

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities

Twitter: @aodaalliance

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance

August 30, 2025

SUMMARY

For parents of students with disabilities, here is a resource that quite a number of people have found to be helpful as they get ready for the return to school. The AODA Alliance made available a captioned online video that provides tips for parents of students with disabilities on how to advocate for your child’s disability-related needs at school. This is our attempt to fill a huge, unfair gap.

Too many parents don’t know what options, services, supports and accommodations are available for their child’s disability at school. They often find it hard to get this important information from their school board. That’s why we created this video which you can watch any time at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtadvCvcGC0

This month, AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky devoted his monthly disability issues column in the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications to this serious problem. We set that column out below.

The Ford Government has made this situation even worse for students with disabilities at the four school boards that the Ontario Government took over at the end of June. Some frustrated parents of students with disabilities have gone to their elected school board trustee to get help navigating a maze-like school board. However, the Ford Government took those functions away from these elected trustees at those four school boards when it seized control of them.

How You Can Help

Please spread the word to any parents of students with disabilities! Encourage them to watch this AODA Alliance video and to read the Metroland column below.

Encourage your school board to publicize this video to all parents.

Urge your member of the Ontario Legislature to get the Minister of Education to fix this festering and easily solved problem in our school boards.

Learn about the history of the battle to tear down disability barriers in the education system in which the AODA Alliance has played a role. Visit the AODA Alliance website’s education page.

Check out the AODA Alliance’s online video series on the campaign to make our education system fully accessible for all students with disabilities.

MORE DETAILS

Inside Halton August 22, 2025

Originally posted at https://www.insidehalton.com/opinion/columnists/new-school-year-brings-angst-for-parents-of-students-with-disabilities-advocate-says/article_2a4f1c08-642e-5744-a7f2-c13346cf5f5b.html

New school year brings angst for parents of students with disabilities, advocate says

Accessibility advocate David Lepofsky shares a free video explaining how parents can ask for student needs to be met.

By David Lepofsky

David Lepofsky is chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.

The new school year approaches. Eager with anticipation, families shop for clothes and supplies.

For parents of one-third of a million students with disabilities, the impending school year often inflicts stress and fears — ones created by the Ontario government and school boards.

What, if anything, will the school board offer to meet their child’s disability-related learning needs? Will their child get what they’re promised? Where do I go to advocate for my child’s needs? Will educators genuinely listen or just smile and run out the clock? What do I do and where do I go if the school says they can’t or won’t deliver what my child needs?

This infuriating, dispiriting angst quietly pervades all around you.

Parents’ blood pressure climbs higher when one education minister after the next boasts their government does more for students with disabilities than ever before, and by perky school board senior bureaucrats painting a distorted rosy picture of how they meet every student’s needs.

How do I know this? I’ve witnessed countless agonizing accounts in person, during public forums, via emails, as member and now chair of the Special Education Advisory Committee of Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), and as chair of the provincewide Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.

So many parents can’t all be falsifying these incidents!

But why does this persist? I believe that teachers, teacher’s aids and principals want to teach all learners. They’re trapped and handcuffed by an outdated, Byzantine provincial and school board bureaucracy replete with inexcusable well-known disability barriers. The Ontario Ministry of Education is overwhelmingly asleep at the switch when it comes to fixing this and it lets 72 school boards do as little as they wish to fix this.

That burdens boards to each reinvent the barrier-removal wheel, if they choose to do anything at all about these barriers.

For example, parents find it brutally hard just to find out what options and supports are available at school for their child’s disability-related learning needs. I’ve often said TDSB is like a restaurant that won’t give you a menu. But TDSB is not alone in this.

School boards pledge to work with parents “as partners” and proclaim that the parent is the expert in their child’s needs. Boards are required to develop and implement an “individual education plan” (IEP) for students with special education needs, and to consult parents on the IEP.

The best way for a school board to get parental input into the IEP and to partner with parents on co-creating the IEP would be to invite them to a meeting, in-person or virtually, to explore what the IEP should include. The U.S. requires this IEP meeting.

Ontario does not even oblige school boards to offer one to parents. If a parent knows to ask, they’ll likely get a meeting.

Having been at numerous meetings, I know they can really help. But most parents don’t have a clue they can ask for an IEP meeting or why it can profoundly help their child.

I, along with other parents and parents’ organizations, have spent years insisting on requiring school boards to offer and hold IEP meetings with parents of students with disabilities/special education needs and to widely publicize this and encourage parents to take part.

Belatedly, after many months of effort, we at TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee got TDSB to include an offer of this in the letter it sends parents about the IEP.

To try to help fill this inexcusable gap, I created a free online captioned video entitled “Tips for Parents of Students with Disabilities on How to Advocate For Your Child’s Needs at School.”

Law School Visiting Professor David Lepofsky gives practical tips to parents of students with disabilities in Ontario or other Canadian provinces on how to advocate for your child’s needs at school. More information available at www.aodaalliance.org/education and @aodaalliance

Check out great legal information from the ARCH Disability Law Centre available at https://inclusiveeducation.ca/advocacy-for-inclusion/

I’m a retired lawyer. I can’t give legal advice. I offer practical tips on how to navigate a bewildering education bureaucracy — tips learned from hard experience.

I’ve urged school boards to share this free 50-minute video. I’ve not heard that any board did so, except for one enthusiastic principal. Please let parents know about this video. Encourage your school board to share it.

It would be great if our education minister directed his ministry to do the same.

David Lepofsky is a retired lawyer who chairs the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance and is a visiting professor of disability rights at the law schools at Western, Queen’s and the University of Ottawa.