Transition Local Agencies
Federation for Students with Special Needs
Mission
The Federation for Children with Special Needs
- Provides information, support, and assistance to parents of children with disabilities, their professional partners, and their communities. We are committed to listening to and learning from families, and encouraging full participation in community life by all people, especially those with disabilities.
- The Federation believes that individual differences in people are a natural part of life, and that disabilities provide children and adults with unique perspectives, insights and abilities which contribute to the overall well-being of society.
- The Federation values children as the hope for the evolving improvement of humankind, and places great value on the family as a caring protector of children’s vulnerability, as well as a catalyst for their healthy growth and development.
- The Federation places a tremendous value on parents because of the contributions they make as the leaders of families toward supporting the health, education, and development of their children at home and in society.
- The Federation promotes the active and informed participation of parents of children with disabilities in shaping, implementing, and evaluating public policy that affects them.
- The Federation believes in the power of parents helping parents and has infused a proven model of peer support throughout all its work.
Support Services:
Workshops and Trainings for Parents
Programs which include:
- Special Education Parent Center: Focuses on providing support, information, training and workshops related to special education to families of children with special needs (includes our outreach programming to culturally and linguistically underserved families). Through a variety of activities, parents can learn about the special education process (including IEP, Basic Rights, Transition Planning, MCAS, etc.) so that they can best support their child. Additionally, parents can participate in an intensive 8-week in-depth training on special education policy and procedures.
- Family Support Center: Focuses on providing parent to parent support for families who have children with special health care needs or disabilities; women, children, adolescents and young adults infected/affected by HIV/AIDS; families of young children with early childhood mental health issues; and families who have a serious mental health challenges and complex DCF cases with child custody concerns.
- Health Advocacy Center: Focuses on providing healthcare information and support to families of children with special needs, and programming that helps build capacity for family partnerships and supports partnership activities between managed care organizations and parents around improved access to services and supports.
- Family and Community Engagement Center: Offers education improvement services to districts and schools in Massachusetts, partnering with districts and schools to improve student achievement and school performance through strengthening family and community engagement policies. The Center also trains community volunteers to act as “surrogate parents” for educational decision-making for students whose parents are not available.
- Parent-Professional Leadership Center: Focuses on activities that help build collaborative relationships among key education stakeholders (parents, educators, other professionals, and community partners) ensuring systemic efforts at improving educational outcomes for all students
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