TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Jonathan Brooks. I am 24 years old. I am an adult with autism. I can't handwrite -- I have dysgraphia. That's a big one. I started in Baldwin for kindergarten, first grade, second grade and then third grade. I went to Oceanside and I stayed with Oceanside until I completed my K-12.

So with that, hand writing assignments was difficult. And when I started in Baldwin, that was all they had. So my mother has to, you know, at the time, she was not a special education advocate. She was managing a restaurant.

My father was and still is a full time employee of the Nassau County Police Department with their paramedics unit. So the two of them had to really go, my mother especially, because my father, unfortunately, worked nights. So he was sleeping during the day when they had the school meetings.

My mother had to go and get them to get me a digital device, and it was one of the first that the district had brought in. And, you know, it's a public agency, so they bring in the cheapest they can get unless you fight them to get better.

By the time I hit middle and high school and even the end of elementary school, my mother had left being a restaurant manager and started her own business as a special education advocate, and she was one of the first of her kind on the island and working with the district.

They definitely, definitely things changed. I should say, you know, a lot of arguments, you know, they fought her on a lot of stuff. I started attending my own meetings, you know, from the time I was, I think, sixth grade until the end of my career in school, I attended my own CSE meetings.

CSE meeting is the abbreviation for a Committee on Special Education, and that is a meeting of teachers and support staff and the student's parents. Sometimes the district's representation, their attorney and the student's representation, their advocate or attorney. And that's where they design the IEP, the individualized education plan.

That's where they put in the goals, the accommodations, the program modifications. You know, it's where they basically make the legal contract that is an IEP. For me, being in the meeting was an experience in argument. The district always brought their attorney and it was always the, you know, the senior partner, the named partner, it was always an

argument with my mother. You know, we'd go for the first three hour meeting, we'd reconvene for another three hour meeting and we'd reconvene for a third three hour meeting before we were finished. Nine total hours before we could finish. And that happened a lot.

I would say that it's important to encourage student involvement. I come in and I teach about self-advocacy a lot and how to get a student to interact and speak at these meetings and to basically help learn how to advocate for themselves.

Students have to learn how to navigate this for themselves, how to speak for themselves, how to advocate for themselves. I'm encouraging parents to bring their children to their meetings and encouraging parents to let their children, their teenagers, you know, middle schoolers, all ages, have a slowly, age appropriate, increasing amount of say.

Right now, we just kind of have a sudden drop into the deep end of the pool at the end of your K-12 career, and especially with disabled students who get an extra level of support, sometimes multiple extra levels of support in their K-12 education, it's an even deeper end of the pool.

So we need to do a better job of prepping special education students to be self-advocates. Don't be afraid to speak up. Speaking up is how you get somewhere. You know, I say the student who speaks up gets the attention and the goal is to see it more.