sharie001

In My Own Words

I have been married to my husband over 20 years. I am the parent of two extraoridinary children. My daughter is now age 16 and going into the 11th grade. She is a wonderful student, who takes accelerated courses (honors, AP, etc.), and is envolved in church choir, ROTC, band, acting, and more. She enjoys the Arts. She is a very talented writer. School comes easy for her. My son is now age 19, and is still finding his way. He has completed high school and is in the Army National Gaurd, which is where he excells (among many other areas). He is twice exceptional (he is both "Gifted" and has disabilities that affect learning). Dispite him having an exceptionally high IQ school was a struggle for him. I learned a lot from my son, particularly in the areas of learning disabilities, their impact on learning, and state & federal special education rules, regs, laws. Most of the knowledge I attained was through research online. I was very frustrated with my district and state's failure to accurately identify his disabilities, along with their failure to follow state and federal laws pertaining to evals, identification, and providing appropriate services throughout my son's school career. After I finaly got my district to comply with the laws along with accurately identifying his disabilities/abilities my son'd GPA zoomed from a .85 to a 3.0 instantly, and his standardized went from below avg/avg to way above avg from one year to the next. This lead to me working for my state parent info and training center advocating for others and teaching other parents advocacy skills. My previous careers (Real Estate broker, and Residential Construction) taught me many things that helped in advocating, such as contract law, reading the fine print, interpreting, attention to detail, and get everything in writing.

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