Exclusive Interview of Michael Yudin, Assistant Secretary of Education - Part IV #Yudin, #interview

This is the fourth post involving our exclusive interview with Michael Yudin, the Assistant Secretary of Education for special education and rehabilitative services. This is a big honor for this blog!

His biography is available in a previous post. We are grateful to the Secretary and his staff for this interview.

The format of the interview will be questions by me signified by (JG), and answers by the Assistant Secretary, signified by (MY).  Here is the fourth segment:

JG:  Bullying is the hot button issue in education law, the problem extends beyond just special education, what should a parent do if she suspects that her child with a disability is being bullied at school?

MY: We issued some guidance in about 2013 that provided a whole packet of resources and guidance around bullying of kids with disabilities. {ED NOTE: see our previous blog post on the guidance here: http://specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/bullying-of-childrern-with-disabilities.html} Essentially what we said is that if bullying of a child with a disability results in the loss of a meaningful educational benefit, then that would be a denial of FAPE. So we laid out a whole set of scenarios where IEP teams should say OK what’s going on here is the kid getting the resources and supports that are necessary and that are not resulting in the loss of a meaningful educational benefit as a result of the bullying. The guidance was a pretty clear statement of our policies along with a set of recommendations and resources for parents and educators. OCR has recently issued some bullying guidance as well that talks about §504 and the ADA and when bullying might constitute discrimination, and I urge people to look at that too. {ED NOTE: see our previous blog post on the OCR guidance here: http://specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/breaking-new-guidance-from-ocr-on.html}  Bullying is a really important issue. We need to make sure that our kids have the opportunity to learn in safe and healthy and supportive environments. As a parent myself- that’s what you would expect from your child’s school- an opportunity to thrive and not be intimidated or fearful. Bullying has some really devastating effects. This administration has convened annual bullying summits. Across the administration this is a really concerted effort to get at bullying. Bullying.gov which is run out of DHHS offers a whole set of research and resources about bullying.