Elementary and middle school education, generally from kindergarten to grade eight, covers precious years. Your student needs and deserves a stable and supportive school environment during those years. Sad to say, though, but many primary and middle school students face significant discipline, progression, and other issues. Those issues can not only slow their educational development but actually impede and interrupt their education. The worst discipline and progression cases can result in the student's removal from the school, isolation from school friends, and loss of teacher and mentor relationships. And while elementary and middle school educators are generally committed to student persistence and development, in some cases, they simply don't do enough or do as they should. Fortunately, skilled and experienced education law help is available for your elementary or middle school student nationwide. Retain national education attorney advisor Joseph D. Lento and the Lento Law Firm's Education Law Team for your student's best outcome to elementary or middle school issues. Fight for your student's future with the special help your student needs and deserves.
Common Elementary and Middle School Issues
The common issues that students can, unfortunately, face in elementary and middle school tend to fall into several broad categories. Each type of issue implicates different student interests, raises different student concerns, and warrants different responses and solutions. Each type of issue can also involve different school procedures and different legal rights. National school attorney advisor Joseph D. Lento knows the interests, concerns, procedures, rights, and solutions. Hundreds of students nationwide have trusted attorney advisor Lento to strategically invoke school procedures and sensitively assert their rights for the best possible resolution of school issues. Learn more about those issues while you retain attorney advisor Lento to preserve, protect, and promote your elementary or middle school student's education.
Elementary and Middle School Issues Accommodating Disabilities
Failing to accommodate elementary and middle school student disabilities is a primary challenge that struggling students at these early levels can face. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that elementary and middle schools reasonably accommodate student disabilities. More than that, the Act requires schools to identify those students who are struggling because of disabilities, even when the parents are not aware of their student's disability or have not brought a known disability to the school's attention. The law places the obligation on the school, not the student and parents. But the law also gives parents and their attorney advisor powerful procedural safeguards to ensure that elementary and middle school officials meet their disability rights obligations. Let attorney advisor Lento help you ensure that your student's elementary or middle school is accommodating your student's disabilities in the way that the law requires.
Elementary and Middle School Issues Failing to Progress
Every parent wants their elementary and middle school student to progress from grade to grade within academic standards. Having a student fall seriously behind or, worse, having to hold a student back a grade can further demotivate and devastate a struggling student. Achievement losses from elementary to middle school can especially lead to serious progression issues in middle school and high school. Failure to progress academically can, at the same time, contribute to delinquency and other discipline issues. As states increasingly benchmark student achievement, students may find less flexibility and support around their failure to progress. Watch your student's academic progression closely, and consult attorney advisor Lento when you perceive that the school may be inappropriately disciplining or removing your student or otherwise ignoring your student's disability and other rights.
Elementary and Middle School Behavioral Issues
Elementary and middle school students are still developing socially and emotionally in ways that naturally affect their behavior. Many teachers and other school officials know a student needs appropriately sensitive and supportive forms of behavioral modification. But some elementary and middle school officials lack those skills and may instead impose punitive discipline for natural social, emotional, and behavioral issues. State laws mandating school removal for elementary and middle school students bringing a weapon to school, and similar school drug, alcohol, tobacco, gang activity, and violence policies, can further encourage or require school officials to discipline, suspend, and expel students for behavioral issues. That discipline may be unwise, unnecessary, and in violation of your elementary or middle school student's disability rights and procedural rights. For example, if your student is in elementary or middle school under an individualized education program (IEP), federal regulations generally require school officials to conduct a manifestation determination review before removing your student. Let attorney advisor Lento help you preserve your elementary or middle school student's rights around behavioral misconduct issues.
Elementary and Middle School Title IX Sexual Misconduct Issues
While elementary and middle school students are generally not sexually mature, they can still face significant school sexual misconduct issues, even more so when not yet understanding social norms and cultural expectations around sexual words, sexual expression, sexual privacy, and related issues. An elementary or middle school disciplining or even removing a student for sexual misconduct is not an extraordinary event. Advocacy organizations call elementary and middle school sexual harassment a crisis, raising alarms with school officials. Those officials may overzealously enforce Title IX obligations requiring schools receiving federal funding to prohibit and punish school sexual misconduct. Retain attorney advisor Lento to advise and represent you on your elementary or middle school student's rights when facing serious sexual misconduct allegations.
Elementary and Middle School Academic Misconduct Issues
While academic misconduct does not directly implicate student safety in the way that behavioral or sexual misconduct can, middle schools nonetheless maintain academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and other academic misconduct policies under which the schools can discipline students. But allegations of persistent cheating, dishonesty, and especially insubordination or other disrespect toward teachers, and other disorderly classroom conduct, can result in an elementary or middle school student's removal from the classroom and school or reassignment to a less favorable academic program. Retain attorney advisor Lento to help your student overcome academic misconduct allegations that threaten your student's removal or another discipline.
Elementary and Middle School Sanctions
Elementary and middle school disciplinary officials clearly have authority, and at times exercise that authority, to discipline students up to and including suspension and expulsion. The Department of Education's National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments lists the state laws across the country authorizing disciplinary interventions at all grade school levels, including elementary and middle school. Elementary and middle schools across the country adopt disciplinary policies authorizing several forms of sanction against students for the above issues, from failure to progress to behavioral, sexual, and academic misconduct. Retain national school disciplinary defense attorney advisor Joseph D. Lento if your elementary or middle school student faces any one or combination of the following sanctions, delaying, disrupting, or destroying your student's education.
Elementary or Middle School Expulsion
School removal under laws or policies against weapons, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gang activity, violence, or other dangerous activities in elementary or middle school can lead to serious student harm. Yet school teachers, principals, and disciplinary officials may also seek to remove students for vague, non-dangerous, but arguably disruptive conduct like insubordination or interfering with instruction. Resist school removal for all the harm that isolation, embarrassment, loss of peer support, and loss of teacher and mentor relationships can do to your elementary or middle school student.
Alternative Elementary or Middle School Placement
Education scholarship raises increasing concerns over the relationship between alternative school placement in so-called boot camps or reform schools and an increase in juvenile delinquency and other serious problems as the student matures. If your student's elementary or middle school succeeds in moving your student to an alternative school, your student is likely to lose the structure, schedule, activity, motivation, and support your student needs to persist and thrive academically. Resist forced or voluntary alternative disciplinary placement.
Elementary and Middle School Suspension
Elementary and middle school policies generally support brief in-school suspensions for student safety and even to restore classroom discipline and instructional order. But out-of-school suspensions or longer in-school suspensions removing your student from the ordinary learning environment generally warrant compelling grounds after resorting to protective evaluative procedures. Both in-school and out-of-school suspensions can have significant impacts on your student because of disruptions similar to those of school expulsions or alternative placement. Resist suspensions while ensuring that your student's elementary or middle school respects your student's rights to an appropriate education.
Elementary or Middle School Reassignments
Reassignment of your elementary or middle school student from the ordinary classroom, courses, and curricular or co-curricular activities to different, special classrooms or courses and restricted activities can have impacts like suspension or expulsion. Don't let your student's elementary or middle school warehouse your student off an academically rigorous track. Keep your student on track with your student's classroom and grade peers.
Lost Elementary and Middle School Privileges
Loss of co-curricular and extracurricular activities and privileges can also impact your student's educational, social, and emotional development. Academics may be the core of any school program. But athletics, band, choir, clubs, intramurals, honors, awards, and even service projects can provide huge developmental boosts, especially at the elementary and middle school level. Don't let your student's elementary or middle school disciplinary officials remove or restrict privileges in violation of your student's rights and interests.
Elementary and Middle School Stakes
Your elementary or middle school student may have more at stake in a progression, disciplinary, or other dispute with the school than you at first realize. Elementary and middle school years are formative years during which students develop their character, personality, emotional and social awareness, and interaction skills. As a parent, you doubtless take an enormous interest in your elementary or middle school student's overall success. Just don't miss how important school stability, environments, and relationships can be for your student during these formative years. By the time students reach middle school or even earlier in fourth and fifth grades, teachers, administrators, and student peers are often already projecting students as being on different tracks. Some tracks are academic and professional, other tracks are vocational, and other tracks don't focus much on the development of any kind but instead assume a student's inability. Know the stakes your elementary or middle school student has in persevering in a rigorous and traditional school program preparing your student for further educational success.
Elementary and Middle School Education Advisor Services
Skilled and experienced education attorney advisor services can make a huge difference in outcomes when your elementary or middle school student faces one or more of the above progression, disciplinary, or other challenges threatening your student's education. Communicating, advocating, and negotiating sensitively and effectively with elementary, middle school, and district officials over your student's persistence and placement requires solid knowledge of education law. It also requires skill in administrative procedure, time, effort, commitment, and devotion. While nearly all parents care deeply about their elementary or middle school student's success, few, if any, parents have the detailed education law knowledge and substantial administrative experience to be effective advocates in school disciplinary settings. Retain national school discipline defense attorney advisor Joseph D. Lento for the services your student needs for the best outcome. Even if you have already exhausted all apparent procedures, retain attorney advisor Lento to contact and negotiate with your school district's general counsel office or other oversight officials.
Premier Attorney Advisor Representation Available
National school discipline defense attorney advisor Joseph D. Lento is available nationwide for elementary and middle school student representation and defense. Hundreds of students at all levels have trusted attorney advisor Lento for their successful outcomes in school progression, discipline, and other issues. Retaining attorney advisor Lento gives your elementary or middle school student the best opportunity to succeed. Call 888.535.3686 or go online now to retain attorney advisor Lento and the Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team.
