Special Education Today

Special Education Day is 2 December. Apparently it is a celebration of the day that US President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-142, the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, into law. The Education of All Handicapped Children Act became the Education of All Handicapped Act and then the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the name by which it is still known at the time I’m writing this.

There is a Web site, Special Education Day, dedicated to the day. It refers to the celebration of day in Massachusetts, an article in Education Week and the speech that President Ford gave when he signed the law.

By the way, the domain name for Special Education Day is quite similar to the domain name for this site. I named this site after a newsletter that Dan Hallahan, Jim Kauffman, and I published in the mid 1980s.

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It’s nothing too polished yet, just a grid-based concept illustrating the main content components we’ll need to tease out of Wordpress: “Lead Story”, “Last Three Features”, “News”, “Contributors” and so on. How do we tie all this together on one page? Let’s start at the top and explore each module step by step:

Welcome to Special Education Today. Special Education Today provides the latest from special education blogs, up-to-date links to resources about special education, in-depth coverage of selected special education topics, current research information, and more. Special Education Today covers diverse disabilty categories, including Learning Disabilties, Emotional and Behaivoral Disorders, Intellectual Disabilities, and Autism, as well as disorders related to or subsumed under these categories (e.g., bi-polar disorder, ADHD or attention-deficit disorder, depression, Down Syndrome, etc.). Although its primary focus is on special education during the school years, Special Education Today also provides information about disabilities during the pre-school and post-school years.

As Special Education Today develops, it will add new features. We welcome your recommendations about what we should include. Please jump to the comments page and send a note.