The Eleven Best Tactics for a Successful Due Process Hearing: A Primer for Advocates

By Janie Bowman

As an advocate, you work long and hard to ensure children with special needs are successful in school. Often, you have to attend due process hearings to support parents in their endless pursuit of an education for their children. Here are some hints to help you better advocate for these families, and to make the proceedings a bit more interesting.

1. If the ALJ, Administrative Law Judge, is taking notes on a laptop, ask her if she’s playing an online game on her computer.
2. Suggest the school district’s attorney take a time-out because he’s raging.
3. Finish your advocate friend’s sentences while she’s on the witness stand.
4. Open a new bottle of coke and let the “fizz” break the silence of a contemplative legal moment.
5. Sit behind the school district’s attorney and district representative and pop your bubble gum.
6. Walk in and out of the due process hearing room, taking your cell phone with you each time.
7. Have copies of Pete and Pam Wright’s legal manuals strategically placed on your table so the spine is in full view of the district's attorney.
8. Allow a homeschooled teen who’s interested in law enforcement to observe the proceedings. Buy him ice cream when he gets nauseated from the district attorney’s antics.
9. Visualize the district’s attorney in a pink, lacy, Mickey Mouse nightgown when he keeps saying that the storage closet is an appropriate place for the special needs student in which to socialize and receive an education.
10. Your little red Jeep, strategically parked next to the special ed director’s Cadillac, has a bumper sticker that reads, “My border collie is smarter than your attorney.”

Disclaimer: The preceding is a brainstorm in the mind of a fictitious, anonymous parent support person attending a due process hearing. The persons depicted here are also fictitious and do not resemble any animal, vegetable, mineral or carbon-based unit. Any resemblance to real persons is only in the mind of an overworked Mother From Hell. This information is provided for educational purposes only and is not legal advice... I think.

This article was originally published in the Mothers From Hell2, Brimstone Bulletin, Vol. 6 Issue 3, Summer 2005.

Contact Janie Bowman