Advocating When Your Child Has Multiple Disabilities
By: Becca Phillips, Advocate
Advocating for your child within the school system can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re also juggling medical appointments, various therapies, behavioral concerns, and academic needs. Not to mention juggling this while also making sense of special education law and school procedures. When a child has more than one diagnosis and disability, their needs are often complex, interconnected, and can sometimes even be misunderstood. This can make it difficult for you and for the school team to navigate, and sometimes schools may feel like they need to “simplify” your child’s profile. Schools may struggle to serve children whose profiles do not fit “neatly” into just one category and may look at each disability in isolation when they are interconnected.
You may hear things like “Your child is really complex”, that certain needs of theirs fall outside of the schools scope, or that one disability should take priority over the others. Oftentimes statements like these can reflect system limitations, not legal realities. Schools are structured around categories, programs, and staffing models and children who have multiple disabilities do not fit neatly into those boxes.
Eligibility categories matter when it comes to qualifying your child for special education support and services and sometimes schools may only focus on the “primary disability” while minimizing or dismissing others. 34 C.F.R. § 300.8 states that in general, a “Child with a disability means a child evaluated in accordance with §§ 300.304 through 300.311 as having an intellectual disability, a hearing impairment (including deafness), a speech or language impairment, a visual impairment (including blindness), a serious emotional disturbance (referred to in this part as “emotional disturbance”), an orthopedic impairment, autism, traumatic brain injury, an other health impairment, a specific learning disability, deaf-blindness, or multiple disabilities, and who, by reason thereof, needs special education and related services.” It is important to note that a child can meet the criteria for one or more of the 13 disability categories. When multiple needs intersect, schools may focus on a primary need and unintentionally minimize others whereas parents are often the only ones who see the whole child across all environments.
When your child has multiple disabilities, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), your child is still entitled to having:
A Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)
An IEP that address all of their identified needs
Services that allow them to make meaningful progress
Also under IDEA, Multiple Disabilities is an eligibility category that is defined as “concomitant impairments (such as intellectual disability-blindness or intellectual disability-orthopedic impairment), the combination of which causes such severe educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs solely for one of the impairments. Multiple disabilities does not include deaf-blindness.” (34 C.F.R. § 300.8(7)). It is important to note that a child does not need to be eligible under this category to receive special education support for multiple needs. Evaluations and IEPs must address all areas related to the child’s disability and a child with multiple diagnoses have disabilities that interact and compound one another. It’s important to remember that your child does not need to be labeled under Multiple Disabilities to receive services for multiple needs and services are based on functional impact.
When a child has multiple disabilities, IEPs may become fragmented where you see maybe one or two goals for academics, behavior, speech, motor, etc. but there is little connection between them. When there is little connection across goals based on multiple disabilities, it can result in inconsistent implementation. We want to advocate for:
Integrated goals that reflect how your child’s disabilities impact one another
Clear service minutes that match your child’s needs
Collaboration between all providers for comprehensive support
Remember that you always have the right to ask for data, to request evaluations, disagree with the team, bring support to meetings, and ask questions to the team like: How do these goals align and work together? What happens if progress stalls? How will providers collaborate? What happens if my child does not make expected progress? How do the proposed services support my child across their entire school day? Are we addressing root causes, not just symptoms? Children who have a complex profile require IEPs that are thoughtfully and intentionally written, not generic.
A solid and comprehensive IEP is going to be individualized to your child, not standardized. Your child’s needs, while they may be complex with multiple disabilities, are valid and your voice matters because you know your child better than anyone else. You bring insight, history, and context that a school based evaluation may not be able to fully capture, which is an invaluable perspective. Advocating for a child with multiple disabilities requires knowledge, preparation, documentation, and persistence to ensure your child is receiving thoughtful and truly individualized support. Remember that advocating for your child does not mean you are being “difficult”, it means you are ensuring that your child is being seen, supported, and given the opportunity to make meaningful progress in school with all support and services necessary.
