Involving Immigrant Parents of Students with Disabilities in the Educational Process

teacher.” How many times have you heard this platitude, usually at workshops about how to involve parents in their children’s education? The challenge for educators of children from immigrant families is to figure out how to engage parents from ethnic and linguistic backgrounds different from their own (see box, “Overview of Current U.S. Immigration”). What if the parents speak Urdu or Hmong, Somali or Chinese, and the only foreign-language teacher or resource person at the school is the Spanish teacher? This article provides many practical suggestions, tactics, and resources for questing educators who are sincere in their desire to involve all parents. Parental involvement in the education of children with disabilities in the United States is a legal right mandated with the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Public Law 94-142, 1975), further strengthened in P.L. 101-476 (1990), and in the most recent reauthorization of P.L. 105-17 (1997). Unfortunately, despite the 25 years of such mandates, U.S. special education programs still lack active involvement and participation from parents of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Thorp, 1997).