Ruth Colker

Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law
Michael E. Moritz College of Law
The Ohio State University

Professor Colker teaches an interdisciplinary course on the law of special education in which 8 students are in graduate school in allied health disciplines and 12 students are enrolled in law school.  She co-teaches the course with a supervising attorney from Columbus Legal Aid who practices in this subject area.  She received a grant from the Ohio Bar Foundation to develop simulations to use in this course.  Vanessa Coterel developed these simulations under this grant. 

At this time, Ms. Coterel has developed three simulations: (1) a client counseling simulation between an attorney and a parent, (2) a mock Individual Education Program meeting, and (3) a mock behavior manifestation meeting.  Under the terms of the grant she received to develop these simulations, Professor Colker has not retained the copyright for these materials.  The public is free to photocopy and use these simulations and they are therefore made available on this website.  Each simulation is a bit complicated to use, and this website tries to provide basic information on how to use the simulation material. The simulations have been developed in Microsoft Word. If someone needs them in an alternative format, please contact Professor Colker.

An accessibility simulation is also provided on the Student Accessibility Studies page.

Client Counseling Simulation:

In this simulation, the students are divided into teams of two with one person in each team acting as an attorney and one person acting as the parent of a child with a disability.  There are two versions of this simulation: (1) angry parent and advocate, and (2) passive parent and advocate.  In addition, students receive common information for each simulation. After the students engage in this simulation, they get together and discuss the challenges they faced dealing with a passive or angry parent.  (We don't tell the students ahead of time that these two roles exist in the simulation.)

IEP Meeting Simulation:

In this simulation, the students are divided into groups of eight because the simulation has eight roles.  The meeting involves the question of how to respond to the parent's request that her daughter have her food blended before eating it in the school cafeteria.  The materials include both private and group information which is clearly labeled in the materials. In addition, the principal receives confidential information regarding the schedule of the professional who might have the skill to prepare the child's food.

Because many of the students in the class are graduate students in occupational therapy, this simulation gave the law students a good opportunity to talk with someone with useful professional, medical expertise.  In the simulation, the regular classroom teacher has fears about the child having a choking incident in the classroom.  We use the simulation to help the students think about how to respond to those kinds of fears when they arise at IEP meetings.  Finally, the simulation poses many practical and logistical challenges that the students enjoy discussing.

Behavior Manifestation Determination Simulation:

This simulation contains five roles.  Students play the roles of the parent, advocate, principal, regular classroom teacher and special education coordinator.  The fact pattern involves a child with ADHD who brought a squirt gun to school in violation of the school's zero tolerance policy for guns or "replica of guns."  In debriefing this simulation, we emphasize that this is only a behavior manifestation determination meeting at which the group needs to decide whether the child's arguable violation of school policy was a manifestation of her disability.  The advocate has the challenging role of keeping the conversation focused on that issue.