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Policy and professional standards shape the way that special education teachers partner with parents. Such partnership is key to engaging parents in the process of special education and can serve as the foundation for collaboration and information sharing. Although the literature describes recommendations for how teachers can provide information to parents, few studies examine what information teachers provide. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate how teachers perceive school information sharing and parents' knowledge relative to special education. To understand these perspectives, we developed and piloted the Parent Knowledge and Resources in Special Education--Teacher Version survey, with a group of 142 special education teachers. Results indicated that 67.6% of teachers perceived parents to be satisfied or very satisfied with the special education information received from schools. However, teachers had varied perspectives on how well parents understand special education, and the majority (56%) did not feel resources and supports to help parents better understand special education exist. Teachers perceived that schools most frequently encouraged parents to access information through conversations with teachers (75.9%), conversations with school administrators (44.4%), and paper handouts provided by the school (41.9%). Teachers also reported that how well school districts provided information varied by special education topic. We also identify implications of the study results and areas for future research.

The article discusses the transition involves numerous stakeholders including the child, service providers, caregivers, educational professionals, and legal professionals. Preparing for this transition involves numerous stakeholders including the child, service providers, caregivers, educational professionals, and legal professionals.

The Family Empowerment Scale (FES) is one of the most widely used measures for assessing the empowerment of caregivers of youth with emotional difficulties. The purpose of this study was to examine the internal factor structure, score reliability, and convergent validity of the FES scores with caregivers of youth who had recently departed therapeutic residential care. Results indicated that the hypothesized three-factor model fit the data adequately with caveats. FES scores were reliable based on coefficient alpha and omega, and evidence of convergent validity with caregiver self-efficacy was moderate to strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]