AdvocateDadCO
The record behind the voice
Rob Harris combines a systems background, parent experience, technical knowledge, and years of public service to help families and challenge systems to do better.
Areas of work
Braille literacy, assistive technology, orientation and mobility (O&M), accessible science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), the Expanded Core Curriculum, and the presumption of competence.
What this looks like in one family’s experience: Project INSPIRE and Isabelle’s STEM access
Helping families understand evaluations, individualized education programs (IEPs), prior written notice, procedural safeguards, accessibility, and ambitious outcomes.
Family guides: IEP preparation, evaluations, ECC and transition
Policy & Action: Accessible Instructional Materials in Colorado
Connecting family experience to decisions about home- and community-based services, assessments, case management, paid family caregiving, and accountability.
Building self-determination, interdependence, peer connection, employment readiness, independent travel, and full participation.
Awareness / Youth leadership
It started with two friends on Main Street. Isabelle and her friend Hayden walked downtown Grand Junction with their long white canes to raise awareness. One of their earliest White Cane Down Main walks brought them to the Sister Mary Balbina Farrell statue at the northwest corner of 7th and Main. That walk helped kick off Grand Junction’s White Cane Day event. By showing up in their own community, they helped people understand the cane as a tool for travel, access, and independence.
That simple beginning grew into White Cane Down Main and community resource events. With the Center for Independence, Orchard Mesa Lions Club, families, volunteers, and other community partners, the local effort brought people together around blindness, practical resources, and the right to participate.
For Isabelle, helping create the local event was also an opportunity to practice leadership and advocacy. Young people can help shape how their community understands blindness and responds to barriers.
The work continues: build understanding, support orientation and mobility (O&M) instruction, and make room for blind and low vision people to travel and participate on their own terms.
Speaking / Family engagement
· Guest speaker · Transition Talk Family Workshop series
Perkins featured Rob Harris alongside Dave Jones as guest speakers for a webinar on fathers’ involvement in supporting youth with disabilities through the transition to adulthood. The session focused on the challenges and opportunities fathers face and their role as active members of their child’s support team.
Special education / Federal advocacy · January 2026
Rob Harris participated as a Colorado parent advocate in the January 2026 U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) listening session on special education and vocational rehabilitation.
His comments on accountability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), state-to-state inconsistency, and the burden placed on families were featured in the Advance IDEA Coalition’s national response. The response was published and amplified across national disability and special-education organizations. The coalition includes the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), The Arc of the United States, and the Center for Learner Equity.
Rob’s remarks connected federal oversight to what families experience: uneven access to services, the expectation that parents master complex systems, and the burden that falls on families when those systems fail—especially for students with low-incidence disabilities such as blindness.
For the fall 2026 Washington advocacy work, that broader record supports two focused Congressional asks: protect the entire Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—including Part D—in final fiscal year 2027 appropriations, and support and advance Senate bill 5046 (S.5046) so the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and other core education functions remain within the U.S. Department of Education. Rob’s role is to show why that federal infrastructure matters when rural communities cannot recreate scarce specialized expertise on their own.
“Families are not asking for perfection—we are asking for predictability, clarity, and accountability.”
Rob Harris · OSERS listening session, January 2026
Selected roles
The method
Rob approaches advocacy like a systems problem: understand the rule, document what happened, identify the gap between policy and practice, ask direct questions, and keep the person affected at the center.
The goal is never attention for its own sake. The goal is a path that works better for the next family.