It’s been three years since I quit my day job, and it’s time and then some for me to create a new bio. This is an adaptation of one that I wrote for REDNews, the commercial real estate publication that I write for. 
“For me, this is absolutely the best second act,” Arnold says of her new career as a full-time writer, writing coach and teacher, private practice educational diagnostician, and pro bono special education advocate. “These days I get to do what I love–write, and I’m also passing on what I learned while doing literally over one thousand early childhood assessments.” For over fifteen years Arnold worked as the Child Find coordinatior for a formerly good school district; these days she is committed to supporting the next generation of dedicated teachers and educational diagnosticians who want to make a difference in the lives of children.
Janis Arnold’s writing credentials include: Daughters of Memory and Excuse Me For Asking, literary novels published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, numerous magazine articles, and too many to count psycho-educational assessment reports and educational treatment plans. Presently she’s writing literary mysteries, Shade Island and McKenzie Park, that feature characters and settings from small town Texas, a locale eerily similar to the Brookshire-Katy area where Arnold grew up.
In between fictional projects, Arnold, who lives in San Antonio, works as a pro bono advocate for children with learning disabilities. Related to her advocacy work, she is writing Aleczander’s Story, a first hand account of how public education failed a little boy and how the community around Aleczander, galvanized by his parents’ persistence in seeking solutions to Aleczander’s educational woes, is working together to help Aleczander learn to read, write, and talk!
A second creative nonfiction project, One Starfish At A Time, is a series of interviews that revisits concerns about free appropriate public education programs (FAPE) and suggests solutions to the literacy crisis in our country. The Starfish stories are planned as a follow-up to Louise Clarke’s 1973 Can’t Read, Can’t Write, Can’t Takl Too Good Either, a book that led to the implementation of PL 94-142, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act, back in 1975. This act required all public schools accepting federal funds to provide equal access to education and one free meal a day for children with physical and mental disabilities. Public schools were required to evaluate handicapped children and create an educational plan with parent input that would emulate as closely as possible the educational experience of non-disabled students. The intentions of Congress way back when were good; unfortunately the ways in which this law has been implemented in Texas schools has been nothing short of abysmal. Special education does consume massive amounts of taxpayer dollars, however the cash appears to be devoted to the creation and maintenance of an elaborate beuracracy rather than to any real efforts to teach kids to talk, think, read and write. Arnold hopes to change that–working One Starfish at a Time.