Parents have enough to worry about, from concerns about your child's course load to whether or not they are getting a good lunch every day.

But for parents of students with disabilities, the list of concerns fills up quickly with issues such as health care, therapy and job training for life after high school.

That's why these parents turn to Scott Crain, the parent mentor for the Hall County School System and the Special Education Department. Crain, along with about 75 others across the state, specializes in helping parents find the right resources for their child, navigate mounds of paperwork and put their child on the right track for a successful life.

"I work with parents on an individual basis if they need me to," said Crain, who was recently honored by his peers with the Phil Pickens Parent Mentor Leadership Award. "If it's an issue where they need additional services that we're unable to provide for them, or if they need Medicaid for a child who has medical needs, I try to give them direction of where to go."

Crain hosts monthly workshops for parents, too, on topics such as Medicaid or, more recently, putting together Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs.

"Every student who is served through the special education program has an Individual Education Plan," Crain said. "It looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the student. An IEP is developed off of that and what kind of needs the student will need to be successful in the classroom."

Crain was also instrumental in putting together the Parent Mentor Partnership's Web site, said Pam Moore, Crain's friend and the parent mentor for Madison County, and he is one of the few parent mentors in the state who was around when the program started out a little more than five years ago.

"The purpose of the Parent Mentor Partnership is a joint partnership between the state Department of Education and local school districts," Moore said. "To be a parent mentor, to qualify for the job, you have to be a parent of a child with a disability - most of us have children who are still in the local school district - and we have experience navigating special education services and all of those services parents need."

Students can be any age for a parent to seek a parent mentor's help. For students whose disability is known in preschool, the parent mentor can work with the parents to help the child transition into elementary school. For older students, Crain said, the task becomes figuring out what they want to do after high school.

And you can never start too early with that planning, he said. Often, too, the idea the parent has for the child differs from the child's idea of life after high school - so, they need to communicate.

For example, he said, many students want to live independently, and while the state can provide education until the disabled student reaches his or her 22nd birthday, it's the transition into adulthood that then poses the final hurdle for Crain.

Once the student turns 22, "services are much more difficult to come by," he said. "The funding isn't there for all the services needed, so you have to plan ahead to decide how you're going to help that student meet his goals once they leave high school ."

Which is why Crain also works closely with Marty Owens, founder of Our Neighbor, an organization that provides job assistance and housing for disabled people who want to live independently.

And that continues Crain's mission.

"We do take every individual and say, ‘What would you like to do with your life?" Owens said. "We still take each of them personally and try to make their life meaningful."

Nancy Kelleman, whose son is now 19 and lives independently at Our Neighbor's Terrie's House, said the Parent Mentor Partnership and the help of Crain gave her son a way to focus on living independently. He now takes a bus to school and then takes a bus to work at J&J Foods after school.

"The problems that parents face are kind of two fold. First, there's understanding the disability and learning to live with it, and secondly learning what to do about it at different stages of the child's life," she said. "No parents expect to have a child that's disabled, and there's nothing that brings you up to learn that."

Kelleman said she spent years looking for answers to questions about programs or resources.

"It wasn't until I got in touch with a couple people at the school like Scott who were able to give me some answers," she said. "And often teachers would say, ‘I don't know, we've never had a child like yours before.' ... These are the kinds of problems parents deal with when they have a child who has a disability. So to have somebody like Scott who can guide you through where the resources are and what resources are available and getting them is just priceless."

Crain said he often sees parents who are tired simply because they don't ask for help - and that is an important step to take.

"One of the things I try to get our parents to understand is, it's OK to ask your friends and neighbors and the folks you go to church with for help," he said. "When you have a child with a special need, you get so busy concentrating on fulfilling their needs, sometimes it's a difficult task."

Moore agreed that often parents of a child with a disability try to take on too much.

"Speaking personally, I think, thinking that you can do it all on your own and that you have to do it on your own is probably the biggest (parent pitfall), because there's so many resources out there. There's so many organizations out there that have help for families like ours."

And Crain, she added, is a good person to have on your side.

"The project started in five pilot districts ... and Scott was in that first full year, so he's been key to this whole partnership," she said. "It wouldn't be what it is without Scott Crain. Anybody in the partnership will tell you this; he is an excellent leader."