Why kids in special education should get a say in choosing their classes: a parent’s experience
The conference room at my son’s elementary school smells like old vanilla coffee and the dry erase marker that’s been left uncapped under the whiteboard for three months. Last spring, we sat around the long linoleum table for his 5th grade IEP meeting, and Jax, my 10-year-old with ADHD and dyslexia, was twisting the strap of his Creeper Minecraft backpack so hard his knuckles were white. The team had gone over his reading goals, his behavior accommodation for extra movement breaks, and then the special education coordinator slid the proposed schedule across the table. “We’ve slotted him into daily reading remediation and a 45-minute study skills block,” she said. “That means there’s no space for the robotics elective he marked on his interest form. We think this is a better fit for his needs right now.”
Jax leaned forward, knee bouncing like it always does when he’s frustrated. “Why can’t I do both?” he said. “All the guys I play soccer with are in that class. I build Legos for three hours every night, I’m good at putting things together.”
That’s when I realized I’d been making the same mistake for three years. Ever since Jax was diagnosed in second grade, I’d showed up to IEP meetings, nodded at the schedule the team put together, and assumed they knew what was best. I’d bought into the same idea everyone else does: first we catch him up on the basics, then he can have the fun stuff the other kids get. But sitting there, listening to Jax ask to be included, I couldn’t unhear how much that logic left him out. I pushed the schedule back across the table and said, “What if he tries robotics for one quarter? If it’s too much, we can switch him out. No harm done.”
The coordinator hesitated, but agreed to the trial. It wasn’t a big fight, just a small shift that ended up changing how we approach everything with Jax’s education.
The first week of school, Jax came home waving a crumpled worksheet with a rough drawing of a robot scribbled in the margin. He talked the whole drive home about how his group was building a robot that could knock over a stack of plastic cups, and didn’t even complain when I reminded him to do his reading homework. There was a rough patch three weeks in, when he hit the coding portion of the project. The instructions were all text-heavy, and he got so frustrated he crumpled his paper and threw it in the trash before dinner. But instead of pulling him out, we talked to his teachers. The robotics teacher moved his seat to the front of the class, and the resource teacher agreed to pop in for 10 minutes at the start of each class to help him walk through the written instructions. Both accommodations were already written into his IEP—we didn’t have to do any extra meetings or paperwork to make it happen.
By the end of the quarter, Jax presented his robot at the school’s STEM fair. It sorted plastic bottles from aluminum cans, and won an honorable mention. When we got his progress report that quarter, his reading fluency had jumped three months more than it had in the entire previous school year. He was practicing reading every day in robotics, trying to decode the instructions to make his robot work, and he never even thought of it as remediation.
That’s the thing no one tells you when your kid gets an IEP. All the focus goes to closing gaps, meeting benchmarks, hitting goals. So often, that means we take choice away from kids in special ed that we give to every other kid. General ed 5th graders get to pick between robotics, art, and band. Special ed kids get slotted into whatever support block fits their goals, no input needed.
What I’ve learned over the past two years is that choice doesn’t set them back. It pushes them forward. And there are small, low-stakes ways to make it happen, no big, brutal school battles required.
For parents who are new to this, the first thing I tell them is to bring your kid to the IEP meeting, even if they’re young. Jax was 8 when I started bringing him, and even back then he could tell me he hated the pull-out reading class he was in because all the kids got teased for leaving the room. Before that, I never thought to ask him what he thought. If the team says their class choices don’t align with goals, ask for a trial period—six or nine weeks, just like we did. That gives everyone an out if it doesn’t work, so it’s not an all-or-nothing fight. If you need accommodations for the class, check your existing IEP first: most of the time, the adjustments you need (preferential seating, extra time on assignments, a teacher check-in) are already written down, so you don’t have to go through a whole new approval process.
For teachers, it’s simple: check in with the kid before you build the schedule. Ask them what they’re interested in, what they want to try that year. You don’t have to rearrange the entire master schedule to make it happen. Most of the time, you can work existing supports into a general ed class without extra work.
It’s not always perfect, of course. Last semester, Jax wanted to drop his beginner art class and sign up for the advanced drawing workshop for 6th graders. We let him try it, and after six weeks he came home and said it was too much. The homework took two hours every night, and he didn’t have time to work on his robots after school. So he dropped it, and signed up for sculpture this quarter. That’s not a failure. That’s him learning what he likes and what he can handle, the same way every other kid does.
Right now, we’re working on his 7th grade schedule, and Jax is already talking about wanting to take the general ed language arts class instead of the modified one he had last year. We’re going to try it. Some days it works, some days it doesn’t. But at the end of the day, school isn’t just about catching up on reading gaps. It’s about learning what you care about, and how to speak up for what you want. That’s a lesson no remediation block can ever teach.
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