What I Learned When My Son’s Special Education Experience Was a Nightmare
I was 10 minutes early for early release in October of Leo’s third grade year, and rain was seeping through the cuffs of my jacket as I walked to the portable that held the school’s full-time special ed resource room. I didn’t mean to peek through the cracked door, but no one answered my knock, so I leaned in to see if anyone was there. Leo, my 8-year-old with ADHD and dyslexia, was slouched at a plastic desk running a purple crayon back and forth over the same line of a dinosaur coloring sheet. The only aide in the room was propped against the back shelf scrolling TikTok, her back turned to the four kids in the room. None of the other kids were doing work either – one picked at a scab on his knee, another flipped the same page of a picture book over and over. When Leo looked up and saw me, he shot out of his chair and ran to me, not even stopping to grab his backpack.
The aide brushed it off when I went in to get his bag: “He had another rough day. Refused to do his reading worksheets, so he just colored.” I nodded and left, and by the time we got to the car, I was crying. Leo just handed me his lollipop from lunch and didn’t say anything. We’d done everything the school suggested six months before: when his general ed teacher said he was falling too far behind and acting out too often to stay in the general classroom, we’d agreed to move him to full-time special ed. We trusted them when they said this would give him the support he needed. Instead, over six months, he went from excited to go to school to crying every Sunday night begging to stay home. He stopped talking about his best friend from neighborhood soccer, because he didn’t see him at school anymore.
A week later, I sat across from the special ed teacher at a parent-teacher conference and asked what we could do to help. She said, “He’s just not motivated to try. Some kids need more time to adjust.” I left, got a glazed donut from the gas station down the street, sat in my car and ate it while I called our parent advocate – I’d found her through a local Facebook group for special ed parents – and said I needed help fixing this.
That whole experience was a nightmare, but it taught me things I wish I’d known going into the IEP process. The first thing is that no matter what the school tells you, you have to ask for specific details, not general promises. When we signed off on the first IEP, we left the meeting with a vague line that said “Leo will receive specialized instruction in the resource setting” and we didn’t push for more. Now I tell every new parent I talk to: before you sign any IEP, ask to see an exact copy of your child’s daily schedule. Write down how many minutes a day they’ll be taught by a certified special ed teacher, not a paraprofessional or aide who might not have training in your child’s specific needs. Ask how much time they’ll spend with same-age general ed peers, for recess, PE, or even just art class. I never asked that first time, and I didn’t find out until that rainy afternoon that Leo was spending his entire day in that portable, with no access to his old friends and only an aide who was assigned to four kids at once.
Another thing: when the team says your child is “unmotivated” or “has behavior problems”, ask for three specific examples of what triggered the behavior in the last week. When our advocate asked the original team that question, no one could list even one. They just knew Leo acted out, so they labeled him as difficult. When we got Leo re-evaluated and moved to a part-time placement, the new team started tracking every outburst: what time it was, what he was working on, what happened right before. Within two weeks, they found that 80% of his meltdowns happened when he was given worksheets that were way below his reading level. The original team had given him first grade work because he struggled with decoding, but he’s a smart kid who knew what was going on, and he was bored out of his mind. He also never asked for snacks when he was hungry, because he was too anxious to speak up in the small room, so most meltdowns happened right before lunch. Once they adjusted the work – gave him chapter books on audio with text he could follow along with, and kept a bin of granola bars he could grab any time – his outbursts dropped by 70% in a month.
I also tell parents to bring your own specific examples of what your child can do to every meeting. I went to our first IEP with nothing but a general ed report card and a list of concerns. I didn’t bring the dinosaur drawing Leo had spent an hour and a half working on, or tell the team that he could explain every dinosaur’s era and diet by heart, which meant he could focus and retain information when he cared about something. The original team only saw what he couldn’t do, so they built a program around what he couldn’t do.
It’s been a year and a half since we changed Leo’s placement. It’s not perfect. Last month he came home crying because his general ed teacher called on him to read out loud and he froze, and the other kids laughed. We still have bad days where he refuses to get dressed for school, and I still have to send firm emails sometimes when the team forgets his accommodations. But now he has lunch with his best friend from the neighborhood every day, he draws dinosaurs for the school art show, and he only pulls out for 45 minutes of reading support a day. I still get angry when I think about that first year, the time we lost that we can’t get back. But now when a new special ed parent messages me asking where to start, I tell them the first thing to do is ask for specifics. Don’t take “this is best for your child” as an answer. Make them show you what that looks like, for your child.
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