Why Special Education Students Should Get A Say In Choosing Their Classes: A Parent’s Experience
I was sitting across from our district’s IEP team last spring, twisting a crumpled coffee cup in my lap, when my 13-year-old son Leo finally spoke up. Leo has ADHD and dyslexia, and we were there to lock in his 9th grade course selections. The team had just walked through the default plan: modified English, modified art, a study hall block built into his schedule to catch up on work. But when they asked if we had any questions, Leo leaned forward, picked at the frayed cuff of his Minecraft hoodie, and said he wanted to take the general ed studio art class instead of the modified section.
The head of special ed tilted her pen and said what I’ve heard a dozen times before: Studio art is 28 kids, lots of independent work, and the modified section is smaller, with more one-on-one support. It’s a better fit for his needs, she said. I didn’t argue right away, because I’d been here before. Two years earlier, the team used that exact same line to assign Leo to a modified reading class in 7th grade, and it had gone exactly how I feared it would.
He came home every day that semester and dropped his backpack by the door without saying a word, something he never did before. After a month of zero homework completion and failing quiz grades, I sat down with him after dinner one night and asked what was going on. He pushed his plate of half-eaten mac and cheese away and said, “We do the same worksheets every day. All my friends are in reading workshop talking about graphic novels. I can read graphic novels. Why can’t I be with them?”
I pushed to swap him into the general ed section for the second semester. The team agreed only on a trial, with a check-in after six weeks. It wasn’t perfect. Leo still needs extra time to finish reading responses, and his teacher lets him turn in video explanations or drawings instead of long five-paragraph essays most of the time. He ended the semester with a B-, lower than the A he was getting in the modified class, but for the first time in a year, he came home talking about what he was learning. He even brought home a copy of the graphic novel the class read and made me read it too.
So sitting in that high school IEP meeting, I knew what to ask. I turned to Leo and asked him to tell the team what he does every night after homework. He mumbled that he draws all our pets, that he’s been practicing drawing owls for three months, that the modified art class mostly does pre-cut holiday crafts that he thinks are boring. “I want to learn how to paint,” he said. That was enough to get them to agree to a six-week trial, same as the reading class.
That experience, and dozens of conversations with other special ed parents I know, has made me realize how common it is to default to separate classes for special ed students, even when the kid has a clear interest and skill in a general ed subject. Most of the time, the team isn’t being deliberately unfair. They’re working off old rules and default placements that have been around forever. But what no one talks about enough is that engagement counts for more than a perfect “fit” on paper, and engagement almost always goes up when the kid gets to pick what they want to try.
I’ve started sharing small, concrete things that work for us with other parents who ask. The first is to always start the course selection conversation with your kid, not the IEP team. Before you even go into the meeting, ask them what they want to try, even if you think it’s out of reach. Open the meeting by saying, “First, let’s let them tell you what they’re interested in.” That shifts the whole conversation from “what’s the right placement for them” to “how do we make what they want work.”
The second thing is to always ask for a trial period instead of a permanent yes or no. Most schools are way more willing to agree to a 6-week trial than a full year placement. It takes the pressure off everyone: the team gets to see how it goes, your kid gets a chance to test it out, and if it doesn’t work, you can swap them out without a drawn-out fight. For Leo, that’s what worked both for reading and art. No one had to commit to anything long term up front.
Third, work out only the accommodations your kid actually needs for that specific class, instead of defaulting to a whole separate modified class. For Leo in art, he doesn’t need a smaller class or extra grading adjustments. He just needs the teacher to write his assignments down on a printed sheet for him instead of making him copy them off the board, and extra time to finish his paintings if he needs it. That’s two small changes, no separate class required.
It’s mid-semester now, and Leo has a half-finished owl painting propped up against our fridge. He stays after class once a week to work on it with his art teacher, and he entered a drawing of our old dog into the school’s spring art show. His current grade is a C+, because he regularly turns projects in a few days late. That’s not the great grade he got in modified art, but he talks about art class every single day on the drive home from school. He’s already talking about taking AP art when he’s a junior, something I never would have heard him say four years ago.
It’s not all smooth. Last month he had a meltdown after he dropped his clay mug and cracked it right before it was due. He swore he’d never go back to art class, but his teacher let him come in after school to glue it and glaze it again, and he was fine the next day. But general ed kids have meltdowns over bad projects too, right? No one pulls them out of the class for that.
We have our next IEP meeting in three weeks to plan for next semester. Leo already told me he wants to add the general ed woodshop class, because he wants to build a bookshelf for his growing graphic novel collection. I know the team will probably push back on it, just like they did with reading and art. I don’t know if it’ll work perfectly if he gets in. But I do know that letting him have the same chance to pick classes that matter to him, the same chance every general ed kid gets, is worth the work of asking. Right now, that’s enough.
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