Question: Share a time when you finally felt heard by your child's IEP team. What made the difference, and how did it impact your child's education?

I think there was one IEP meeting where the school saw our perspective.  My child was in a job exploration program and many of the community partners are retail stores and food service.  When you have a child whose transition goal is college and a job in an office, these types of jobs don't align too well with that goal.   I think that clicked at this meeting.  We were offered a job shadow opportunity in the school's IT department.

This was pivotal in my child's life.  Prior to this, they wanted to go into graphic design.  This position changed their focus and they went to school/got a degree in IT.

Funny story.  One assignment was to transfer videos on a disk, label them and store them for future use.  They couldn't get it to work.  My child figured out that the accessory holding the disk needed to be turned on where the people training them couldn't figure this out.

My child had experience two outbursts in one day. It was weeks after his last suspensions. It was then they seemed to realize that he truly needed intervention. And everything I had been saying for so long was valid and necessary. At that time they started to realize the mainstream classroom setting wasn't ideal for him to be in all day long.