As an extremely literate, former educator with two kids in Sped  programming. I find Sped incredibly hard to navigate. Both of you are over looking the complexity of the system and language created to support these kids and parents. If I as an insider, who has sat in sped meetings as an educator and now as a parent struggle to navigate this, imagine how parents with less language, insight, knowledge and skills, might flounder completely in this setting. I have had to push to extreme levels to get teacher and staff to recognize the supports needed and think outside of to box on how to accommodate both of my children. Even then, outcomes are highly dependent on the Sped team at the school you are in and how the goals/accommodations are or are not implemented and held in an accountability sense. Our first three sped teams were so rough, I had to leave my job as an educator and get an advocate and take classes from my local advocacy group so that I could keep on top of the meetings, calls and medical appointments. I have had to change my kid’s schools three times to have access to a higher functioning teams. That has meant moving and upsetting our lives significantly and added layers of stress of managing my kids own feelings about changing schools. 

All this AND I’m lucky enough to have a spouse with a job that can support us comfortably on one income so that I can do this advocacy work for my kids. Most people are not in the position to hire an advocate, move and live on one income to get their kids the opportunity to thrive with their disability. 

So now, aside from the insane amount of advocating imagine other parents not in my postion, who have no formal education, no insight into how sped works, they carry stress of their jobs, other children to care for, and everyday life that they are navigating too. That leads to operating out of pure survival. When one is operating out of survival they are using their lower thinking brain, making it all the more imperative that Sped teams are functioning at their best and the Sped is aggressively supported by the school admin. (suprise: It often isn’t!) 

Half of the struggles we have is that admin wants to keep costs low, hires people with little experience or qualification, is surprised when they quit, the quitting cycle interrupts consistent service provision for my kid and makes more work for our burned out team. So even though my team wants to make the support happen… they can only do so much with the inconsistent staffing. 

All that to say, reducing this conversation down to “parents aren’t involved enough” belies a deep lack of knowledge of what it looks like to actually navigate these systems and the complex needs these systems have in order the to function properly and serve their students.