Educational advocate recommendations (middle/high school — not for placement)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyone but Stacy Kahn.

Definitely if you want someone to alienate the teachers and never speak to your kid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:at what point does one shift from making a kid run a race they will never be competitive in to finding a niche that they might find happiness in.

Pull him out and home school to check that box all while trying to find a marketable skill they can preform to build self sufficiency. The system isn't going to normalize your child, at best all they can do is pencil whip their compliance until they get to a point they don't have to and what growth will have really happened? All that dragging the sides together for a disingenuous result is wasting cycles all parities could spend toward real growth respectively. All the money and time you are going to spend on them trying to fit an atypical kid into a typical path might be more productive attempting to engineer an atypical path. You might need to reset your life too but these are the burdens of parenthood.

This is… quite a dramatic overreaction.

The kid has ADHD and anxiety, not a rare incurable condition that prevents him from functioning in society. The jump from “needs stronger supports at school” to “pull him out, homeschool, overhaul your entire life, and go hunt for some mystery ‘marketable skill’ he can perform” is absurd.

And honestly, taking advice about educational pathways from someone who can’t even spell “perform” or “parties” correctly probably isn’t the wisest move.

MCPS isn’t being asked to “normalize” anyone. They’re being asked to do their actual job: provide legally required accommodations so a student can access the curriculum. That’s literally the point of a 504 or IEP.

Executive functioning improves with maturity, coaching, and proper supports — not by ripping a kid out of school and building an “atypical path” out of thin air. Homeschooling is a valid choice for some families, but framing it as the solution for an ADHD eighth-grader is pure panic fantasy.

Parents advocate for services because the services work, not because they’re chasing a “disingenuous result.” If anything is disingenuous here, it’s pretending that abandoning the system entirely is somehow more “authentic.”