Anonymous wrote:Nope. But we moved to be inbounds for a school cluster that had a great reputation for caring with students with IEPs. Got the IEP in K without a hitch, and accommodations as needed.
The issue is that resources are stretched thin and even though everyone is willing to do what it takes, there just aren't enough special ed teachers, SLPs, etc, to see to everyone's needs. And that's where it gets dicey, since the most needy students get the most resources, and parents of students who are less afflicted feel either forgotten or worse, deliberately lied to. In our elementary, middle and high school systems, where I volunteered for years, I saw it wasn't a question of purposeful stonewalling at all, but a systemic lack of resources, despite great efforts by the administrators to hire more people.
The caveat in my rosy description is dyslexia. For some reason I cannot fathom, dyslexia is not well addressed in public school. It should be the one BEST addressed, since it's so common! The Principal of our elementary school has dyslexia, and despite the absence of that learning disorder in the IEP system, she did what she could for these students, which included bundling them in "Other Health Impairment" and hiring an excellent SLP, the best one my son ever had. But I've heard horror stories of students with dyslexia not receiving desperately-needed services at their home schools, with less-informed administrators and IEP teams.
I think you characterized the problem well - but the schools in the DMV are multi-billion dollar enterprises. It cannot be resources alone. We actually did a few years in Catholic school with a dyslexic kid and it was remarkably better than MCPS W district school. This is flat out corruption. Also they get even MORE money for disabled kids but I think this was the principals slush fund for his promotion to another (bigger) school.