I’ve also been in these shoes. In my case, I have a son on the autism spectrum. He had an IEP carefully formulated to account for the fact that he has sensory processing issues, and being overstimulated in a traditional classroom environment would cause him to completely melt down. We had arranged in his IEP for that, as well as clear instructions to teachers on how to recognize and handle the overload.
One teacher kept insisting on ignoring these instructions, resulting in repeated meltdowns that could have been avoided if the IEP was followed. There was one VERY memorable incident where we got called to the school because he melted down when said teacher insisted he handle the noise despite the meltdown, and it got… ugly. I threw a fit (after trying to deal with this politely on multiple occasions), and had to keep him out of school for several days until he was back to normal (he’d been repeatedly sent home for sensory overload meltdowns). I was told that as a parent I didn’t know what I was doing and was setting him up for failure as an adult, and since I only had two kids I needed to use HER judgement. You guessed it, we got the call because we weren’t sending our child to school.
In case you’re wondering, I’m NOT a nice person when you mess with my kids. No, these issues aren’t a quick interview and done. In my case, I was fortunate that we’d been working with one of the best child psychologists in the state and he’d had a large hand in formulating that IEP, and we had proof it wasn’t being complied with. We eventually decided to pull him out of school and go the home school route. It was stress that was completey unneccessary and avoidable. Yes, I was LIVID. The school office got some very ugly phone calls, and we had to threaten them with lawyers. Anyone who thinks it’s not a big deal really hasn’t met a person determined to weaponize the system.
