3 Things Teachers Wish Parents Knew About IEP Meetings |
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EC teachers are burdened by administrators' demands for test scores and parents’ needs for real support.
EC teachers burn out quickly due to overwhelming demands and lack of resources.
Teachers want to collaborate with parents, but the system can make it dificult for them to do so.
Recently, I wrote a post here titled, “6 Things I Wish I Knew Before My Kid's First IEP Meeting.” Although I am also an educator, I wanted to get the perspective of an Exceptional Children (EC) teacher.
EC teachers specialize in teaching neurodiverse children, attend many IEP meetings, and are often in charge of implementing IEPs.
I interviewed Lisa Cooper Ellison, a former EC teacher with a degree in clinical mental health counseling. She is now a trauma-informed writing coach.
Here are three things Lisa wants parents to know about IEP meetings and the work of EC teachers with our neurodiverse kids.
1. EC Teachers Face Immense Pressure From Administrators
In our interview, the first thing Lisa told me was that EC teachers “feel like they are being crushed by competing demands and constraints.” These demands and constraints, she told me, “come from both above and from below.”
From above, EC teachers face immense pressure from the school administration. For example, they must worry about standardized test scores. As an EC teacher, Lisa not only had to make sure her students had equal access to education, but also that “the accommodations and modifications that I provided somehow would lead to equal results in the overall school test scores.”
Why? Administrators did not want their EC students to drag down a school’s average scores.
But this task is not only nearly impossible but also severely unhelpful to EC students’ learning. Lisa told me that some of the students in her classroom, for example, “had severe trauma that they were dealing with, which led to severe nervous system regulation, which of course affects learning.” Others had severe intellectual disabilities.
EC teachers want to do right by their students, but sometimes that goal collides with the goals of those in charge.
As parents, we should feel frustrated by these policies. We should support our EC teachers (even just a kind email can help), and then push back against administrators who want outcomes measured in ways that are unhelpful to our kids.
2. EC Teachers Face Immense Pressure From Parents
All children are valuable and deserve a good education. As Lisa explained, though, the pressure from above and also from parents means that teachers are “trying to balance all of that at the same time,” which makes their jobs incredibly difficult.
But, despite this pressure, she said, she wants parents to know, “We feel your pain.”
She told me, “I have sat in so many meetings where I had a parent who was desperate to understand what was going on with their child, hoping that if they just had a label, it would fix the problem.”
Lisa explained how IEP meetings often become deeply emotional for parents, especially those just learning about the struggles their kids are facing and will face in the future.
In these meetings, Lisa told me, parents’ “hearts are breaking, because they're having to accept the reality of what they're being told [about their kid’s struggles].”
Sometimes, however, these meetings can be productive, but only if the school staff “can hold space for that pain.” The problem is that teachers don’t have the training to help parents through these difficult experiences.
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Lisa explained, “As a person who has worked as a teacher, and who has a background in mental health, [I can attest that] teachers are often not equipped to hold space” for the pain that parents experience in IEP meetings.
So the problem arises, Lisa told me, “because parents are coming in with all of these feelings, either because of a new diagnosis or [the fear that their] kid is not going to get what they need.”
But there isn’t much support for these parents during meetings, Lisa said, “because we're not trained.”
“We feel and appreciate your pain,” Lisa told me. “We just sometimes don’t know what to do with it. It’s not insensitivity. It can be a lack of awareness…a lack of knowledge.”
And also, she pointed out, it can be caused by a lack of time, “because [an IEP meeting] is not just a meeting to talk about curriculum, it's a legal meeting, with legal ramifications.”
So if the school representatives in a meeting are not going to be able to support you emotionally, you should follow the advice I recently gave in a free online class: Bring a support person with you. You are allowed to bring anyone you want.
Bring your best friend who always stands by you. Put them in charge of the tissues as well as note-taking so that you don’t have to worry about managing your feelings and keeping track of all the meeting details.
3. Teachers Want to Collaborate With You
For her final piece of advice, Lisa emphasized how much teachers, especially EC teachers, want to collaborate with parents.
But she said that sometimes the system makes this collaboration difficult. The fact is, she said, “There are not enough resources and hours in the day to offer your child everything that they need.”
The lack of resources takes an immense toll on EC teachers. She explained how the work of an EC teacher frequently leads to career burnout: “EC teachers have a lifespan [before burnout] of about five years.”
Why? “Because of the overwhelm, and the fact that your resources and capacity never meet the needs of your students.”
The point is, she said, “You're not just the underdog. You're always feeling like you're failing. You can never live up to what the parents want, to what the system wants, to what your principal wants.”
She wants parents to understand, “If you're a parent that's feeling defeated, or like you're not giving your kid enough, know that your teacher may feel the exact same way.”
What can we do as parents? First, support our EC teachers because we know they love their jobs, but it can be nearly impossible to do so given the circumstances they face.
Second, we can push for better conditions for EC teachers: higher pay, stronger support, smaller classrooms, and so on. As I write in my book Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children, we can hold the systems accountable that make their jobs difficult.
A simple way to start, however, is to show them love and understanding.
Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).