I Wasn’t in the Room for My Own IEP

People made decisions about my education for years, and for most of them I wasn’t in the room.

An IEP, or Individualized Education Plan, is a legal document that lays out how a school will support a student with a disability. It covers the accommodations, the services, the goals, and the modifications, and every kid with a qualifying disability gets one. The whole point is that it’s supposed to be built around the individual student. The word right there in the name is “individualized,” and yet the individual usually had the least say of anyone involved.

My IEP gave me Mrs. Rios, thirty minutes a day of one-on-one instruction that changed my life, and it gave me speech therapy, and it set up accommodations that helped in some classes and fell apart completely in others. But the actual conversations about what went into the plan happened between adults, between my mother and the school and the specialists. I was the subject of the meeting, not someone sitting at the table.

My mother pushed for Spanish, and nobody at that table really accounted for how hearing loss made an audio-heavy class almost impossible for me. Nobody asked me what was working and what wasn’t from where I was sitting, which was the only seat that actually felt it.

I’m not blaming anybody, because parents advocate with the information they have and schools follow the frameworks they’re handed and everyone was genuinely trying to help. But the kid in that classroom knows which accommodations help and which ones just look good on paper, and that’s worth more than any of the adults realize. If your child has an IEP, ask them what’s working, and then actually listen to the answer.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss